What next? (learning Spanish, maintaining German, random dabbling...)

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gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Sun Aug 07, 2016 9:14 pm

gsbod wrote:I've decided to do the August 6WC but rather than trying to top the leaderboard, I am going to try and do 21 hours of Italian and the same again with German.


One week in and I've already had to admit that those hours are not going to happen. I mean, they could happen if I decided to dedicate at least 2 hours a day of every day between now and the end of the challenge when I am not on holiday and don't have any social engagements, but that just doesn't fit in with how I want to work. Some days, half an hour of Italian is enough. Other days, I'd rather spend an hour reading German than doing textbook work. I'll keep logging the time on my courses and Quizlet, but I'm just going to think about the results (I wonder how much Italian I'll be able to do in a month) rather than the actual hours.

I am finding the pronunciation for Italian a little more challenging than it should be. I think it will take me a little time to get the hang of putting the stress in the right places. Also, my brain frequently tries to process the pronunciation of individual words either according to German, Spanish, or a mix of the two, meaning sh and th sounds turn up where they don't belong...

I have also finally discovered a German TV show that my husband is happy to watch with me. Alarm für Cobra 11 features lots of car chases, gun fights and explosions and terrible plot lines whose main purpose seem to be to facilitate the car chases, gun fights and explosions. But at least this is one way we can improve our listening comprehension together.
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Elenia
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby Elenia » Mon Aug 08, 2016 9:39 am

gsbod wrote:I have also finally discovered a German TV show that my husband is happy to watch with me. Alarm für Cobra 11 features lots of car chases, gun fights and explosions and terrible plot lines whose main purpose seem to be to facilitate the car chases, gun fights and explosions. But at least this is one way we can improve our listening comprehension together.


This sounds precisely like the kind of silly thing I like to watch! Thanks for mentioning it, I'll [try to remember to] check it out!
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dampingwire
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby dampingwire » Mon Aug 08, 2016 1:00 pm

Elenia wrote:
gsbod wrote:I have also finally discovered a German TV show that my husband is happy to watch with me. Alarm für Cobra 11 features lots of car chases, gun fights and explosions and terrible plot lines whose main purpose seem to be to facilitate the car chases, gun fights and explosions. But at least this is one way we can improve our listening comprehension together.


This sounds precisely like the kind of silly thing I like to watch! Thanks for mentioning it, I'll [try to remember to] check it out!


I've seen it (or, more likely it's spin off) dubbed into Italian on RAI. My recollection is that it was very silly and very SHOUTY. But if you like (or can tolerate :-)) that sort of thing then there's at least another language that you can practice through that series. (RAI claims that there are 20 series of Squadra Special Cobra 11, so I don't think you'll run out of material ...)
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新完全マスター N2聴解 : 94 / 103新完全マスター N2読解 : 99 / 177
新完全マスター N2文法 : 197 / 197TY Comp. German : 0 / 389

gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Wed Aug 17, 2016 6:34 pm

Yesterday I arrived back home from yet another brilliant long weekend in Germany, which involved:

Practicing Japanese listening (not speaking) by listening in to real conversations in a ramen shop in Düsseldorf. The ramen wasn't bad either.
Going to a music festival where I saw a lot of great music, half of which was in German, and drank too much mead.
Enjoying the German language coverage of the Olympics on TV a lot more than expected.
Experiencing (and failing) the ultimate language test in Köln - where a TV crew stopped me and asked if I could tell a joke on camera for a TV show the next day. If you can pull that one off in your target language you must be at least level C6. My polite refusal, on the other hand, was well within the competency required for B1!
Buying a stash of books which should keep me going through the Super Challenge and beyond. It's the first time I've been to a German bookshop without even looking at the language courses section.

On the whole I am quite happy with where my German is right now. I can generally get the gist of what is going on around me, which makes travelling a lot more interesting. I am also happy to use my German, warts and all. Admittedly, for the most part the kind of interactions I have as an interested tourist are limited in scope, but I still managed to break out from the usual range of routine tourist interactions a few times.

A couple of things I have noticed:

My comprehension is most likely to fail if somebody says something completely unexpected for the context. I think this trips me up even in English sometimes, but when it happens in German it's only natural to assume it's a language skill issue.
I get stumped more often than I would like by everday vocabulary words. Stuff that has come up in my recent trips includes: Umschlag (envelope), Besen (broom - even more annoying because I learned this in my A2 class but it still failed me in a real life context), Matratze (airbed). I think there's a limit to how much textbooks/wordlists/flashcards will help me with this one (it didn't help with Besen), and I get the feeling more exposure and practice is what I really need. If only I could run away to Germany for a few months without putting my marriage, job and home on the line!
German plural noun forms are my biggest grammar headache right now and it's a problem I don't really know how to solve.

dampingwire wrote:(RAI claims that there are 20 series of Squadra Special Cobra 11, so I don't think you'll run out of material ...)


Yes, I think it has been going since the nineties. I got three seasons on DVD because it was a special price for all three from amazon.de - and I think those three seasons will be enough for me!
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby Stefan » Wed Aug 17, 2016 7:27 pm

gsbod wrote:Matratze (airbed)

I wasn't aware of the english term but to be picky, I think the German counterpart is Luftmatratze and not Matratze which is a collection name for all kind of mattresses. I apologise for nitpicking.
Last edited by Stefan on Wed Aug 17, 2016 8:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Wed Aug 17, 2016 7:39 pm

Stefan wrote:
gsbod wrote:Matratze (airbed)

I wasn't aware of the english term but to be picky, I think the German counterpart is Luftmatratze and not Matratze (mattress). I mean, it isn't wrong - both are mattresses but if you want to be specific about the kind (air). I apologise for nitpicking.


The term was given to me by a native speaker. But given that we were stood in a tent talking about sleeping arrangements, I guess the context made it unnecessary to be too specific. I need to go camping in Germany more often to firm up this kind of vocabulary!
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gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Sun Sep 04, 2016 3:19 pm

So this became the summer where I went to Germany three times in 6 weeks. I had a week off work which I was able to arrange at quite short notice after some deadlines changed and I knew I wanted to go somewhere. Germany wasn't actually my first choice, but it turned out to be the easiest option at such short notice. I was only there for 6 days, including travelling, but I managed to pack in a lot of tourist stuff, topped up my suntan in the glorious weather, sampled the local wines and relaxed in a Therme. I also picked up two more paperbacks, with the excuse that I won't have the chance to browse a German bookshop again for a while (I also used this excuse a couple of weeks ago, but you know...)

With all my mini-breaks this summer my study routine has become quite disrupted, but it's quite nice coming back with the feeling that I can make something of a fresh start. Thinking about where my weak points are, or at least those points which are bugging me, rather than working through general textbooks I think I might benefit from some short bursts of targeted work on vocabulary and grammar, backed up by plenty of extensive listening and reading.

I also need to decide whether I'm going to pick the Italian EdX course back up again, because naturally this has become disrupted too. I think for me, maybe summer is the worst time to try to pick up a new language. I should probably wait until November, when the weather is bad and I have nothing better to do.

I'm taking a break from Tintenherz. I lost interest in the book and found that in procrastinating reading it, I was actually procrastinating reading anything in German. I may pick it up again later, but I think in general children's fiction is not the way to go for me. If I want to read something "easy", I think a trashy book for adults suits me much better. In a way, this is old news. I remember getting bored silly by kids books in Japanese too, however thanks to the kanji/vocab barrier, adult trash was still too difficult. I don't have this problem with German!

I'm still making good progress through Verblendung, but since it's 700 pages long I think it will still take a while before I finish it.
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gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Sat Sep 10, 2016 8:22 pm

gsbod wrote:I'm still making good progress through Verblendung, but since it's 700 pages long I think it will still take a while before I finish it.


I was wrong about that one! I'd read about 66% of the book when I picked it up to read for half an hour in bed last night before going to sleep. I was still awake (and reading) at half past five this morning before I finally had to concede that getting a little bit of sleep while it was still dark was a very good idea. I finished the rest of the book this evening. Anyway, I think this is a book I can recommend to people with only a small amount of experience of reading real German, with some caveats. The style of the translation is quite simple and direct, making it a fairly straightforward read in terms of language, although there were a few short sections dealing with some financial practices which needed some careful dictionary work on my part to understand enough to get why it was important to the story. The plot, after a slow start, turned out gripping enough to keep me awake most of last night. 700 pages is also quite daunting at first, but 700 pages of fairly comprehensible text turns out not to be a problem after all. The only major caveat is that the book deals with themes around sadism and violence against women which meant that I found some parts of the book to be incredibly disturbing.

So for my next book, I think I may avoid going for the next Krimi or Thriller on my bookshelf, and try to find myself something altogether lighter. Any recommendations?
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gsbod
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby gsbod » Tue Sep 20, 2016 6:50 pm

I was browsing Amazon looking for some new Super Challenge material and my finger somehow slipped, so now I am in possession of Langenscheidt's Dänisch mit System. First impressions are that Danish appears to comprise a mixture of words that sound a bit like German, words that sound a bit like English, and words that I can't pronounce.

I do not expect to take this very far. However, it is fun to play with, and the course contains plenty of German too.

The other thing I am having a surprising amount of fun playing with is a book called Using German Vocabulary. It's quite a substantial book, but it is well thought out in terms of selection and presentation of vocabulary, with some nice exercises, although ideally there would be more. I'm using it in conjunction with Quizlet and have already encountered a number of the 400 or so new words studied while reading German so it's definitely helping to bridge that mid-range vocabulary gap.
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Re: gsbod's language log (mostly German) | TAC 2016

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Sep 20, 2016 7:22 pm

Next time wanderlust gets the better of me, I'm going to use that excuse. --- I was just browsing and my finger slipped.
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