Postby Lisa » Sat Mar 27, 2021 7:46 pm
Finished LotR3. I got tired of trying to enter and learn these very rare and obscure words that the book is full of, so I just read. I don't mind rare and interesting/easy to learn words, but rare ones that are hard to learn really seem like a waste of energy. Due to all the extra words entered during LotR1 in late February/early March, my Anki deck is a little daunting at the moment.
I read a (english-language) book on the history of the german language. What I found interesting was that (it says) the spoken german and written german are not as similar as spoken and written english. It gave a number of examples, e.g. spoken German often uses dative instead of genetive, for example. Also that the first person conjugations often don't say the final e, e.g., ich geh, ich hab... which is true in my experience). In any case, it does speak to the need to listen/learn from material that did not originate as written (e.g. not audiobooks read from the paper book).
My reading ability I'm happy with, though there is a lot of vocab still to go (Anki ~4500 words), and things like long adjective clauses before objects can throw me. When I try to speak I seem to have a much harder time since I'm trying to use words that don't come easily and trying to conjugate them... If I manage to set aside what I "know" and just speak my simple broken german it does come easily. E.g., I know üben, but wanted to use einüben instead and I could not do it easily... I start with the modal (muss) and defer the verb to the end of the sentence, but after I finish the object I've forgotten both the word and if I meant to use infinitive or participle.
To deal with my still ongoing problem with mixed sets of words, I decided to add another field to the anki cards with the meanings that it's not. I have been doing this for NL->TL, where are multiple german words for an english definition (like throw), but I can do it for TL->NL too. This will be especially useful for laut/laute/lauten/lauter.
Since garden season has started I'm going to have to spend less time on my language efforts; it has been taking up a little too much of my time and mental space.
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