Beli Tsar wrote:The bigger problem I have is all the little functional words - prepositions, conjunctions, etc. etc. - that are high frequency, but hard to absorb. Beginner textbooks seem to cover fewer of these than they should relative to frequency, presumably precisely because they would overwhelm you. But when you start reading they are everywhere! They are so easy to muddle with each other. And they are often slippery things, without a direct gloss or equivalent in your own language, which is - for me - the one thing that makes a word really hard to absorb.
Absolutely . And the thing is, no matter how good the textbook or teacher, very often a native speaking teacher just doesn't always fully understand which things puzzle foreign students the most. I don't remember ever covering particle words in Dutch like 'toch, even, nochtans, eens, wat, pas...' I remember some cropped-up in the old Hugo three months course I did, but the approach taken in classes was to merely say/use them and seemingly hope students would divine the meaning! I remember being in the library in Brugge and asking a woman :'what does toch actually mean? How do I use it?' And she was hard-pressed to explain even though she knew perfectly well all its uses and senses. They're slippery indeed and hide inside sentences.
A girl at the language cafe (pre-covid) said to me she was in despair learning French with things like: ainsi que, encore que, autant que, bien que, pour autant, alors que, that sort of thing.
These sorts of things need time and to happen in conversation/reading over a fairly long period in order to internalise. I'm not sure that sticking a long list of those in Anki without a lot of context, would be something learned in a week or a month.