Mostly German and some Japanese log

[tacerto1018]

Another busy week. Between school work, work work, and my wife not feeling well this week, I had little time to dedicate to my German, but I surprisingly did more than both the previous weeks. I am going to stat to watch classic movies from all different countries and will be watching some German films as well. This will be some additional practice that I will be able to get in the ways of listening. I haven't been doing as much immersion stuff as I would like to, but I honestly don't think I have enough time at the current moment.

Things are going well at the linguistic level, however; I am starting to have 'din in the head', as Krashen puts it, that are repeats of my Assimil lessons, a sentence or an expression here or there that I find myself repeating throughout the day. Pimsleur has been going well, too. My ability to recall the backwards-from-English number system has been easier and easier as I have been practicing and can recall them more quickly.

Wanikani has been lagging, I have missed a few days and need to catch up. Other than that, not much to report.

[tacerto1018]

Two days this past week were without any practice. I recently bought a Kindle 5th edition this week to use t o read more. I figure reading will give me more vocabulary exposure in French, and I already see an improvement in my comprehension, understanding absolutely every word being spoken and not just 95-98%. But I digress, here we're talking about German! I put the Kindle interface into German so I get some exposure to German instructions, and have already gotten used it this way. I say this because although I had some days with no active study, I am still being exposed to the language.

Of course school gets in the way, but I am dedicating average 4 hours a week to formal German studying and I am noticing that words to sentences that were difficult to pronounce a few months ago are becoming more and more natural to say. My tongue (and glottis for that matter) have been able to wrap around the German sounds. I am at around lesson 26 in Assimil, almost completed the 2nd A2 section of Deutsche Welle, and have almost completed the German 1 of Pimsleur. Overall, feeling good about my process!

What I have been learning in my Master's program about first and second language acquisition and classroom techniques for learning can be applied to all of my auto-didactic learning, as well. And marking down what I am doing each week and recording it here has made a tremendous difference in my accountability (despite me writing this post 2 days later than usual).

I have also rekindled an old interest in cinema so I will be being exposed to more German through some movies that are on my list.

[tacerto1018]

This past week was the one during which I did the least amount of German so far. I could not dedicate that much time to my studies, but what I could do this way was very productive. I spend quite a bit of time in the 3rd review of Assimil going over the declension system and doing my best understand that. I have studied Russian in the past so the concept of declensions is not totally foreign to me, it's just a matter of memorizing the endings and what declines, whether it be the article + noun or just the article. I actually think that declensions are quite utilitarian and efficient despite their complexity to learn.

Not too much of an update this week. Wanikani is going sloooooowly, and I am kind of losing track of the last time I did it. I want to dedicate more time their, but I need to just carve out an hour or so to do it.

[tacerto1018]

This past week was good because I've started to move a little outside of the materials and into more native texts. The explosion in Beirut was all delivered to me in German via Euronews and I found myself understanding most of what was written, albeit much was still incomprehensible. I also watched the 1931 movie M and despite some of it being silent there was quite a lot of speech. I counted this in my weekly total because I consider it to be an invaluable part of the learning process, my listening skills need to be tuned! even if it's pre-WWII German. Deutsche Welle is by far the best free resources I've ever used; programs that cost hundreds per month don't even compare to the content that they have. I have found this to be my go to, it's more involved than Pimsleur and less involved than Assimil.
So far so good, I really am enjoying this process. Keeping track by logging my results and making these posts is so motivating and really propels me forward instead of doing much of the same thing without seeing many results.

Poor WaniKani has been left to rot a little the past weeks, I haven't touched it to be honest and I am ashamed! But with grad school and a pregnant wife I need a little down time to just recharge.

[tacerto1018]

So this week was weak. No pun intended. My time spent on German this week was by far the least and my motivation waned. Just over if those weeks, you know? I posted in the general discussion board and got so many good responses from so many people. It's given me a different perspective on the language. And, after having almost given up this week, I will definitely continue to do my German. Watching as much as I can and making my study time more enjoyable.

It's all about rekindling my interest in why I started on the first place and that's the beauty of it, you can see why you started and it all comes rushing back to you. So I thank the forum's community and moderators for being supportive and insightful.

Also, I've officially stopped my subscription to wanikani RIP

[tacerto1018]

This week was a strange one: my motivation waned for the first part of the week and I was very close to abandoning my studies. All the things that I was doing were studying and not really enjoying the language with native materials, e.g. tv shows, media, etc. I took a break from most of my Deutsche Welle, Pimsleur and Assimil studies and watched documentaries and movies instead. This is where my motivation waxed back on, just like Mr Miyagi taught us. I was thrilled to be consuming native material, albeit not understanding THAT much, I was refreshing my motivation for German.

I watched Machst Du Kein Sorgen which is honestly such a lousy name for such an intense interesting movie. It talks about a German teenager who gets radicalized over the internet and joins ISIS in Syria in 2014 and the extreme effects of this on his family. So Don't worry! is really such a poor name for a movie with such intensity. This was my first modern movie that I watched in German. I highly recommend it, it's on ARTE.

At the beginning of the week, I watched some ARTE documentaries about cold-water sharks and I found myself being able to follow. I also took a walk in the park to enjoy the weather and I did some German Pimsleur during that time.

Moving right along.

[tacerto1018]

This log is misnamed, but I guess it doesn't matter because I said SOME Japanese. I wasn't technically lying

German is fun. I have to say the more I get the more I love it. It's such an interesting language. And it opens up at least 5 more countries in central-western Europe that I want to visit, maybe convince the wife to move to after the baby is born
This being said, I didn't do much formal studying this week, it was mostly Clozemaster and various other news and video related stuff. I got some Deutsche Welle in in the evenings but I did no Assimil nor Pimsleur. It's an interesting journey for me so far in this respect because all of what I have done with other languages (sauf French) in the past was heavily reliant on Assimil. I don't think of it as a crutch, I genuinely get excited about the books and visit the website at least twice a week to tease myself about buying some other books. However, I think that naturally working through the levels of learning with TV and reading and exposure has been a kind of freeing experience in that I am not required to do one thing in a sense, but I am free to vary my learning.

At any rate, I'm back on the German Zug.

[tacerto1018]

My Excel sheet keeps getting longer and longer! I'm proud of myself thus far for having logged as long as I have. I've done it every week for 10 weeks now, this is not all of my learning; I first did 30 minutes of Harry Potter every day for 30 days so I'm at about 15 weeks of learning, which is, funnily enough, the EXACT same amount of time my wife has been pregnant. SO my pregnancy project is learning German lol.

This week is the week I didn't heed the warning of one of the poster's on this thread and went straight into Dark. What a f****ing show. I'm totally enamored by the suspense, story-telling and characters. I have been using Language Learning With Netflix for my learning and have watched this show only with German subs after having enabled the hover for translation mode. I use the Chrome extension with some hovered words while watching and this way I can use some of the translations, context clues, and the words I know to watch each episode. So far so good, I have followed the complex storyline and am totally invested in the characters. It's good practice and really fulfilling.

As I mentioned last week, I am really enjoying this type of learning, kind of asynchronous while still keeping track of my logged hours. I feel like I am making good progress and might use Assimil in the coming weeks for a little more structured learning.

Danke, dass ihr meine Beiträge gelesen habt

[golyplot]

How far are you?

Anyway, Netflix created a site just to help watchers keep track of everything going on. You can put in which episode you've watched to, and then it will let you trace the history of characters, items, etc. through the episodes you've watched. Especially useful if you watched the seasons as they came out rather than back to back. It doesn't have everything on it though, sadly.

https://dark.netflix.io/en

[tacerto1018]

How far are you?

Anyway, Netflix created a site just to help watchers keep track of everything going on. You can put in which episode you've watched to, and then it will let you trace the history of characters, items, etc. through the episodes you've watched. Especially useful if you watched the seasons as they came out rather than back to back. It doesn't have everything on it though, sadly.

https://dark.netflix.io/en

Oh cool! That's a great resource. I'm about 10 episodes into the 1st season. Believe it or not, I haven't had much trouble at all with understanding the plot. But I imagine it gets more involved as the story goes on