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

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Caromarlyse
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Re: Dw i'n gwylio Tatort

Postby Caromarlyse » Sun Aug 22, 2021 2:21 pm

Have you worked through Erkundungen C2 yet? I think you, like me, really rate this series. I have the C1 volume and one day (year) I will find the time to work through it - it seems like my idea of fun, I just have other priorities right now, and it might be yours too?! I've seen an advanced French course recently, and the thrust of the rationale behind that course is that at an advanced level you really need to slow down again, question everything (why was a certain structure used here? What would be another word for that one used there? etc). Given that a C2 level textbook exists for German, it might be worth trying it, at least alongside more reading?
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gsbod
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Re: Dw i'n gwylio Tatort

Postby gsbod » Sun Aug 22, 2021 2:52 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
gsbod wrote:Interesting that you both suggested audiobooks here - I'd like to know more about your reasoning for this?
You said listening was what you mostly do, but you would get a vocabulary benefit from reading books. Audio books seems the easiest path between the two.


It's an interesting way to frame the problem. It's not that I want to get a vocabulary benefit from reading books, I just want to get better at reading books and my perception is that vocabulary is the cause of the friction. Whether listening to the books, as opposed to just reading them, would help me learn more vocabulary more quickly is another question, but my gut feeling is I'd do better just reading the books.

Caromarlyse wrote:Have you worked through Erkundungen C2 yet? I think you, like me, really rate this series. I have the C1 volume and one day (year) I will find the time to work through it - it seems like my idea of fun, I just have other priorities right now, and it might be yours too?! I've seen an advanced French course recently, and the thrust of the rationale behind that course is that at an advanced level you really need to slow down again, question everything (why was a certain structure used here? What would be another word for that one used there? etc). Given that a C2 level textbook exists for German, it might be worth trying it, at least alongside more reading?


I've thought about using the C2 Erkundungen book - and also the chapters in the C1 book that I haven't studied. I've also got the Entscheidungen book which is kind of C1/C2 level but with a focus on German in the workplace. I think these would both be good resources to use, but only with other goals in mind - particularly with respect to upgrading my speaking and writing to C2, if I felt this was achievable or desirable, or aiming to pass the Goethe Zertifikat C2. Although if either of these were my goals I think I'd also have to think about engaging a suitable tutor, or at least putting a lot more time into speaking and writing than I do at present. The other textbook that I am really keen to work through once I get into a German textbook mood is the Übungsgrammatik für die Oberstufe published by Hueber.

Where I don't think textbooks would help so much is with reading novels, where the main drag is with the kind of low frequency vocabulary that you'd be unlikely to use yourself (unless you wanted to branch out into writing German fiction), but is still useful to be able to understand. I think the question I have is whether it would be enough for me just to increase the amount and frequency that I read, looking up words when I really need to, or whether I need to approach it like more of a dilligent student, making vocabulary lists and the like.
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coldrainwater
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Re: Dw i'n gwylio Tatort

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Aug 22, 2021 9:55 pm

So I have a specific problem I want to look at, but I don't quite know the solution.


Even though I would add a third voice recommending audiobooks, I fully understand and share your dilemma around it. Since I haven't solved the problem you expressed with audiobooks myself, I might then pick a hybrid approach. My reasoning for betting on audiobooks at your juncture was more to let your advanced listening skills pull your reading along as far and fast as it could, then graduate to a different method.

A few ideas from my own studies: For pure reading, cherry-pick material that provides the richest vocabulary you can find (from any era) and ensure that is the type of voice you want in your longer-term reading repertoire. The trick as I see it is to ensure you can keep a strong pace from reading alone, with a certain richness of vocabulary at every turn of the page. Since pure reading will allow you to select tougher material, don't accept anything less (a case of you are what you [recently] consumed). If you were only able to read a few hundred pages per month like that I would not do it. But if you can muster on the order of say 2k-3k+ (or whatever you consider more significant) pages per month, applied over several months, then I would jump at it.

I would use directly vocabulary study in your case supplementally to ensure you are getting enough new terms each day, but there wouldn't be any explicit reason to go overboard there. Direct vocabulary study is so efficient taken in isolation, that you could devote less than an hour a day and pick up plenty of words (say from a book of synonyms and antonyms with the idea of seeing maximal words per page, most of which you already know but some of which you might not).

For audiobooks, I would consider a couple of approaches, both of which might not appeal. One is to select harder but shorter audiobooks, perhaps in the 1-6 hour range that you could consume in one go. For example, some audiobooks are short enough to consume in a long, slow and uninterrupted Sunday run. Another is to use the solution that Amazon provided, namely Whispersync. A downside to Whispersync is that it isn't available for most books, but when it is, it is nice and allows you a hybrid solution where you at least get some listening exposure via audiobooks and never lose your place, switching to pure reading at a moment's notice and back again depending on circumstance. In theory, at least, this would allow you to read more per unit available time. An upside of the approach is that it is available for German audiobooks, but isn't for many other languages.
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gsbod
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Re: Dw i'n gwylio Tatort

Postby gsbod » Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:04 pm

Following Caromarlyse's suggestion about hitting the Erkundungen books again, I've found myself flicking through my textbooks and at least considering it. I've also pulled back out my copy of Da fehlen mir die Worte, a vocabulary book published by Schubert Verlag which is quite different to most vocabulary books I've seen, in that rather than being organised around lists of words and expressions, it is organised around different approaches and techniques for learning vocabulary.

On reflection, I don't think I'm quite ready to start working with a proper textbook again for the time being (I suspect I'd keep it up for a week or two before it turned into yet another language dabble, all be it with an advanced language) but it's still something to think about.

coldrainwater wrote:A few ideas from my own studies: For pure reading, cherry-pick material that provides the richest vocabulary you can find (from any era) and ensure that is the type of voice you want in your longer-term reading repertoire. The trick as I see it is to ensure you can keep a strong pace from reading alone, with a certain richness of vocabulary at every turn of the page. Since pure reading will allow you to select tougher material, don't accept anything less (a case of you are what you [recently] consumed). If you were only able to read a few hundred pages per month like that I would not do it. But if you can muster on the order of say 2k-3k+ (or whatever you consider more significant) pages per month, applied over several months, then I would jump at it.


I think this, in a way, hits the nail on the head. I'm not sure I could, consistently, manage 2k-3k pages a month. My reading speed is too low, even in my native English, for that. (Although maybe if every time I felt the urge to log onto LLORG I read a page of my book instead, it might add up surprisingly quickly...)

But the core of the idea is there. I just need to keep reading the kind of books I want to read (mainly crime fiction, contemporary literature, and non-fiction history books), which I am perfectly capable of doing even though it is, currently, a bit harder work than reading English, and put a decent enough amount of time into it.
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gsbod
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Re: Dw i'n gwylio Tatort

Postby gsbod » Thu Aug 26, 2021 3:33 pm

Things have stayed reasonably quiet this week at work, in the sense that I'm not always being dragged into video calls and the like (hooray for other people being on holiday), so I listened to a lot of Radio Deutschlandfunk, until I got sick of listening to Radio Deutschlandfunk. I mean it's good quality output, but it's very news heavy, and it seems the better informed I am about current events, the more miserable I feel. So I've been listening to Die Ärzte instead and keeping my listening topped up with the odd nature documentary in the evening from the ZDF and ARD Mediatheks.

I'm also keeping up with some reading in the evenings (although not at the intensity suggested by coldrainwater, maybe I'll have to build up to that!)

Since taking a pause on Welsh, I am finding myself noticing it a lot more. Despite living and working in a bilingual environment, the infrastructure here is such that I don't have to be bilingual myself, so it's always just been something in the background. And now, for the first time, it's starting to bother me that I don't understand it. Again, not sure how I feel about that.
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gsbod
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Re: Und was jetzt?

Postby gsbod » Sat Sep 04, 2021 7:16 pm

I've finished reading Happy birthday Türke by Jakob Arjouni. It's a Krimi set in Frankfurt in the early 1980s. It was written around the time it was set, and it shows (lots of drinking, smoking, and bad attitudes). It's quite gritty, but also at only 170 pages or so, it reaches its conclusion surprisingly quickly. The writer has a knack for being able to describe a scene very completely with just a sentence or so. I can just about remember the 1980s, but I'd forgotten how grim things were back then...
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gsbod
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Re: Und was jetzt?

Postby gsbod » Fri Sep 10, 2021 4:57 pm

You know you're reading German literature (as opposed to mere fiction) because there are no speech marks and sentences tend to be 4-5 lines long.
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Le Baron
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Re: Und was jetzt?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Sep 10, 2021 9:36 pm

gsbod wrote:You know you're reading German literature (as opposed to mere fiction) because there are no speech marks and sentences tend to be 4-5 lines long.

:lol: Too right. And you find yourself having to run backwards to the start of the sentence just to remind yourself how it started.
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einzelne
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Re: Und was jetzt?

Postby einzelne » Fri Sep 10, 2021 11:33 pm

Le Baron wrote:And you find yourself having to run backwards to the start of the sentence just to remind yourself how it started.


It's especially the case when you find the prefix of your verb after 2 or 3 lines! My favorite anecdote about it:

By the way, there is an upper limit to what you can consciously experience as taking place in a single moment: It is almost impossible to experience a musical motif, a rhythmic piece of poetry, or a complex thought that lasts for more than three seconds as a unified temporal gestalt. When I was studying philosophy in Frankfurt, professors typically did not extemporize during their lectures; instead, they read from a manuscript for ninety minutes, firing rounds of excessively long, nested sentences, one after another, at their students. I suspected that these lectures were not aimed at successful communication at all (although they were frequently about it) but that this was a kind of intellectual machismo. (“I am going to demonstrate the inferiority of your intelligence to you by spouting fantastically complex and seemingly endless sentences. They will make your short-term buffer collapse, because you cannot integrate them into a single temporal gestalt anymore. You won’t understand a thing, and you will have to admit that your tunnel is smaller than mine!”)


This is from Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (pp. 36-37)
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gsbod
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Re: Und was jetzt?

Postby gsbod » Sat Sep 11, 2021 4:06 pm

So it was about three weeks ago I thought I had a problem with reading, mainly in relation to vocabulary.

A couple of weeks ago I did a few exercises from Erkundungen B2, made a few stupid grammar mistakes, felt pretty down about it. I also did a couple of exercises from Da fehlen mir die Worte but I didn't keep it up.

But since then I have started reading German books regularly again. Not everyday, but most days, and mostly Krimis (although I have just started something that was nominated for the Deutscher Buchpreis a couple of years ago and I'm also working my way through a recent paper edition of Der Spiegel I managed to pick up from a local shop). I'm also following some of the gossip around the upcoming elections, mainly through the medium of satirical TV shows (each to their own, eh).

And guess what, my reading has improved, without me having to do focused vocabulary work or textbook work or anything like that. A vocabulary gap is still there (which I guess approximately equates to the difference between C1 and C2), but it's no longer getting in the way of me reading comfortably and the range of materials I can read comfortably is also improving.
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