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

[Peluche]

gsbd, kudos on all the progress!!

When you read German books, do you read them on Kindle? How do you pick up vocabulary?

[gsbod]

I mostly read on the Kindle, although I'm reading Tintenherz and this Abitur history book in dead tree version. When I read I do it for comprehension and enjoyment rather than explicitly for vocabulary building, so I look up words and expressions as I need to but don't worry about trying to learn them.

I am still working through my Begegnungen textbook so I do study vocabulary I pick up from that.

[Peluche]

The Begegnungen text has SO MANY new words (perhaps even above the B1 level)!

[sjintje]

Ich habe noch ein deutches Buch gelesen. Das Buch ist Taxi von Karen Duve.

Ich habe Taxi, Regenroman, und Dies ist kein Liebeslied gelesen. Karen Duve ist eine meiner Lieblingsschriftsteller, aber sie schreibt von schrecklichen, persönlichen Ereignissen. Ich hoffe. dass sie von ihrem Vorstellungsvermögen stammen, und nicht aus ihrem wirklichen Leben.

[gsbod]

@sjintje Ich würde gern andere Bücher von Karen Duve lesen, aber zuerst muss ich etwas leichter lesen!

@Gemuse I don't think the vocabulary load for Begegnungen B1 is too bad. Although two things help with this. Firstly, I have already studied the A1 and A2 textbooks in the same series, and the whole thing is structured so that each book revises and then builds on what came in the last one. And secondly, I am working through the book at a rather sedate pace. If I was trying to take it with one chapter every week or two, it would be much tougher.

[gsbod]

It's taken a little longer than anticipated, but I've finally logged my first book (well, it works out at 8 "books") for the German Super Challenge. Today was the first day in a long time that I had absolutely no plans and I have been so busy lately that I felt perfectly justified in spending pretty much the whole afternoon on the sofa reading, so I could polish off the last 30% of the book. What a luxury.

The book was Mordsfreunde by Nele Neuhaus, the second in the series after Eine unbeliebte Frau, which I read a couple of months ago. It's a pretty trashy read, as expected. Some of the plot turns left me feeling a little uncomfortable but then by the end everything came together in a satisfactory way, so it was worth sticking with, as far as trashy reads go. I think for my next book I would like something a little meatier, however. Not something more difficult, but rather something with more substance.

[gsbod]

Tonight I got home from work late, feeling tired from not sleeping enough over the last week or so, and decided what better way to celebrate than to do the Dialang level placement test for German.

My results are as follows:

Placement test: 639
Listening: C1
Writing: B2
Reading: B2
Structures: B1
Vocabulary: B2

I think that my result for listening says more about my test taking ability than my actual ability, although I would still be first to admit that listening is my strongest skill.

It's also interesting (but not overly surprising) that my grammar is the obvious weak point. I need to learn how to be a dilligent student and fix that one.

But first, I need to get some sleep.

[gsbod]

When the prospect of a referendum on EU membership became a reality, it became a real motivating factor for studying German. I considered it a kind of insurance policy. But like all insurance policies, I never expected to have to cash it in.

No, I don't have plans to immediately relocate to Germany (as much as I would like to in my dreams). I love my city and I've got some really interesting things happening at work. Now I would love to be able to do a similar job in another European city, because I think I could learn a lot from the experience, but my German is not yet good enough and I think a couple more years experience here would also put me in a better position. But who knows what's going to happen now.

My survival strategy right now is to keep abreast of the rapid developments without getting unduly distracted (that's tough), keep working hard at my day job, and keep working hard at German. And since this is a language forum, I shall focus on the German bit here!

Despite all the good things about it, I started to get really bored with Begegnungen B1 so decided to go with a completely different textbook while also trying to convince myself that I am not a victim of gear acquisition syndrome. The book I am working on now is Aspekte Neu B1 Plus. I have been working on this since May and have nearly finished Kapitel 2 (of 10). As a package, it's rather a lot more expensive than Begegnungen, because you have to buy the textbook, workbook and audio CDs separately. However, the quality of the audio recordings are generally better than Begegnungen (although at this level I'd like to have seen them throw in excerpts from genuine radio shows etc) and the textbook also comes with a DVD which has a video with accompanying exercises for each chapter. It's really nothing more special than what you can get every week from DW, but it's still a nice addition. The textbook doesn't contain answers, however these can be downloaded for free from the Klett website.

For comprehension, vocabulary and useful expressions I think Aspekte Neu B1 Plus is pretty good. There are also lots of useful lists (and in many cases example sentences) at the back of the workbook with irregular verbs, prepositional verbs, verbs that take the dative and reflexive verbs. The grammar explanations (and accompanying drills) are quite light, however. I do like how the grammar summaries present a nice overview of what you are expected to know, but it is still too light. Also, my recent Dialang experience shows that grammar is probably my weakest point right now. But I've got loads of other grammar books on the shelf. For now I am continuing to work with Grammatik Aktiv, but I'm trying to take it at a more aggressive pace. Also I'm experimenting with cloze deletion Anki cards for the example sentences for prepositional verbs, but I only started this at the weekend so it's too early to judge its value.

My German Super Challenge also seems to be going reasonably well. I am on track for the films and am probably on track for the books but I have somehow managed to end up with 4 different books on the go at once even though I was originally aiming for one at a time. I've also had a reasonable amount of exposure to German news lately (Tagesschau, Spiegel Online etc), which I'm not counting for the Super Challenge, and I'm finding that it's refreshing not to have an exclusively British media view on world events.

Now that both my German class and meetup group are on holiday I am absolutely itching to have a German conversation with someone, but I guess I'll just have to be patient.

[gsbod]

I love the way that German builds new words out of old ones in a generally rather logical way, but please tell me, why is it that:

die Toilette = toilet
die Brille = glasses
die Toilettenbrille = toilet seat

It's certainly not a word I'll be forgetting in a hurry, but I shan't be looking at (through) my glasses in the same way again for a while.

[garyb]

I love the way that German builds new words out of old ones in a generally rather logical way, but please tell me, why is it that:

die Toilette = toilet
die Brille = glasses
die Toilettenbrille = toilet seat

It's certainly not a word I'll be forgetting in a hurry, but I shan't be looking at (through) my glasses in the same way again for a while.

French does the same: glasses are "les lunettes" and the toilet seat is "la lunette des toilettes". I always wondered where that came from and it's interesting to see that German has it too!