Lisa's Language Log

[Lisa]

Over the last month, I've been chipping away at the German but I have to say I don't have that grand passion that I had with Spanish. I don't understand it... my German has objectively always been better. I suspect it's just that it's not the first time climbing this mountain and it's not fresh and new and exciting. The vocabulary seems to be going slower and being much harder in German than it was in Spanish. Partly it's that I'm making myself get the genders right and that turns out to be much harder with three than two. But I wonder if, setting aside the set of basic fundamental words (which I mostly knew already), if English has so many older french and latin borrowings, and recent constructions based on latin, that there are more hooks for memory with Spanish than with German. I have not yet been reading - though I have books queued and ready - as I'm still waiting for the vocabulary to catch up.

Other than anki, I've been using duolingo which I still don't like but I have to hand it to them, that they (sometimes) force me to figure out word order and conjunctions and catch me with those sneaky n's they sometimes put at the end of nouns. I don't have to produce a whole lot of sentences, but now and again they do make me come up with something. Since my not producing was a big problem with spanish this is a good thing.

I went to one German conversation meetup, and I was able to speak pretty okay although once or twice I got stuck. Much easier than trying to speak Spanish. Alas, I was pulled into a ballroom dance class for that day of the week so it will be problematic for the next month or more. Luckily the Germany trip is not until September so there's no immediate language pressure. And then, I'm glad we didn't schedule the trip in May as the coronavirus complicates matters... hopefully September will be okay.

[tungemål]

...The vocabulary seems to be going slower and being much harder in German than it was in Spanish. Partly it's that I'm making myself get the genders right and that turns out to be much harder with three than two. But I wonder if, setting aside the set of basic fundamental words (which I mostly knew already), if English has so many older french and latin borrowings, and recent constructions based on latin, that there are more hooks for memory with Spanish than with German. ...

Yes, learning Spanish I find so many words that I recognize from English. Mostly the more advanced English vocabulary, while much of the basic English vocabulary have cognates with German.

I also find German vocabulary hard to learn, especially the more abstract verbs that often are build with prefixes. For example from lassen are derived the words unterlassen, entlassen, einlassen, überlassen, zulassen, nachlassen, anlassen, veranlassen and maybe some more I don't know. (I don't recommend learning them all at once). They all have different meanings of course, and the German system of separating the verb from its prefix makes it hard to follow the meaning. Allthough there is a logical system behind the prefixes.

And then some of these verbs have several meanings, some of which are opposite:
* zulassen - can mean to allow, but also to keep (a door) shut.
* anhalten - can mean to stop, but also to carry on

[Lisa]

...The vocabulary seems to be going slower and being much harder in German than it was in Spanish. Partly it's that I'm making myself get the genders right and that turns out to be much harder with three than two. But I wonder if, setting aside the set of basic fundamental words (which I mostly knew already), if English has so many older french and latin borrowings, and recent constructions based on latin, that there are more hooks for memory with Spanish than with German. ...

Yes, learning Spanish I find so many words that I recognize from English. Mostly the more advanced English vocabulary, while much of the basic English vocabulary have cognates with German.

I also find German vocabulary hard to learn, especially the more abstract verbs that often are build with prefixes. For example from lassen are derived the words unterlassen, entlassen, einlassen, überlassen, zulassen, nachlassen, anlassen, veranlassen and maybe some more I don't know. (I don't recommend learning them all at once). They all have different meanings of course, and the German system of separating the verb from its prefix makes it hard to follow the meaning. Allthough there is a logical system behind the prefixes.

And then some of these verbs have several meanings, some of which are opposite:
* zulassen - can mean to allow, but also to keep (a door) shut.
* anhalten - can mean to stop, but also to carry on

I'm trying to take it slow with verbs starting with ab-, an-, auf-, aus-, and so on, they always look all the same and confuse me. I'm hoping that now I know about Anki I can manage it so I don't just give up in despair. I'm still finding too many words that tranlsate the same, anfangen/beginnen, abreisen/abfahren.

Interesting though if you are a native norwegian speaker, I know practically nothing about scandanvian languages but I would have thought they were more similar to German than English is...

[Lisa]

Well the virus and lockdown affect us all in one way or the other. I had booked tickets for the germany trip, and was charging ahead on the German when... things changed. I'm not entirely sure why I just trailed off on duolingo, and while the german conversation group has gone online, I'm not sure enough of myself speaking to want to attempt speaking on zoom. I haven't worked on reading, or listening, not looking for german online resources... not even been around in this forum. The only thing I haven't given up on has been the anki words since that really does benefit from a little every day.

German vocabulary is still MUCH more difficult to learn than Spanish was. I did actually start reading a children's book, Insel der blauen delphine and learning the words from that... but it goes slow and it's frustrating. The same problem with lots of words with the same english meaning that I had with Spanish... possibly worse... but also, so many words look way too similar in German and I'm forever getting words mixed up. I have got to about 1500-1600 words (about 4000 cards) and I still feel like I can't read, it's harder to recognize the words in context. Possibly I was this frustrated at the same time with Spanish and I've forgotten... but I thought the German would go much faster; I can (at least a couple months ago) still hold a conversation in german so I don't get it.

I have to write to my cousins and tell them I'm not visiting Germany - don't want to get into a plane anytime soon - and that will be a nice test since in the past it's been quite difficult to write.

It does appear I haven't lost all that much Spanish, though, I picked up a book after two months of ignoring Spanish, and while it wasn't very easy to read, it was understandable. I can't imagine what would come out if I tried to speak.

[Lisa]

I have passed the nebulous-but-real boundary between "can't read" and "can read" in German... hurray! Of course I still don't know many of the words, but if I go slow and it's a book I sort of know already I can read along without getting completely lost. Tested out on an agatha christie and a couple of other novels (bestseller types, not childrens books).

To try to make vocabulary building faster for reading, I've rearranged my anki decks, so the german-to-english are in a separate deck. If I put more effort into these, I'll be able to read sooner, and if I know the word well then likely it will be much easier to learn the english-german. That's my theory. What with rearranging the decks so often I don't seem to be getting into overload.

On the german resources page I found https://klexikon.zum.de/, which is a wiki children's encylopedia... the german sentences are simple so I can follow them grammatically, the topics are simple so I can guess a lot, and it shows words I need to learn.

[golyplot]

I also find German vocabulary hard to learn, especially the more abstract verbs that often are build with prefixes. For example from lassen are derived the words unterlassen, entlassen, einlassen, überlassen, zulassen, nachlassen, anlassen, veranlassen and maybe some more I don't know. (I don't recommend learning them all at once). They all have different meanings of course, and the German system of separating the verb from its prefix makes it hard to follow the meaning.

To be fair, English does the same thing. Not that that makes it any easier to learn as far as productive skills go. Luckily, it's much less important for listening comprehension, since the meaning of the preposition part is usually clear from context.

[jeffers]

To try to make vocabulary building faster for reading, I've rearranged my anki decks, so the german-to-english are in a separate deck. If I put more effort into these, I'll be able to read sooner, and if I know the word well then likely it will be much easier to learn the english-german. That's my theory. What with rearranging the decks so often I don't seem to be getting into overload.

Either here or on HTLAL, a guy (I think it was Ari) said that he totally stopped using L1 -> L2 cards (e.g. no more english-german) and found it so much easier to learn more vocabulary. I did the same thing and have never looked back. The reason is that most of the time when I got frustrated with cards taking too long to learn it was with L1 -> L2 cards. Remove those cards and you remove a large mental block.

On the other hand, does removing L1 -> L2 cards mean you won't be able to use the words? I don't think so. Cards are part of learning vocabulary, but not the whole thing. Flashcards introduce and remind you of the words, but that's 10% of the process. The real learning comes when you meet and use those words in other contexts: when you read them, hear them, speak them write them.

So in your case, you are removing english -> german cards. That will give you the chance to learn more words and have more time to read, with less looking up words while you read. In the long run that will give you a stronger vocabulary than spending more time on flashcards because of doing them both ways.

[Lisa]

So in your case, you are removing english -> german cards. That will give you the chance to learn more words and have more time to read, with less looking up words while you read. In the long run that will give you a stronger vocabulary than spending more time on flashcards because of doing them both ways.

That's encouraging! Though... I actually am wanting to learn the gender (and plural and conjugation) of words since not knowing gender has meant speaking incorrectly.... I don't really mind speaking incorrectly, actually, but how nice to actually know the correct gender and not feel that stress, as the words line up on your tongue and you can see you have to stick some article or another in that spot in the sentence... picking one randomly has worked OK but still it would be nice to actually just know.

While it does take longer to learn english-german, but what is slowing me down and annoying me the most is words that have somewhat similar english definitions. If I have 3-4 cards with more or less the same english terms and I say the wrong one, do I call the answer wrong? I either have to list every work I know, or edit the cards so end up with "to decide (not entscheiden)"

Reading has already improved... (the first 10-20 pages of a book are always the hardest for me).

[Lisa]

Still frustrated by how hard it is to remember German words (relative to learning Spanish words). I gave up on the Agatha Christie since the particular one was a translation that used a lot of advanced words, and I need to get the basics before I get cute about vocabulary. I've fallen back to Agatha Raisin, much more lowbrow. It's not keeping my interest a whole lot... but at my current level I can mostly read it although I have to blurp over many words. I've read this book in English a few times although I don't know it as well as say Tolkien or Agatha Christie.

My frustration with vocab has led to massive amounts of work on my Anki deck.

First, I set up an experiment to see if learning just german->english produced significantly different results than my usual both-ways-plus-plural/conjugation. My methodology fell short but it's still interesting.

I put 50 words each in different decks, hard words that I didn't know and trying to balance each deck although I wasn't very careful. Later I added 3 words to each deck before I decided I didn't want to run this experiment continuously. With one deck, I suspected all the non-German->English cards. Then I studied both decks as part of my regular time on anki. I did a little extra study on the German->English only deck with an idea of keeping the time even on both decks... but decided that wasn't a good idea. I did try to move through the cards on the all-the-cards deck a little faster to get the experiment moving.
Once I'd made it through all the cards on the both-ways deck (just under two weeks), I waited a couple of days then I gave myself a german->english quiz on both decks, mixed. The result is that I got about 90% on the all-cards and 95% on the german->english only, with about 25% more time spent on the all-cards over the course of the experiment.

Some observations...

Turns out I am doing a fair bit of "learning" by remembering the set of definitions and just guessing which applies to which. For example, I know there is one word that I definitely do not know - I just see it and say, that's a weird-looking word it must mean "permit". The value of learning both ways is that I'm forced to at least go though the syllables in the german word, and can't just learn the general shape. I don't think I want to underestimate the number of english definitions I can keep in my mind and match to likely words.

I found the german->english-only deck very fatiguing. It's a relief to my brain to see words that resolve themselves, fairly often between the baffling ones. This might be due to having a deck of mostly hard words... with a larger and mixed deck you'd get more of a mix of easy and hard.

Another thing also happened. Partway through the experiment, when I was struggling with my Agathas, I thought that since the deck I started with happens to have example sentences, it wouldn't be hard to make additional cards with these, and seeing the words in context might help. I created sentence cards for one type of card, which included some of my test words, and didn't notice and reviewed it, and it made a difference in how well I knew that word. I had to suspend the sentence cards for the test words (and the test results were messed up, of course)... but it was interesting.

I've now got a lot of sentence cards. It also turns out that sentences by themselves are kind of boring to review (no plot!), and they also suffer from just remembering the english and not bothering to analyze the german sentence. I've moved the test cards into a single deck, and gone back to studying the mixed decks, with the added sentences. I've now got kind of a backlog of reviews and once that gets worked down I need to settle things into a steady state and see how it goes. I feel optimistic.

Also I tagged each of the test words and a control set of words, so I should be able to go back after another couple of weeks and figure out how well I know the words and how much time it's taken.

[Lisa]

It turns out the sentences got too boring and the words kept piling up and I've got some anki burnout. German vocabulary continues to be so much harder to learn than Spanish! So I got rid of most of the sentences (I kept phrases like nach und nach) and I'm going to accept that I'll never be able to distinguish stürzen, stützen, and sturzen.

I'm at about 2500 words (6200 cards). I'm way behind on reviews and not motivated to catch up. It doesn't seem like quite enough for reading, still, although it's improving and I could probably manage. For Spanish I would enjoy adding new words from reading to anki, but now... welll... all the words seem difficult and obscure and to mean almost the same thing. It's also discouraging to know I'm not going to be able to travel there or talk in German to anyone in person here for that matter.

Turns out there are some nice audiobooks on youtube and I can follow these pretty well most of the time. Since I'm not driving up to the office I don't have that handy time period to listen, never mind if the mechanics of streaming while driving. And hard to make time for something that doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon...