Mastering French and German

[Gänsefüßchen]

My French had about a 6 month head-start over my German, but even if I had started both at the same time, it really seems like they are on two different trajectories. I still notice progress with both, but my French overall has progressed at a faster rate, so the distance between them has continued to increase over time. Now I have the impression that my French comprehension is much higher than that of my German.
Additionally, having an easier time understanding French means that I can spend more time per day on it, which increases this contrast even more.[...]

Do you think that's due to the greater overlap of vocabulary between English and French or do you find French grammar easier than German grammar? There are many cognates between English and German as well, but they might not be so obvious for beginners. E.g. die Forke (a large fork for gardening) or die Zähre (a tear) are probably not words you'd encounter in study material for beginners.

Ich wünsche Dir gutes Gelingen beim Deutschlernen!

[Eternal Foreigner]

Do you think that's due to the greater overlap of vocabulary between English and French or do you find French grammar easier than German grammar? There are many cognates between English and German as well, but they might not be so obvious for beginners. E.g. die Forke (a large fork for gardening) or die Zähre (a tear) are probably not words you'd encounter in study material for beginners.

Good question! The shared vocabulary between French and English has without a doubt sped up the process a ton, but in addition to that I have a background of studying romance languages, particularly Spanish which I studied in school for many years. But I have to imagine even without that, German grammar would still be harder for me. When I first learned how the articles worked I could hardly believe it, and the fact that German speakers can speak at full speed without violating this system was honestly pretty stunning to me. It still seems to me almost like a kind of encoding that a computer would use to compress some data, hardly something that can be done subconsciously in day-to-day conversations.

But anyway, the grammar thankfully isn't usually a barrier to comprehension. With French the issue was always connected speech, but as I've been practicing and reviewing my audio cards this barrier has thankfully been slowly fading. With German though the main barrier is definitely vocabulary. I totally agree that there are a lot of cognates, but as you've mentioned it seems like it's a totally different category of words than the cognates with French. And the majority of unknown words that come up a lot in the content I'm consuming are either not cognates, or I'm not making the connection.

Ich wünsche Dir gutes Gelingen beim Deutschlernen!

Vielen Dank!

[jeffers]

You mentinoed the nature method on another log, and I'm finally getting around to looking into it for Italian. I've found a YT channel, Ayan Academy, which has the audio for the first 20 chapters of the various nature method courses, but then you need to pay them on Patreon to listen to the rest. They also have pdfs of the books for free. When you used the nature method, did you just read the text or did you use audio?

[Eternal Foreigner]

You mentinoed the nature method on another log, and I'm finally getting around to looking into it for Italian. I've found a YT channel, Ayan Academy, which has the audio for the first 20 chapters of the various nature method courses, but then you need to pay them on Patreon to listen to the rest. They also have pdfs of the books for free. When you used the nature method, did you just read the text or did you use audio?

Ah I didn't know they locked content behind a paywall. I guess I was lucky since their (40?) French chapters with the audio were free. I read and listened along with all of them. But to be honest, it probably would have been a similar result if I had just read them, because I ended up mostly reading other content (without audio) after that anyways until I reached the point that I could listen to Inner French. If I were you I'd take advantage of the free 20 chapters and then just read the rest haha.

[Eternal Foreigner]

One hundred and sixty one episodes later, I finally finished my first series entirely in French!

It took me just under a year, having started at some point in January and finishing this evening on Christmas eve. Each episode was 20 minutes long, so roughly 54 hours total. I made 964 audio anki cards. (average of 6 per episode)

At the end of January, I wrote:

watching even only 20 minutes of this series still feels like a decent amount of work. Re-listening to certain lines to try to figure out what's being said, and making anki cards with the audio can turn this 20 minute task into well over an hour. I'm currently making roughly 10 anki cards per episode.

Judging my progress over the year is difficult, but I have definitely improved noticeably. I'm very pleased with myself, but if I'm being honest, I think my expectations were higher, which is maybe part of why I started to feel a bit demoralized this month. But I still mostly feel content. I remember as I wrote that it "feels like a decent amount of work" how much effort it used to take to concentrate on the speech for a full episode. It still takes some effort now, but I think the mental resistance I feel now has much less to do with the language and more to do with just being sick of watching this particular show. If you're wondering why I didn't drop this show in favor of something else when I got tired of watching it, well, so am I.

It's very nice to have all of these anki cards though. Even if I decide to take a break, I can still manage to maintain my daily review habit. It's incredibly easy even with almost a thousand cards, it's usually less than 15 reviews per day. And I really get the impression that it prevents me from losing the comprehension skills that I've managed to slowly build up.

As I've mentioned before, I have a lot of anime series dubbed in French that I want to watch, but for now I'm going to relax, do anki, and enjoy the last week of the year.

[Eternal Foreigner]

It's been a difficult year.
I started 2024 extremely motivated to learn French and German, and this motivation survived some hardships. Particularly losing my job in May, which started as a shock to my ego but lead to the realization that I have a once in a lifetime opportunity to focus on a software/business idea. But despite this opportunity, I felt more drawn to continue my progress in French and German for most of the year.
Until this December, when I had a dramatic shift in motivation, feeling my energy for French and German evaporate and get replaced with an extreme drive to get my software idea on the market. Only for that to get replaced with a feeling of desperation, as I watch my finances suffer, the end of my apartment lease a few months away with no idea if renewal is even a feasible option, and my software that I put online receiving zero attention so far.
I've gone through worse times in my life, and I always have the option of moving somewhere really cheap when my lease ends and living like a monk. But already restricting my expenses like this has been a difficult adjustment. I haven't washed my car in months and my laptop screen is broken which would cost me around €80 to fix, plus many other little things like this that just drive me insane.
It might seem completely illogical that I'm still continuing with French and German at this point, but my only explanation is that I have limited control over what I'm motivated to do in a given month, and it wasn't until feeling the hurt of my savings depleting that I felt my motivation shift more towards financial goals.

Anyway, all of that is just to provide the context of my mental state now, and how I'll be starting 2025.

Regarding my November-December goals, I did manage to finish the series in French as I mentioned in my previous post, but I only managed 10 episodes of 14 Minuten which was mostly in November. Ran out of steam in December.

My anki usage varied throughout the year. During the first few weeks I was using it a lot, since I had both my French audio cards and German basic vocabulary to review. But then I dropped the German deck in favor of other methods, and for the majority of spring and summer I was only using anki for French. Then at some point in the Fall I started making German audio cards too, so the usage went up again.


Also a cool little thing, I've mentioned Antennapod on this forum before, one of my favorite apps and probably the most used app on my phone. One really cool feature, which I think is new, is at the end of the year it shows you a summary of your year. I listen to a lot of podcasts in English, so I was really surprised to see that Inner French was my most listened to. Especially since I started losing interest in it during the second half of the year. Somehow it still beat the other podcasts I listen to frequently.

[Eternal Foreigner]

Goals for January and February:

• Finish 20 episodes in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (French dub)
• Finish 10 more episodes of 14 Minuten

And as always, making audio anki cards and reviewing them regularly.

[Eternal Foreigner]

I was a bit apprehensive to watch something new, maybe a bit worried I wouldn't understand as much, but it's clear that something new was exactly what I needed. Forcing myself to watch the same series the entire year last year was a total drag. Some motivation is definitely returning.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is 64 episodes long which is far less daunting than the 161 episodes I watched last year. Plus it's just a classic, I remember the first time I watched it when I was in high school I was captivated. Given my pace though with other stuff going on in my life, I probably won't get through my entire French-dubbed anime catalog this year, but that's fine. I think the most important thing is just keeping French and German as a part of my daily routine, even if it's just a small part. I'm hoping that after this summer I'll have more life stability and I'll be able to increase the amount of language activities in my daily schedule. I was hoping to read some novels this year and listen to audiobooks as well, but it's going to require more time investment per day than I can currently afford.

[Eternal Foreigner]

Way back in August I started playing a game from the Tales series in German, and I noted how long it was taking me to get through the dialogue. I was looking up a ton of words, especially since the beginning of these games always has a lot of dialogue.
Eventually it got a bit easier but this game really didn't captivate me. I've realized that my only motivation to actually play it is for the sake of learning German. When I'm really enjoying a game, it's the enjoyment of the game itself that keeps me going even through lots of difficult dialogue. I didn't get very far at all in this game.

In October my routine shifted to listening to the 14 Minuten podcast and although this podcast doesn't really excite me either, I'm making so many valuable audio anki cards from it that I think its worth persevering. But I'm deciding to skip any episode that looks like it might be even remotely uninteresting to me. No more politics.
And there are some days where I have enough new anki cards, leaving me with some extra time I could have dedicated to playing that game if I had actually been motivated to play it. That's why I'm going to pick another game to play.

Thankfully, as I've mentioned before, there are many many options. It's actually difficult to decide, but I've narrowed it down to a few choices. And I think this time it makes a lot of sense to pick a game I've played before, not only because having some memory of the plot is helpful, but also because I'll know already if I enjoyed the game.