SalzSäule's Multilingual Mess

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SalzSäule
Orange Belt
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Languages: English (N), German (C2), French (?), Czech (Beginner)
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Thu Sep 16, 2021 8:43 pm

german2k01 wrote:What exactly are you studying in Germany I am just curious? As far as the bi-directional method goes, what are you supposed to achieve in the end?


Did you mean German or Germany? I study in England actually (am just finishing my Auslandssemester here), and there I study 'German and Linguistics'. In my final year I picked modules on debating and on 19th-20th C. German Literature. I will do a Masters in Germany, but I am not yet sure in what field :) For linguistics my focusses are on Advanced Phonetics.

The BDT is mostly for beginners, Luca advises against using it to learn beyond B2? I think (or B1). It's meant to be able to enable you to get a deeper understanding of the structure of a language, because when you literally translate you can see the difference between grammars in the respective languages. I'm not sure how much he intends for it to be used for vocab learning, but it certainly doesn't harm it. All the Czech words I learned recently are from these sentences.
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Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

german2k01
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby german2k01 » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:27 pm

I meant Germany I thought you were a foreign student studying linguistics in the German language as part of a degree program.

You can attain the same results through "sentence mining" via Anki. One sentence in your TL in your question field and its corresponding translation in English/NL. This way you can see how grammar structures are formed in your TL.

After having done mass immersion in German over a period of 17 months now I feel that grammar sentences are sticking better through sentence mining and I believe that I am at an intermediate stage in German. It is like walking around the whole forest first then counting trees. Had I started it earlier in the beginning stage, it would have felt like counting trees one by one and then walking around the forest.

Do you use deepL translator or what? In the beginning stage in your target language when you can not make any sense of it - how are you even going to translate a piece of text from your TL into NL?

Thanks for your inputs though.
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SalzSäule
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:07 pm

german2k01 wrote:I meant Germany I thought you were a foreign student studying linguistics in the German language as part of a degree program.

You can attain the same results through "sentence mining" via Anki. One sentence in your TL in your question field and its corresponding translation in English/NL. This way you can see how grammar structures are formed in your TL.

After having done mass immersion in German over a period of 17 months now I feel that grammar sentences are sticking better through sentence mining and I believe that I am at an intermediate stage in German. It is like walking around the whole forest first then counting trees. Had I started it earlier in the beginning stage, it would have felt like counting trees one by one and then walking around the forest.

Do you use deepL translator or what? In the beginning stage in your target language when you can not make any sense of it - how are you even going to translate a piece of text from your TL into NL?

Thanks for your inputs though.


I'm glad you're getting to a point where you're comfortable with the grammar. Regretfully some of my Kommilitonen at uni are still in desperation after four years, and now I say this I don't actually think any of them are particularly comfortable with the grammar. Strange. It's good to find exceptions!

Yes that's true, I could also do it in Anki and I think I'll give it a go. I do prefer to write things down because it's proven to be better for memory. I've always had an on-off relationship with Anki, it's a great tool but at some point I get lazy and then a few weeks later I come back to 1000s of reviews :lol:

Usually I try to use bilingual resources and atm I'm restricted to shorter translations. Czech has lots of sentences on tatoeba.org with English translations which are of great use, and I do actually have an A1-A2 graded Czech reader here at the moment which has German translations I understand. The Assimil I use also has bilingual FR-CZ and I can understand the French 99% of the time so no issues there. I guess an idea would be also to use some Duolingo sentences later in the course.

I would almost definitely not use DeepL to do BDT with Czech. The Czech translations are still quite shakey on there owing to, well, it being Czech :D There are not really many super good online dictionaries out there for Czech (which aren't monolingual) — the DE>CZ dict.cc is quite good at about ~31,000 entries IIRC, and Wiktionary is slightly better at about ~35,000, but I do remember it being an issue when I did a Czech module years ago.
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Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

SalzSäule
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Fri Sep 17, 2021 8:29 pm

Been very relaxed day, I've mostly just been reading through a book with a collection of words from Grimm's Wörterbuch, with the occasional TV watching and song listening here and there. Reading and listening skills are feeling '100 emoji' today. French and Czech have really not happened :(

Having another one of those days where I just feel awful about my speaking skills. I lit. know they're not that bad and yet when I speak I just seem to forget so many things. I kept saying 'schwierig' and was like why am I repeating the same wordddd I should be using a synonym and I just drew a blank. And I mean part of it is because I do not practice it anywhere near enough, but I'm not sure what I should talk about to practice it. It would just seem boring.

I'm sure by tomorrow my confidence on the language will have done a total 360 again though.
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Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

SalzSäule
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Posts: 106
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Sat Sep 18, 2021 6:38 pm

So I tried to do some experimenting today to see if there was a way to improve word recollection (in German). Because it's my most developed language I normally remember relatively easily, but I wanted to see if it could be improved.

I took 30 words and grouped them into 6 diff. learning aproaches. I tried i) Flashcard w/ picture, ii) Flaschard w/ picture and trans., iii) pure visualisation and attaching words to memories of said things, iv) bi-directional translation, v) looking up the words in a corpus and reading various diff. contexts, and vi) simply trying to create my own sentences with the words. I dedicated 1min per word.

And... almost no difference. I remembered all of the words, with the only noticeable difficulty occuring with the visualisation attempt (iii) with 'Abrede' (accord, understanding veraltet). I also noticed that bi-directional traslation (iv) was, unsurprisingly, the least vivid method, i.e. it took me longer to visualise a concept associated with the word, but it was at the same time the one where I answered successfully the quickest.

Conclusion: no idea. I think if I combine BDT with another method it should be the most effective, but I will try this out on a different language instead. And I will come back in a week or two to see if I can recall the words again.

In case anyone's wondering, the other words I learnt were: unsittliche Entblößung (indecent exposure), verworfen (hier: overruled), kurzschließen (to hot wire), blumig (florid), Knalltüte (type of fold, when you blow up a bag and bang it, or a twirp/loser), schwärmen (hier: daydream), Dachstuhl (roof timbering/frame), Senkrechtstarter (whizz-kid, up'n'coming), Weberknecht (daddy long legs, harvester spider), Vermächtnis (legacy), schreibungsabhängig (case-sensitive), ersprießlich (pleasant or fruitful, beneficial), Windspiel (windchimes), Kurbel (crank... i always forget this word), mimosenhaft (over-sensitive), Augentäuschung (optical illusion, again, always forget), meucheln (murder, assassinate), Ausbeute (yield, haul), Schräglage (tilted position, in-/decline), minderbemittelt (less well off), schroff (rugged jagged coarse etc. also fig.), Luftzufuhr (air supply), Hörensagen (hearsay), Fimmel (fad, craze), pillepalle (easy-peasy u. ä.), Notgroschen (nest-egg), Ansinnen (imposition), tadellos (impeccable), Siebensachen (belongings).

I also watched some more films in German, read and listened to some more of Kafka, did a little bit of Czech duolingo and writing, and caught up on Lingvist with French.

Oh what was also nice though, was that I had to scroll through my many bookmarks to find some words for the experiment and in doing so I realised I actually have learnt quite a few per adventure and could delete them.
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Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

german2k01
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby german2k01 » Sat Sep 18, 2021 7:02 pm

I have read 3 novels of Kafka and looking at your list of words I think he will be taking inspiration from you. :D

Not one word I recognized in the list. :D

I have a follow-up question. How many books have you read in German to this date? Just wanna see how a variety of authors you have touched upon. Sebestian Fitzek is my favorite German author and I am currently reading his novels.
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SalzSäule
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Sat Sep 18, 2021 8:33 pm

german2k01 wrote:I have read 3 novels of Kafka and looking at your list of words I think he will be taking inspiration from you. :D

Not one word I recognized in the list. :D

I have a follow-up question. How many books have you read in German to this date? Just wanna see how a variety of authors you have touched upon. Sebestian Fitzek is my favorite German author and I am currently reading his novels.


:lol: :lol: :lol: Most of these are really just words where I thought "oh I don't know how to say that in German" and then bookmarked. I'm trying to close as many lexical gaps as I can really.

And I have got to C2 and lacked these words so it really goes to show it affects us all :D

I am actually not so sure, since I prefer to read newspapers or magazines. I have read through lots of poems (I am not so sure by which authors, it was from a collection of love poems) as well.

For works I have read five by Kafka (Das Urteil, Die Verwandlung, Die kaiserliche Botschaft, Ein plötzlicher Spaziergang, Brief an den Vater and I read like 20 pages of Der Prozeß before... :oops: ). I read Dürrenmatt's der Besuch der alten Dame. I have read Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra and I tried to read Jenseits von Gut und Böse but the man is so egoistical. I have read a considerable amount of Faust by Goethe but for some reason this work above all I still find too challenging and abandon. One of my university professors also insists that we've all read some Brecht, so I guess at some point I did?? But I do not recall this at all.

For the module I will have to also read Der geteilte Himmel by Wolf, Das dreißigste Jahr by Bachmann (and I think we read some of her work wayyy back at the beginning), Der kaukasische Kreidekreis by Brecht and one other novel iirc "Tauben fliegen auf".

In der Oberstufe I chose to do the topics of film and music, so I have not read as many German novels as the average learner I think.

I do know of Sebestian Fitzek, but only because he had a board game made based on his book :lol: crime is not so much my thing.
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Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

DaveAgain
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Sep 19, 2021 7:56 am

SalzSäule wrote:The BDT is mostly for beginners, Luca advises against using it to learn beyond B2? I think (or B1). It's meant to be able to enable you to get a deeper understanding of the structure of a language, because when you literally translate you can see the difference between grammars in the respective languages. I'm not sure how much he intends for it to be used for vocab learning, but it certainly doesn't harm it. All the Czech words I learned recently are from these sentences.
In the past BDT has been combined with rhetorical analysis of the text.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 4ddba35ab3
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SalzSäule
Orange Belt
Posts: 106
Joined: Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:17 pm
Languages: English (N), German (C2), French (?), Czech (Beginner)
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Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Sun Sep 19, 2021 12:08 pm

Been digitalising some more flashcards today. I have about 100 left (and many of those have 2-3 diff. terms on them) to go, I just wanna sleep.

I am determined to take Don Quixote back to England so I am trying to fit it into a jacket pocket and hope ryanair dont notice :|

Will either be reading more of Kafka later or more of one of the French books I have to finish.
1 x
Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.

SalzSäule
Orange Belt
Posts: 106
Joined: Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:17 pm
Languages: English (N), German (C2), French (?), Czech (Beginner)
x 352

Re: SalzSäule's German Log

Postby SalzSäule » Sun Sep 19, 2021 7:30 pm

Am on the verge of finishing "Brief an den Vater". Hallelujah! Now to re-read it and make notes and highlight the words I was like ? to...

And of course I've now started reading Der Prozeß by Kafka online :lol:.

I also today learned a few obscure words from reddit: die Obviusität (sth obvious), mit Karacho (quickly), and die Krawallbürste (one who revels in causing chaos) (and -brüder = hooligan). I encountered a few more in my book with a collection on peculiar words from Grimm's Wörterbuch, but they are all incredibly obsolete so I make no effort to remember them at all.

I am about to do Czech Duolingo again so I don't, again, give up on this language, again.
3 x
Da seufzt der Tropf im Purpur unter der unabwälzbaren Last seiner armseligen Individualität; während der Hochbegabte die ödeste Umgebung mit seinen Gedanken bevölkert und belebt.


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