Deutsch and magyar

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tungemål
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17672
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby tungemål » Wed May 12, 2021 7:09 pm

Ich gratuliere!
C1 ist ein sehr hohes Niveau. Mein Ziel ist das irgendwann zu schaffen. Ich hätte auch deutsche Freunde brauchen können.
Welche Bücher hast du benutzt?
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Dagane
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Wed May 12, 2021 9:16 pm

tungemål wrote:Ich gratuliere!
C1 ist ein sehr hohes Niveau. Mein Ziel ist das irgendwann zu schaffen. Ich hätte auch deutsche Freunde brauchen können.
Welche Bücher hast du benutzt?

de

Danke schön!

In der Goethe-Instituts Webseite gibt es zwei Prüfungen, dass man herunterladen kann. Das Buch "Prüfungstraining" von Gabi Baier und Roland Dittrich habe ich ser nützlich gefunden. Auf jeden Fall empfehle ich es. Bezüglich der Grammatik habe ich Webseiten mit Aufgaben benutzt, in denen man die Antworten direkt in Lücken schreiben kann.
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Dagane
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Mon May 17, 2021 8:53 pm

hu

Az utóbbi hónapokban nem tanultam túl sokat magyarul, mert "Goethe Zertifikat C1"-et akartam szerezni. Tehát tanultam a német nyelvet. Volt sok munkám is. Ha nem jött volna közbe a munka, talán mindkettő nyelvet egyszerre tanulhattam volna. A német vizsga jól sikerült és most a magyar nyelvben szeretnék javulni.

Szerintem az aktív szókincsem elég nagy, mivel én  legalább 2.400 szót ismerek. Mégsem vagyok elégedetlen a szövegértésemmel, úgyhogy szükségem van arra, hogy sok cikket olvassak és videókat nézzek.
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Dagane
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Tue May 18, 2021 4:51 pm

en

My C1 certificate arrived today and I feel it's the right time to share my plans for the future.

German

Now I've obtained Goethe's C1 certificate and finished my C2 course, I officially consider myself trilingual :shock: :lol:. German goes into the maintenance group along with English. After 6 years of study, this decision appears to me as transcendental, but it will yield few immediate consequences. I won't engage in further classroom courses, but I will continue increasing my vocabulary, watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading on a daily basis. There's still plenty of room for improvement. I will also keep having weekly conversations with my two friends, with whom I have developed a relationship in German even though they are Polish and American :lol:.

Hungarian

I'm back to it. I had largely put it aside since January so that I could focus on the exam (and work too). I'm still using the FSI course and I'm currently in volume 2, lesson 17. I feel I'm at a point where I know enough grammar and vocabulary to get by... But I don't because I need loads of input. This will now be my primary focus. I will however take it easy and not stress about it. There's no rush.

English

Nothing new. English is my work and house language and I am even less excited about improving it since I hold a British passport. I sometimes feel like brushing my pronunciation. I'm currently reading "The Oxford Book of English Verse". XVc poetry poses a challenge but it is still understandable.

Other languages

I may engaged in some short challenges. In January, I drafted a 3-month calendar so that I had an structure to prepare my German exam, and it worked quite well. I looked at it and committed myself to it everyday. I may use the same technique to embark on random monthly challenges. I may study Galician since last year I got B2 and C1 level textbooks. Maybe I use it to improve my reading comprehension in German. Or to study Portuguese. Who knows!

Right, it sounds like I'm doing less than before...

...because I have decided to focus on writing. I've never really wanted to talk much about this on here, but language learning is only one of my interests. I love writing. I mainly write poetry in Spanish and I feel I have not done it enough for the last few years. One of my short stories was selected for publication earlier this year. It will be my first publication in 3 years and it made me think. I consider I should dedicate to writing some of the time I used to spend learning German. I'm no longer afraid of forgetting the language overnight :lol:. I also like hand-drawing (I have even drawn cover pictures for three books) and this is another thing I don't do enough, but I don't want to spread myself too thin by multiplying my goals :lol:.
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Dagane
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Galician (B2?)
Dutch (A1)
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Portuguese (A2?)
French (A1?)
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Sat May 22, 2021 6:46 pm

en

Back in the day I was inspired by Internet polyglots and the old HTLA forum to track my study time towards fluency in German. I now want to share my figures with you.

But first: a couple disclaimers.

Disclaimers

DISCLAIMER 1: I carefully noted every single minute of study and practice until 2019, when I started my first C1 course. I then decided to track my intensive study only as I could already enjoy the language and I didn't feel like studying. It feels like I spent an awful lot of uncounted hours into reading, speaking and watching videos.

DISCLAIMER 2: By the time I tackled German in 2015 I had had a couple forays into the language. I leisurely studied German for a couple months in 2011, but I abandoned it to focus on my university thesis and on learning English afterwards. Late in 2012 I signed up for clases but I abandoned them after 5 months to move to Amsterdam and learn Dutch. My primary focus at the time was still English.

In 2015 I approached German as a Spanish native speaker with a C2 level in English.

My German Journey

2015
- First trip to Germany: I became interested in German
- 104 h 4 min home study (since June)

2016
- Second trip to Germany
- First trip to Austria
- Goethe-Institut access exam: placed at A2.1 / A2.2
- 2 classroom courses - Level: A2
- 137 h 43 min home study
- Anki deck: over 2000 cards

2017
- Third and fourth trip to Germany
- 3 classroom courses - Level: B1
- 137 h 39 m home study
- Anki deck: over 3000 cards

2018
- First trip to Slovenia (where I spoke German)
- 2 classroom courses - Level: B2
- 81 h 28 min home study

2019
- 2 classroom courses - Level: B2 / C1
- 74 h 48 min home study (Jan - Oct)
- 12 h 18 min home study (Nov & Dec) - Intensive only
- Anki deck: over 4000 cards

2020
- Fifth trip to Germany
- 2 classroom courses - Level C1
- 50 h 54 m home study - Intensive only
- Anki deck: over 5000 cards

2021
- 1 classroom course - Level C2
- 60 h 24 min home study (Jan - April) - Intensive only
- Goethe Zertifikat C1 - Obtained!

Conclusions

The above amounts to 663 h 18 m of self study and (less than) 432 h classroom time. The latter will likely be just about 400 h since I missed some classes.

This means I studied a wobbling total of 1063 hours in a little less than 6 years to go from false beginner (I suppose) to somewhere near C2 (I hope), and this figure still does not take into account the many hours I spent enjoying the language since November 2019. I am amazed by my poor records of about half an hour study a week adding up to so much. Except for the preparation to pass my C1 exam, I think I never studied very hard. But I was definitely beharrlich.

So this is it. I haven't done this documenting exercise with any other language and I am unlikely to repeat it. I think it served me to see that learning a language takes time :D.
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Dagane
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Dutch (A1)
Czech (A0)
Portuguese (A2?)
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Sun May 23, 2021 11:26 am

Dagane wrote:This means I studied a wobbling total of 1063 hours in a little less than 6 years to go from false beginner (I suppose) to somewhere near C2 (I hope), and this figure still does not take into account the many hours I spent enjoying the language since November 2019.

en

I should add that I read exactly 30 books in German during my 6 year learning process, ranging from A2 level collections of short stories to Goethe's poetry.

An attempt at counting on the unrecorded time I spent "enjoying the language" between November 2019 and April 2021 would of course be inaccurate, but it would be something like this:
- One year having weekly 60 to 90 min conversations almost every week - 56 hours.
- TV (only Deutschland 83 / 86 / 89 unrecorded: 26 x 45 min.) - 19 hours 30 min.
- Radio: estimated 7 hours along the summer.
- Reading (mainly books): est. 55 h.
- Podcasts and videos: est. 30 h.

I think my estimations for TV watching and speaking are pretty accurate. The others are pure guessing. Anyway, they all make up 167 h 30 min together. Added to the formal (and formally recorded) study time, I see I have spent 1230 hours in contact with German.

I do not know what this means. Estimations for learning a language vary wildly and seem to have a high B2 level as the target while I am somewhere between C1 and C2. According to the estimations I have seen and their rules to count on home study time, I did not need too long a time at all. In my mind, however, the whole process took an awful lot of time and I couldn't help but comparing it against my experience with other languages including English.

Has someone else recorded her/his experience in a similar way?
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Dagane
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Portuguese (A2?)
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Sun May 30, 2021 10:38 am

en

My Hungarian is in bad shape :roll:.

Work, the exams (the language exam but also other exams I had to take during the last year) and life meant I haven't taken Hungarian seriously for the last 5 months. Although I did for about 3 weeks during my Christmas break, I had also done very little during the autumn. The Hungarian people I know noticed I am way less fluent now than in the summer, but they are still amused when I understand things. This is because I never stopped acquiring vocabulary and getting familiar with new grammar rules. Neither takes a lot of time, they only require constancy and oh boy, that I have.

Now I need lots of input, tons and tons of it. I also feel that everything becomes difficult and that I cannot recall rules or words even though I know I should. This probably means I'm hitting myself against the lower intermediate barrier. I need to break through it so that I secure my grip on the language.
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Dagane
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Portuguese (A2?)
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:31 pm

hu

A múlthét óta süt a nap Londonban. Azt emberek azt mondják, hogy a tél túl hosszú volt. A tavasz a télre hasonlított, legalább a fejemen. Bár a télen nem volt boldog, most újra mehetek ki és a barátoimmal találkozhattom. Sok helyett még zárt a covid miatt, példáuk a szinházakat és a mozikat. Viszont az éttermek újra nyítva vannak. De nem ez a fontos. A legfontosabb a jó időjarás!

en

I am not at my best. The sun shines, the summer holidays approach, I am back to the gym and to the pool and I am seeing my friends again. But the winter was long and gloomy and I am still suffering its consequences. I am not used to the lack of things it entailed. Lack of everything I do: sports, travelling, socialising, theatre. The winter was also coincidental with an on-going difficult period at work with more tasks, increased working times and pressure, higher responsabilities and no pay increase for the new financial year. During this period, my goal of passing my German exam was an anchor I used to preserve my sanity. It made me focus. As a side-effect, however, once the exam was done I felt relieved and wanted to move on and onto another thing, perhaps too quickly.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. I kind of feel I am stuck with Hungarian, and the problem is that my level is not as high as it should be to hit that wall. I mean, my experience tells me you start learning a language and there's a point when nothing makes sense anymore until it finally does and bang!, you speak the language. I kind of hoped I would not go through that again but I do. Nothing makes sense. Or it does but I am unable to disentangle whatever I try to say, hear, write or understand the first time round. I wrote no more ranting. Oh well...

A few hard facts then:

- I started to read my first book addressed to natives. Needless to say I find it very hard and I only read about half a page a day, but it helps with vocabulary and grammar and I get the gist of the story.

- I starter to watch documentaries on Youtube where they speak slowly. My listening may be better than my reading, maybe because the vocabulary is more limited.

- I am considering writing a journal in Hungarian with short daily entries to practice vocabulary and grammar and get used to the language, which works in a very different way when compared against the languages I speak and have studied.
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Chung
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Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Chung » Tue Jun 08, 2021 7:24 pm

Dagane wrote:
A few hard facts then:

- I started to read my first book addressed to natives. Needless to say I find it very hard and I only read about half a page a day, but it helps with vocabulary and grammar and I get the gist of the story.

- I starter to watch documentaries on Youtube where they speak slowly. My listening may be better than my reading, maybe because the vocabulary is more limited.

- I am considering writing a journal in Hungarian with short daily entries to practice vocabulary and grammar and get used to the language, which works in a very different way when compared against the languages I speak and have studied.


You'll have ups-and-downs with the language. I don't know whether you still live with a Hungarian or not, but for sure with all of the restrictions over the past year or so learning any living language can really become a lonely struggle since it's often just you and the coursebooks. Online lessons or chats over a webcam aren't the same.

I'm still tending to my Hungarian and here's what I've been doing.

1) I've been writing short dialogues as part of the exercises in "Halló, itt Magyarország!". All chapters in each textbook include a set of exercises where I need to make up short dialogues based on illustrated cues and a model dialogue. I then have a native speaker check my answers to these dialogue exercises. As much as I can sometimes reuse some of the lines from the model dialogues in my answers, I usually need to make up my own sentences and look things up in my English-Hungarian dictionary or grammar reference guide even though I have a certain idea of how I should complete the dialogue based on the illustrated cues. I'm not sure if any of your books offer these kinds of exercises which force you to use conversational Hungarian (even though I'm down to the final chapter in the last volume, I actually don't recommend this series unless you're working with a native speaker and/or already understand basic grammar because its notes on grammar are ridiculously skimpy. The biggest plus of the course is that it tries to improve students' knowledge of Hungarian for everyday life with its exercises and dialogues).

At its most essential, I first get a model dialogue, and then write variations of that dialogue prompted by cues or pictures illustrating situations that are similar enough to the model so that I can reuse certain structures or phrases found in the model dialogue.

2) I spend about 15 minutes every day or two working with FSI Hungarian. This could be just studying the dialogue and grammar notes, or working on 5 or 10 sections for drilling (drilling with between 30 and 50 sentences).

I've split the original audio into smaller tracks so that I have about a dozen tracks per chapter. When it comes to the dialogues, I've edited them on Audacity so that each subsection with built-in pauses has its own MP3 file but the final version with the dialogue being read like a normal conservation is put onto just one MP3 file lasting about 3 minutes. I can handle listening to this version at normal speed, but not when the voice actors drone on with pauses for at least 20 minutes for one dialogue and its new words and phrases.

To take in a dialogue, I first study the English translations (and cover up the Hungarian text), and then listen to the dialogue at normal speed while following only the English translation. On the second pass, I listen to the dialogue again but don't look at any text. On the third pass, I listen to the dialogue but now look at just the Hungarian original. Finally, I listen to the dialogue a fourth time without looking at any text.

I find a combination of listening to the dialogue with and without the text in sight keeps up my interest and has the right combination of testing my aural understanding and also allowing me also to match the speech with the Hungarian text.

For the exercises, I usually do quite OK with the drills for substitution and transformation, but have to think a bit when doing the variation drills. Because these are also pattern drills, I usually pay close attention to the model answer given before each section of variation drills since the English sentences are usually structured similarly to the model English sentence. This means that the Hungarian answer to the model sentence resembles the structure of the other Hungarian sentences in the drill set.

In short, the variation drills are a kind of guided translation drill. It pays to study closely the model sentences given in English and Hungarian, and be sure that you know enough of the basic vocabulary and grammar points of the chapter to be able to provide a Hungarian translation of the given English sentences in a timely way. I find it rewarding to do these drills successfully since these are easier and less frustrating than doing regular translation exercises of a running text, yet they're harder than almost robotic substitution or transformation drills where I need to change only one or two elements of the sentence based on what I see in the example.

3) Lastly, I take in native material when I can. Since I deem myself to still be learning the language (A2? B1? A2-B2 mismatch depending on the skill involved?), I have no shame watching Hungarian videos with subtitles turned on and prefer watching something in Hungarian with Hungarian subtitles as if I were deaf. It's a shame that Hungarian media isn't as strong on this point compared to what I've found for German or even Finnish shows.

I know that I've suggested to you already the show "Szóról szóra magyarul", dual-language articles from Reader's Digest and Garfield comic strips in Hungarian. I've lately found it useful for myself to watch interviews or short monologues given by teachers in addition to reading Garfield comics. There's a ton of free shows and movies in Hungarian on Youtube but they're really meant for natives and the lack of any subtitles makes it frustrating for me to follow after about 10 minutes since I keep failing to understand enough of the content or punchlines.

Here are some possibilities if you're interested in watching Hungarian that's not overly stilted or dumbed-down for learners.

- Hungarian Lessons with Zsuzsi - Most of Zsuzsi's videos are in Hungarian only but they usually have optional subtitles in Hungarian or English. I sometimes like to watch even her grammar lessons even though I know what she's talking about. It's good practice for me to watch her explain some point of Hungarian grammar in Hungarian, figure out what she's saying exactly without any subtitle, and then test my understanding or ability in rapid transcription by watching things again with the Hungarian subtitles.

- Easy Hungarian with Petra - She's a teacher who gives short monologues about various topics - often with optional Hungarian closed captioning. This is handy for improving my listening comprehension.

- Easy Hungarian - You probably know about this series, and I actually don't like it that much because it's sometimes quite hard for me to follow along without the subtitles. However, the content is always interesting enough.

- Hungarian with Sziszi - I like to watch the interviews since the foreigners involved are fluent enough while I can still train my ear by listening to Sziszi, the native speaker. Her video lessons on grammar or vocabulary use mainly English though, so I've watched only a couple of them.

- Hungarian Fairy Tales - I don't watch these often because they're not ideal for my purposes. I prefer that they'd come with optional Hungarian subtitles. These are various fairy tales or bedtime stories narrated in Hungarian but accompanied by hard-coded English subtitles.
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Dagane
Orange Belt
Posts: 172
Joined: Wed Apr 13, 2016 6:08 pm
Location: London, UK
Languages: I regularly use:
Spanish (N)
English (C2)
German (C1+)
Hungarian (A2?)

I formerly studied:
Galician (B2?)
Dutch (A1)
Czech (A0)
Portuguese (A2?)
French (A1?)
x 263

Re: Deutsch and magyar

Postby Dagane » Tue Jun 08, 2021 8:12 pm

Chung wrote:For the exercises, I usually do quite OK with the drills for substitution and transformation, but have to think a bit when doing the variation drills. Because these are also pattern drills, I usually pay close attention to the model answer given before each section of variation drills since the English sentences are usually structured similarly to the model English sentence. This means that the Hungarian answer to the model sentence resembles the structure of the other Hungarian sentences in the drill set.

In short, the variation drills are a kind of guided translation drill. It pays to study closely the model sentences given in English and Hungarian, and be sure that you know enough of the basic vocabulary and grammar points of the chapter to be able to provide a Hungarian translation of the given English sentences in a timely way. I find it rewarding to do these drills successfully since these are easier and less frustrating than doing regular translation exercises of a running text, yet they're harder than almost robotic substitution or transformation drills where I need to change only one or two elements of the sentence based on what I see in the example.
- Hungarian Fairy Tales - I don't watch these often because they're not ideal for my purposes. I prefer that they'd come with optional Hungarian subtitles. These are various fairy tales or bedtime stories narrated in Hungarian but accompanied by hard-coded English subtitles.


Thank you for all the good advice Chung!

The Hungarians I know live in a household I visit often. As mine is a single-person household, I was able to mix with another during the second and third lockdowns in England. However, further restrictions after the summer meant less numerous meetings and less exposure to the language. Also, I haven't always been keen on actively listening, especially at times when I felt stressed at work.

FSI is the only course book I follow. I love the drills, I find them very useful, and I generally don't have any problem with the vocabulary they use. I have however stopped on chapter 17 because I feel that, although I understand the grammar rules so far, they have not yet sunk in and became automatic. The only drills I have often overlooked are the translation drills, the ones without audio meant for writing practice. Maybe I should start doing those from lesson 1! I also have a grammar book with exercises I may start doing.

I know Sziszi! Some times it feels I understand her well and other times I don't get anything :shock: . What can I say, I am still at the early stages of learning. I didn't know the last YouTube channel you mention and it looks promising.

I guess you're right in saying there're ups and downs. I should probably come to terms with it and work towards being up again. It feels that my ability to speak Hungarian has gone down for quite a few months and now it takes a great effort to pull myself up again.
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