A much better week in my German adventure has come to an end. Today is Saturday and I haven't done anything German related today other than some Anki this morning. I may just relax this weekend. This week, I made a big push and finished out the A1 course Harry Gefangen in der Zeit from the Deutsche Welle on Wednesday evening. I really like this course and highly recommend it for new German learners. I would not recommend pushing through it as fast as I did but do one lesson per day and even do the same lesson twice to reinforce what I learned the first time around.
The day after I completed the course, I went back and did an A1 placement test on Duetsche Welle website. Out of 30 questions I scored a whopping 74. Obviously not as good as I would have liked but it seems I'm heading in the right direction. There were a few of the written parts where I didn't know the meaning of some words. There were a couple audio parts that dealt with numbers that threw me off. If the German speakers would have spoken more slowly and clearly then I'm sure I would have done a little better. But in the real world that's probably not the case.
For my YouTube video fix, it was a combination of Natürlich German (7 videos) and Easy German (14 videos), 21 videos in total. The Natürlich videos are longer than the Easy German ones. Both were from their Beginner playlists. I really like both channels but I still have to give Natürlich German a leg up over Easy German, but for the total amount of videos Easy German will win out.
My TV time went up quite a bit also. I watched The Worst Witch (8 episodes) and I Woke Up A Vampire (6 episodes). Both are way over my head and will be for a long time but I'm going to assume I'm learning somehow. If anything, I can say I can pick out the words easier even if I don't understand their meaning. Need to get my vocabulary on up but all in due time.
Lastly, I knocked out some Anki reps. I have 2 Anki decks now. One is a collection of sentences from FSI German that I handpicked (2,317 sentences) and I also made a deck on Friday from all the sentences I kept from Harry gefangen in der Zeit (432 sentences).
Reading and Podcasts were again non-existent. By the time I get home in the evenings, around 5:30pm, cook supper and eat, then watch two episodes off of Netflix, its already pushing 8pm. Just not enough time in the day. For book reading or podcast listening, I'll have to give up something. I think I may ask over in the main group, General Language Discussion or Practical Questions and Advice section, whats the best bang for the buck, so to speak. Specifically for a new language learner. Is it better to read books with translations or watch TV shows with translations??
German Lessons: DW: Harry gefangen in der Zeit: Lessons 41-50
German YouTube videos: Natürlich German - 7 videos, Easy German - 14 videos
German Movies / TV episodes: The Worst Witch - 8 episodes, I Woke Up a Vampire - 6 episodes
German Podcasts: NONE
German Books: NONE
I'm looking forward to this coming week. I'm going back to LingQ to do a lot of listening/reading from Nico's Weg and other German content. Who knows where I'll go from there. But I paid for a year membership on LingQ so I might as well use it to the fullest. Some people may dog LingQ, and I'm not here to promote it, but looking back LingQ was instrumental during my very early days of ShawnP's Spanish Adventure.