What next? (learning Spanish, maintaining German, random dabbling...)

[gsbod]

I am cheating and writing in English today because I am using my language log as a form of reflection, and I think the process will work better if I do it in English rather than trying to formulate my thoughts in German straight away. Maybe I should try to translate it to German later. Or maybe not.

I've had the feeling for a while that my listening comprehension in German is already pretty strong, definitely in C2 territory, and things that cause me trouble in German also tend to cause me trouble in English, like strong accents/dialects, mumbling on TV, long-winded technical explanations about things I know nothing about, and short utterances that are so out of context I can't figure out what they're talking about (my husband is a great one for throwing those at me in English, thank goodness he's not yet learned how to do it in German).

The other night, however, I was struggling to sleep and looking for something in German to listen to. I've been avoiding my usual favourite podcasts in both English and German recently as anything recent is far too likely to have too much Coronavirus talk in it, so I ended up listening to some of the C level Deutsche Welle podcasts for learners. These are a resource that I've always felt I should have made more of, but always found something else to do instead. Except now, listening to them in a slightly sleep deprived state, I realised that as a comprehension exercise, I don't have anything left to learn from them. This was a real shock. I think I'd always assumed that there would be something new to learn from C level graded learner materials. Now I'm starting to think that unless I'm listening to philosophy lectures or super mumbly TV shows with heavy regional accents, I'm not even trying any more.

And in an odd way, I seem to have lost some of the thrill out of listening as an activity. Listening was always the skill I valued the most, and I would feel an actual buzz as my brain processed what it was hearing and gave it meaning. That buzz has gone now, at least for German, and I miss it. Now, the only thing that matters is content, I guess. It's like I've reached the stage in the marriage where the lust has gone and it's just as well that this relationship was built on firm foundations and we still have loads of things in common...

There seems to have been a shift in the way that I am processing reading materials too, in terms of what happens when I encounter unknown vocabulary. I've had strategies in place for dealing with vocabulary gaps since before I even started learning German, which I've refined as I became more advanced. Basically, if I can't use a dictionary, or can't be bothered too, for years I've either happily continued accepting some ambiguity, which I'm able to do without losing the thread of meaning overall, or slowed right down to consciously figure out the meaning from context. Except now, more often than not, I'm finding that I am rapidly and unconsciously figuring out the meaning from context - and when I realised I was doing this it felt really weird - I've developed a new reading skill/strategy without even trying and without even realising it was possible. Maybe this is the final key when it comes to using extensive reading to unlock a large vocabulary?

Sadly my productive skills don't feel like they've progressed at all, at least not since I hit C1, and I don't really know what to do about that.

[tungemål]

Wow - so your German listening skills are so good that there is no challenge anymore? Congratulations! I don't think I am there even in English, as I tend to lose odd sentences in movies where they don't always speak clearly. My German listening level is slightly lower than that.

How many hours of listening would you say it took to get there?

As for production - you could do like me and write essays on different topics, and then have them corrected. I think that is the ultimate test of mastery.

[gsbod]

How many hours of listening would you say it took to get there?

By now it's impossible to give accurate data on this, at least in hours. Going back to the start of this log in the middle of 2015, I had just finished an A2.1 level course and was already watching TV shows and listening to Deutschlandfunk. So I can say I've had regular listening practice (maybe averaging 1-2 hours a week, who knows) for at least 5 years. I suspect the years are more important than the hours, to be honest.

[gsbod]

I've just finished unit 4 in Nos Vemos. The course is structured so that every 4th unit is a kind of revision chapter, so it's much shorter than the normal chapters. In the coursebook it covers a bit of "learning how to learn" which for me, by now, is rather unnecessary but at least it meant I could skip through it fairly quickly. In the workbook, it presents a short test covering grammar/structures, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and writing, presumably as a kind of stepping stone towards the requirements of the DELE or similar, which is a nice way of rounding off a segment of study. I guess this means that I'm now, just over 2 months since I started, 33% of the way to A1. Woohoo!

[gsbod]

I have some time off work this week. It's going to be a staycation, since even if I was permitted to travel somewhere and stay the night, there's barely any point with all the other restrictions in place. But I reached the point where I just really needed some time off work, so right now I am still very much in a relaxed holiday mood and genuinely looking forward to a week of not doing very much beyond catching up on sleep and, hopefully, some reading.

I'm really starting to enjoy Spanish now. I've taken a little break from Nos vemos, because I had too many new Anki cards generated from my last couple of studying sessions so wanted to get up to date with those before adding any new material. I find it's best if I stick to the default maximum of 20 new cards a day. I'm ok with leaving it a few days between adding the card and reviewing it for the first time, but if this extends to leaving it a week or more, it makes the reviews much more difficult as I'll have forgotten the original context.

So while I waited for the pile of new cards to shrink a bit, I started working with a Lernkrimi Hörbuch, El sacrificio, which I picked up one time in Dussmann (you know you're a language nerd when you visit a bookshop while on holiday in Germany and buy learning materials for beginner Spanish). It's at the A1 level but assumes you've already covered most of the grammar for this level, which I haven't yet, but it was nice to use my detective skills and knowledge of other languages to figure out what was going on. I couldn't have done this a month or two ago, but I've got enough knowledge of the absolute basics to hang the rest on. Also, the text is deliberately written in really simple Spanish, with some vocabulary and usage notes in German. So I've now got an idea of what the perfect tense looks like (auxilliary verb + past participle), I've noted that you can use "ir a" + infinitive to talk about the future in the same way you can with aller + infinitive in French, and I'm assuming "tener que" means "to have to". The book also introduces the imperfect tense as something new to be learned, complete with explanations in German, so I get to level up even more.

As a general rule, I'm not a big fan of taking an inductive approach to learning languages, as I find it's more time efficient to have the explanations up front and I don't think the effort of figuring things out helps me to remember things anyway, although I appreciate other learners are different in this respect. However, discovering already that I can make some quick and easy inferences based on my knowledge of other languages is a genuine time saver, at least as far as comprehension is concerned. Obviously the production of correct Spanish will take a bit more deliberate training, but I'll get there.

I also did another review of the two other Spanish learning books I own, the Vocabulario A1-A2 book from Anaya and the Gramática del uso de español A1-A2 but I think I'll need to study a bit more through Nos Vemos before these will be of use to me, since there's still too much unknown vocabulary involved at the moment.

Looking ahead over the next 4 chapters of Nos vemos (i.e. 3 main chapters and 1 revision chapter), I'll be covering a lot of important grammar stuff, including several more verbs in the present tense, direct and indirect object pronouns, and the perfect tense. And the very next chapter is all about food, one of my favourite subjects. I'm quite excited.

[gsbod]

Yesterday I watched the film Magical Mystery oder: Die Rückkehr des Karl Schmidt on DVD. Last time I saw it was just after it came out, in a packed theatre at the Filmtheater am Friedrichshain in Berlin. Everyone loved it so much there was even a round of applause at the end.

The basic premise is that Karl Schmidt, formerly involved in the early days of the techno scene, is now recovering from a possibly drug-induced nervous breakdown in Altona, when he bumps into one of his old acquaintances and is persuaded to be the driver/organiser for a group of techno DJs doing a tour of Germany in a minibus - since he's had to give up the drugs, he can be counted on to stay sober and keep everything under control.

It wasn't quite as atmospheric watching it on DVD in my living room, but what was left was plenty of 90s nostalgia, a few good jokes, and an unusually positive portrayal of living with mental illness.

[gsbod]

That was a wonderfully unproductive staycation. Once I'd made peace with the fact that there wasn't much I could do in my time off, thanks to ongoing COVID restrictions and some pretty foul weather, it actually took away a lot of pressure. Normally I feel like I have to make the most of my time off and feel guilty if I don't, which can make a holiday at home somewhat stressful. This time it felt like I had permission to not be productive, or active, or stick to any routines, and instead to wallow into a level of guiltless laziness I haven't enjoyed since my late teens. It was nice. And now I feel rested and ready to get back to my normal working life. So it was a holiday success, of sorts.

One thing I did do this week was get properly hooked on Dark on Netflix. I started again from the beginning (I was halfway through Season 1 to start with) and got my husband to start watching it with me from the beginning so he could be hooked too. His German is around B2, so I'm sure it did him some good. We watched it mostly without subtitles, although there were a couple of scenes with an important plot reveal where I had to rewind and watch with German subs just to make sure I understood correctly. I also made sure to check in with my husband regularly to make sure he'd understood the important bits and explain what he'd missed where needed.

The plot is quite complex, but not impossibly so, you just need to make sure you're paying attention, and if you do it's really satisfying. So many of these big name science fiction TV shows start with some kind of interesting quasi-philosophical premise that isn't satisfactorily developed and concluded due to the uncertainty of how long the series will run. I understand that Dark was already planned as a 3 season show and really delivered in terms of developing a complex plot and then tying everything together satisfactorily at the end, at least if you are willing to suspend disbelief and accept the pseudo-scientific "rules" of its world (but isn't that necessary for all fiction?).

Thanks to bingeing Dark I'm now a couple of weeks ahead of where I need to be on the films portion of the Super Challenge. I've also finally finished my first book for the Super Challenge, Elf Tage in Berlin by Håkan Nesser. For the most part it's a pretty sweet book, about a young Swedish man living with a brain injury who is sent on a mission to Berlin by his dying father to find his long lost mother. But towards the end the story takes a bit of a weird turn and I'm not sure what to make of it.

Anyway, next time I'm able to take a trip to Germany, I'm thinking of stopping by Winden. I hear they have an interesting cave system, could be worth exploring...

[gsbod]

As much as I am finding it useful to work with Nos vemos, I think I would struggle to recommend it to other learners. On one level it is reasonably comprehensive and aligns well with expectations for the corresponding CEFR levels. I'm getting what I need from it. But the publishers should have done a much better job.

Part of the problem comes from the fact that it's been adapted from a German base to a monolingual Spanish base, which I've mentioned before. Except it has not so much been adapted, rather it has just been translated, meaning that the instructions and explanations that would originally have been in German are now in a Spanish that is far too complex for a typical A1/A2 student. Also some of the exercises, particularly the pronunciation ones, really only make sense if you assume that the book assumes your native language, and therefore your default point of reference, is German.

The other issue, which is even more unforgivable, are some huge mistakes that have crept in. These are not just simple typos, which even the best books rarely completely avoid. To start with, some of the transcripts have huge chunks which do not match with the audio at all.

And the thing that has triggered my rant today, is an exercise where direct object pronouns are introduced, which asks you to match a statement to a number and then insert the correct pronoun in the statement. I'm assuming the number ought to be a number from a corresponding list of vocabulary, except there is no vocabulary list, or no numbered list at all, there is just a bit of blank space on the page. From the content of the statements in the exercise, it looks like the vocabulary list, if it existed, would include new vocabulary for tableware and cutlery, which you are then incidentally expected to know for another exercise which follows in the exercise book. With a bit of dictionary work, I think I've got the vocabulary I'm supposed to need and have completed the exercises as best I can, but it's so frustrating the way that this error has overcomplicated things.

Another recent ommission was a listening comprehension which introduced the irregular verbs poder and probar, which it turns out follow a similar pattern. Except the explanation only covered the conjugation pattern for poder, there's no mention of probar, but you are again expected to know it in the corresponding exercise in the exercise book. Good job I could figure it out on my own with the help of an online verb conjugator. Grrr.

I hope there aren't any more massive errors, because it's still a long way to the end of A2.

[BalancingAct]

probar's pattern is listed on Page 61 in the textbook, emphasizing the change o -->ue.

It is still a very good book.

[gsbod]

probar's pattern is listed on Page 61 in the textbook, emphasizing the change o -->ue.

It is still a very good book.

Yes but it should have been spelled out in the main text, not just the summary at the end. Actually, given that both issues which triggered my rant are within the same section of the same chapter, I wonder if the editor was just asleep when working through this bit.

And you're right, it is a good book. Or at least, it has all the components that should make it a good book. I think that's why I'm so annoyed with it! If it was just another rubbish language course I'd just drop it and move on, but it's worth it despite the flaws. (Also, I deeply regret not finding out about the original German version before making the purchase).