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

[Elenia]

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!

I guess that if you open out a toilet seat and lay it flat, it looks a bit like a pince-nez?

[dampingwire]

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!

I can't speak for German but isn't the French lunette a word for crescent that happens to have been applied to various objects, including spectacles and toilet seats?

[gsbod]

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!

Learning this was a moment of sheer joy on an otherwise gloomy day. Thank you!

I can't speak for German but isn't the French lunette a word for crescent that happens to have been applied to various objects, including spectacles and toilet seats?

You mean the French were being poetic and the Germans took it literally?

[gsbod]

Textbooks

Following my post here I decided that I would have a go at alternating chapter by chapter between Aspekte Neu B1 Plus and Aspekte Neu B2 to see how I would get on. After finishing off Kapitel 2 in the B1 book on Saturday, I cracked open the B2 book on Sunday and it turns out that the B2 book is actually more suited to my level than I previously thought. The workload in terms of new vocabulary is very similar to the B1 book and the grammar points so far are actually covering things that are both new to me and extremely useful.

So now my dilemma is, of course, whether to go back to the B1 book at all or whether to keep ploughing through B2! I had a browse through the grammar points at the end of each chapter in the B1 book last night to see if there were any gaping holes in my knowledge - but all I really found were a few minor gaps, the biggest one being handling modal verbs in Perfekt, Konjunktiv II and Passiv (but of course, once you can handle them in Perfekt, everything else is perfectly logical). I also learned that Futur I can also be used to express a supposition or a command. Plus there are a couple of prepositions I hadn't met before (außerhalb/innerhalb + genitiv), and some exciting new subordinating conjunctions (sodass, damit).

In any case, my study of the verb lists at the back of the B1 Arbeitsbuch is proving fruitful, so I shall at least continue with that, but it is making more sense to me now to keep pushing through the B2 book, while also doing a separate grammar drill book (I'm still going with Grammatik aktiv) on the side.

Cool stuff

I decided that now would be a good time to start to get to grips with German vocabulary and expressions related to my profession. I won't get any of this from a general language textbook, so I bought myself a couple of classic texts relating to my field of work (which I also happen to have in English) along with a couple of books aimed at teaching basic concepts to students. So far I'm really surprised at how straight forward this new reading material is, but maybe I shouldn't be. Using the professional knowledge I already possess in combination with the basic framework of German I have built up over the last couple of years, it's generally quite easy to figure out what the texts are saying. Whether I shall absorb all the right terminology from reading alone remains to be seen.

I am also now hooked on Verblendung, the German translation of The girl with the dragon tattoo. Hooked to the point of desperately trying to keep my eyes open long enough to reach the end of the chapter before I go to sleep...

[dampingwire]

I also learned that Futur I can also be used to express a supposition

I've yet to get me teeth into real German (still doing a bit of Pimsleur and little else so far), but it sounds like that corresponds to the Italian sara` dotto ma non lo sembra, which uses the future to express "he's probably smart, but he doesn't look it".

I guess there's nothing new under the sun!

[gsbod]

Yesterday I finished reading Russendisko by Wladimir Kaminer. This is one of the books that I found mentioned in a couple of places online when googling for suggestions for easy German books. The author emigrated from Russia to Berlin in 1990 and the book is basically a series of short stories, similar in style to a magazine column, about various happenings in his life and the lives of those around him. It's a short and fairly easy read, genuinely amusing in places, less so in others. I think I was maybe hoping for something with more of an overarching narrative but as a fairly short book the format was fine.

Now I'm just planning to catch up with my reading of Tintenherz and keep going with Verblendung before I pick up any new German books.

I've decided that I need to start weaning myself off the Kindle dictionary. It is very useful, especially when your level is such that vocabulary bombs are commonplace whatever you are reading, however I am reaching the point that with a substantial part of material that I want to read, I can manage without a dictionary. And having the dictionary just a tap away is making me lazy and taking my attention away from actually making sense of the German words in front of me. With that in mind, I have asked for a pile of dead tree books in German for my birthday.

[gsbod]

I've enrolled on the Italian Language and Culture: Beginner offered by Wellesley College on edX and am working my way through it as and when I have the time. It is the first of three courses which seem to provide a considerable amount of Italian (the advanced course covers the subjunctive, yay!), especially considering that you can audit the course without paying a penny. I've been waiting for a comprehensive language learning MOOC for a long time and am really excited about the idea of learning a language for free. Also, I've wanted to know Italian since I was 10 years old and bought myself the Usborne Italian for Beginners book, because at the time it seemed so much more exotic than French...

[dampingwire]

I've enrolled on the Italian Language and Culture: Beginner offered by Wellesley College on edX

Great choice

Don't forget to get a satellite dish installed and pointed at HotBird so you can get (almost) unrestricted access to Rai1,2,3

[gsbod]

I think it will be a while before my Italian is TV ready, although it's already quite nice to just have the radio babbling on in the background even though I can't understand that much. Of all the Romance languages (at least the big ones), Italian is surely the nicest to listen to. I'm also finding my background in music combined with my smattering of Spanish to be somewhat helpful with the vocabulary. I have also heard that the grammar is quite similar to French, but I haven't even got to the verbs properly yet, so we'll see.

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. For German, I am only counting stuff specifically related to textbook study, partly because I don't want the hassle of having to start a timer off every time I feel like leafing through Der Spiegel, partly because I can't be bothered double counting on the Super Challenge and partly because I like the idea of having a time limited textbook challenge which won't consume all my free time! Also I've got another long weekend away and possibly a whole week away (if I book it) during the challenge period, and I don't intend to study at all on holiday.

It's too soon to give a review of the edX Italian course, but one positive so far is that it has introduced, and got me hooked on, Quizlet. I recently spent a long weekend in Germany and once I came back I really could not be bothered to get back into Anki. Quizlet is really easy to use, has a nice amount of flexibility in the ways you can practice your material, and has the bonus that I decide what I study and when, rather than leaving it mindlessly to an algorithm.

[dampingwire]

I have also heard that the grammar is quite similar to French, but I haven't even got to the verbs properly yet, so we'll see.

At school I was looking through the prism in the other direction (learning French) but I remember noticing many patterns in French that matched Italian. For example, each labguage has 3 major verb conjugations, each of them forms compound tenses in similar (but not always identical) ways and so on. Even some of the irregularities match.

I found that as long as I could remember that certain patterns matched Italian, then it left me more time to concentrate on the bits that were entirely different.

One area where Italian helped quite a lot was with noun genders. Mostly they matched, which was jolly useful!