Improving output casually and without commitment

General discussion about learning languages
desitrader
Orange Belt
Posts: 109
Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2016 11:26 am
Location: England
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Native / bilingual: English, Bengali.
Fluent: Hindi.
Learning: German (B2), Italian (A2+), Japanese (A1-), Norwegian (A1-).
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Improving output casually and without commitment

Postby desitrader » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:02 am

I’d like to improve my German and Italian output in a kind of passive and laid-back way. I switched to an input-only regime a few months ago, and as expected my output has become worse. Don’t know if it matters in the long run, but who knows how long the long run is? And in the long run we are all dead 

I go to a German-speaking club once a month. There is nothing near me for Italian.

Options I have tried and discarded:
• I absolutely detest talking to random people on Skype, and there is no way I’m gonna do that ever again, no matter how beneficial it may be.
• I used to speak in TL in my mind, but found that to be a draining and forced exercise, so decided to stop.
• Finally, there is production using Anki, which I have done for 6 years or so, and I am tired of spending hours and hours to create cards, the daily chore of reviewing, in short just sick of Anki.

So, is there any simple app kind of thing that I can use every now and then, when I fancy, that can test my output? E.g. it shows me an English sentence, and I produce the German or Italian translation, and check what the app has as the answer?

It must be casual, not like SRS where if I pause for a week then there are 500 cards waiting for me.

The fact that there can be many TL translations of the same English sentence doesn’t bother me because I know both languages enough to work out when I am close and when I am not.

The main thing is I get presented a random selection of common and useful sentences to translate.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Last edited by desitrader on Fri Jan 20, 2017 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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tastyonions
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Languages: EN (N), FR, ES, DE, IT, PT, NL, EL
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Re: Improving output casually and without commitment

Postby tastyonions » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:13 am

Write in your languages. You don't need to keep a schedule or depend on your schedule matching up with someone else's. And your output will be what you are interested in expressing, not dictated by an SRS algorithm or the methods of a teacher.
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moo
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Re: Improving output casually and without commitment

Postby moo » Fri Jan 20, 2017 12:55 pm

I absolutely detest talking to random people on Skype, and there is no way I’m gonna do that ever again, no matter how beneficial it may be.


How about finding someone in your target language with whom you can message on whatsapp or whatever? I was thinking of doing that myself with German to maintain it. Then you could create sentences and that could be your output?
Maybe one day your native language the next target language. Also there are sites out there for finding penpals who just write to each other. If you find one in your target language then most of them don't even expect help with your language and it can all be done through the language you are learning.
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