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

[Brun Ugle]

I think you'll really love Spanish once you get into it. I find it much more logical and much easier to learn than German. For example, the genders are mostly obvious and the plurals are pretty regular. Sometimes people complain about the many verb forms and the irregularities, but I don't find that a problem at all. I like having a verb form for every purpose and I find German to be frustratingly lacking in that area. And for the most part the irregular verbs aren't that difficult to remember. The really irregular ones are so common that you can't help but remember them due to frequent use. And the others usually have only a slight irregularity and there are generally many others with the same irregularity so that it's just another pattern to learn. For example, the many verbs where an e splits under stress to become ie, or an o splits to become ue.

I would recommend the Language Transfer Complete Spanish course too, which you can find on their website for free, or on YouTube or Sound Cloud. It gives a very easy overview of the language and simplifies a lot of the problem areas.

[gsbod]

Thanks for dropping by, Brun Ugle! Funnily enough, I was looking at the Language Transfer course yesterday after seeing the thread about it on here. By looking at, I mean downloading the complete thing and listening to the first couple of tracks... Anyway, I think it looks really good, like a more friendly and informative Michel Thomas. However, I think that if I took it on alongside the other three courses I'm working with, I would feel overloaded, so I'm going to keep it in the bank until I either want to shift my focus to production, or I get bored with anything I'm using right now.

I agree that people seem to make a lot of unnecessary fuss about irregular verbs. Once you've got used to the basics, I find that verb forms are relatively easy to pick up from exposure alone. I'm still too much of a beginner to appreciate the use of tenses in Spanish, I can barely do the present tense right now, but it'll be interesting to see how it goes, since I am more used to studying languages with fewer tenses!

[gsbod]

One of the most unexpected but coolest things about learning German so far is the ease with which I can legally obtain native materials. Plenty of TV shows can be streamed free and legally from the providers with no geo-blocking, ordering DVDs from amazon.de costs about the same (including delivery) as ordering from amazon.co.uk and there is a really good selection of German books, both dead tree and Kindle, on the UK amazon store. I can even occasionally pick up Krimis from a local charity shop! It's enough to make the three noun classes worth dealing with.

I have reached some kind of a milestone, as this week I logged my 100th hour of watching German TV/films. It's a nice round number, but I don't think 100 hours translates into a magic number when it comes to comprehension improvement. I felt a couple of obvious jumps earlier on, since then any improvement has been so gradual as to be imperceptible.

I was ill again last week, and for part of the week before, which has messed up my studying again somewhat. It says something about my current German level that if I feel well enough to read English books or watch English TV I can pretty much do the same with German. So I at least managed to get caught up on the Tintenherz readalong. But concentrating on things and trying to learn things deliberately was pretty much out of the question. A week ago I tried to work through a bit of my B1 textbook and was so frustrated with it that I nearly swore off textbooks completely. Today I went back to it with a considerably clearer head and had to admit that actually, the problem was not with the textbook at all, but rather with me.

As for Spanish, well, naturally I haven't done anything since getting sick. But now I have my voice back and my head back, so it's time to try (yet) again.

[gsbod]

I spent a long weekend in Berlin over Easter. It was really wonderful. I didn't get to practice much speaking beyond tourist basics, unfortunately, but I've loaded up on yet more books and DVDs and have discovered the joys and horrors of German reality TV, much of which is available free and legally online. As trashy as it is, reality TV seems to include a lot of shouted or mumbled, rushed, sometimes careless colloquial language, often without an obvious context, which I have to admit I think would be great listening practice for the kind of real life situations where my listening comprehension sometimes lets me down. I'm not sure how much of it I can really stomach, but hey, I'll give it a go.

I've decided that after all the disruption in my routine over the last 5 or 6 weeks, now would be a good time to review my study approach. I'm in that weird intermediate phase where I'm no longer a beginner and in the right circumstances I can manage quite well in German, but my abilities in various domains are very variable and in a way that is much more fine grained than just being able to say "I'm good at listening but bad at writing so I'm going to practice writing for a bit".

I think a good approach for now would probably be:

Continue working through my Begegnungen B1 textbook
Work through a good grammar book alongside
Consume plentiful amounts of native material, following my interests as I do so

The Begegnungen B1 textbook is well thought out in terms of content and repetition of material, and due to the range of topics covered it helps me to identify holes in my knowledge I didn't know I had, e.g. the last couple of pages I've worked through have covered basic vocabulary needed for job applications - maybe not something I need to be able to use actively right now, but for the future, who knows.

The grammar exercises in Begegnungen are plentiful and generally well thought out, but there are never enough of them. I have been working through the A1/A2 drills in Grammatik Aktiv, but I'm wondering whether to put a pause on that and dive into Die Gelbe Aktuell, which I may have recently picked up in a German bookshop. It's aimed at a more advanced level, but I am definitely good enough to cope and in any case the difficult bits should only stretch me in a good way. It has lengthy explanations in English (since I bought the English edition), which is a nice contrast to the brief German explanations in Begegnungen, and seems to come with a good selection of exercises.

Two textbooks should be just enough, which means I ought to put all the other cool learner materials I've got on hold to give me enough time to follow my interests when it comes to digesting plenty of native material, which is also really important right now. There is just so much German stuff out there which is just so easy to get hold of it can be hard to choose what to read/watch. But that is really a nice problem to have.

I'm also continuing with Spanish, despite all the disruption recently, I've picked up where I left off with Mi Vida Loca, Assimil and Gramática de uso del español A, which I do on rotation (i.e. one resource per day). I've got an extra bit of rotation going on with the grammar book, since the way it is ordered means that it doesn't start dealing with verbs until chapter 41, so I've been using it with two start points because I can't bear to use Assimil alone to deal with the verbs and don't want to wait until I've done 40 chapters to get stuck into ser and estar and all that follows...

Anyway, that's enough from me. Back to work!

[Brun Ugle]

One of the most unexpected but coolest things about learning German so far is the ease with which I can legally obtain native materials. Plenty of TV shows can be streamed free and legally from the providers with no geo-blocking.

Could you give us some links please? I think I'm ready to try a little German TV.

[gsbod]

Official German TV sources which I use:

http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv - I can get Das Erste and the regional channels like WDR, although some individual programmes are geoblocked (like Swiss Tatort grr). I can't get Arte or 3Sat
http://www.zdf.de/ - good for shows like Heute Show
http://www.tvnow.de/ - as much reality TV as you can take
http://www.myspass.de/ - loads of comedy series available on demand

[Hypatia]

Thanks, those links will be v helpful!

[gsbod]

Ich habe noch ein deutsches Buch gelesen! Es war ein Krimi von Nele Neuhaus, Eine Unbeliebte Frau. Es war nicht besonders schwer zu lesen, mit vielen Dialogen und Wiederholungen von Wörtern und Sprichwörtern. Ich finde, dass es ein spannendes Buch ist, mit skandalösen Ereignissen, unfreundlichen Reichen und Pferden. Es erinnert mich an die Bücher von Jilly Cooper nur mit mehr Gewalt und weniger Sex!

Jetzt habe ich 1567 Seiten gelesen. Ich muss nur noch 8433 mehr lesen. Ganz einfach!

[gsbod]

So my German reading has levelled up. It's funny how you can work and work at something and it doesn't feel like you are making much progress and then suddenly the progress all seems to happen at once. In this case, reading has suddenly become so much easier. I bought a copy of Der Spiegel this week and was sat flicking through it, lingering on the articles that attracted my interest much like I sometimes do with The Economist and it just occurred to me that a few weeks ago, I couldn't have done that. There is still much more to learn of course, but now I can actually relax with reading material in German, rather than having to force my brain to engage.

[gsbod]

Ich habe noch ein deutches Buch gelesen. Das Buch ist Taxi von Karen Duve. Es geht um eine zwanzigjährige Frau, die Taxifahrerin in Hamburg in die achtzigerjahre war. Sie fuhr immer die Nachtschicht und ihr Leben ist so dunkel und deprimierend wie die Nacht. Ich fand die Hauptperson sehr frustrierend, denn sie war sehr unglücklich, aber sie war auch zu passiv, etwas dagegen tun zu können. Aber dann habe ich mich an mein Leben vor 10 Jahren erinnert. Damals war ich auch sehr passiv und unglücklich, aber endlich habe ich die Kraft gefunden, schwierige Entscheidungen zu machen und ich wurde glücklicher. Ich denke das ist ein Teil des Prozesses, erwachsen zu werden.