Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

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Khayyam
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Sun May 15, 2022 9:39 am

I try so hard to resist video games, but once in a blue moon ich erliege, and well, The Talos Principle, which has been tempting me for over five years, was only four dollars on Steam. I'm only human. (Lustiger Ausdruck im Kontext des Spiels. Du wirst wissen, was ich meine, wenn du es gespielt hast.)

Of course I'm playing in German, and right off the bat, I get a new German challenge: try to read two texts at once. There are captions on the bottom and a text in the upper left giving me status updates about a fictional computer system, and trying to keep up with both is a bit of a workout.

The vocab when you start typing on the terminal in the game is tough! It's surprisingly fun to learn the German words for various IT things. (Zwischengespeichert means cached. Important stuff, right? Trying to figure this stuff out rather than looking it up right away adds another element of fun head-scratching to this puzzle game.)

Reminder to myself: stay open to trying anything that might help me improve my German. There may be fun and worthwhile things I can't see without jumping in.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby garyb » Mon May 16, 2022 11:02 am

I got back into gaming recently after a break (of 15 years or so!) and I've played a couple of games in Spanish, which I've found has been quite useful for listening and reading practice and includes a lot of repetition (instructions, NPC dialogues, etc.). I'm definitely looking forward to my German being good enough to follow a game. Of course it needs to be enjoyed in moderation, which can be the hard part!
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Thu May 19, 2022 12:17 pm

I don't think I've ever envied people who can walk alone in their own private gardens more than I do right now. It's become clear that simply walking, in a peaceful environment, is more conducive than anything else to my absorption of spoken German. Very hard to find in the city unless I stay up much later than is responsible. This, more than anything else, is making me want to get to the mountains and hike my legs off. I'd prefer a leisurely stroll to a hike, but if hiking is what it takes to move my legs outside where there's no sign of other humans, it's what I'll do. Thank God that at least I live in a very mountainous area.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Nogon » Thu May 19, 2022 4:32 pm

Is there a Botanic Garden in your town? Some which I have visited are very large and there are often few people in the areas a bit away from the entrance and the greenhouses.
Or what about cemeteries? In Stockholm for example there is the Woodland Cemetery which is perfect for long and quite solitary walks.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Fri May 20, 2022 9:14 pm

Nogon wrote:Is there a Botanic Garden in your town? Some which I have visited are very large and there are often few people in the areas a bit away from the entrance and the greenhouses.
Or what about cemeteries? In Stockholm for example there is the Woodland Cemetery which is perfect for long and quite solitary walks.


Those are great ideas. I think I'll try walking in a cemetery this weekend.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Sat May 21, 2022 12:11 am

Okay, wow (deutsche Muttersprachler verwenden diese Woerter manchmal, also ich kann sie verwenden und noch immer behaupten dass ich nur in Deutsch schreibe, oder?)--Computerspiele kann ein grossartiges Mittel sein, um eine Fremdsprache zu lernen. Es ist möglich, dass The Talos Principle meinen Wortschatz genauso aufbaut wie das Buch das ich gerade lese.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Sun May 22, 2022 4:05 pm

My fitness regimen has me standing on one leg with my eyes closed (if you think it sounds easy, try it). Yesterday I happened to be listening to a German Star Wars radio drama while doing it, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to set a goal of doing it for 30 seconds while focusing as hard as possible on some menacing Vader talk. Hey, you've gotta do what motivates you. I'll most likely be doing it by a mountain trail. If other hikers pass by and thinks it looks dorky, at least I'll have the consolation of knowing that they can't hear what's playing in my headphones, and therefore won't know know just how dorky.

Trying to understand people screaming or babbling in German against a background of battle sounds can be extremely frustrating, but the calmer dialogue is mostly what drives the story, so I can miss a lot of the battle dialogue and not lose the main thread. I can often make more sense of the battle scenes if I replay them, preferably multiple times, but it's hard to make myself do it when I know that I can coast through them and not miss the story.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun May 22, 2022 4:24 pm

Khayyam wrote:My fitness regimen has me standing on one leg with my eyes closed (if you think it sounds easy, try it). Yesterday I happened to be listening to a German Star Wars radio drama while doing it, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to set a goal of doing it for 30 seconds while focusing as hard as possible on some menacing Vader talk. Hey, you've gotta do what motivates you. I'll most likely be doing it by a mountain trail. If other hikers pass by and thinks it looks dorky, at least I'll have the consolation of knowing that they can't hear what's playing in my headphones, and therefore won't know know just how dorky.


This is inspiring.

There was a time when I did my martial arts routines while going through both volumes of FSI German.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:15 pm

Current, very flexible routine: reading Der Steppenwolf and listening to Star Wars radio dramas. Kinda ironic: Star Wars is tough and requires me to buckle down, while the ultraheavy, Nietzschean, human-condition-shredding novel is pretty easy.

"Hey, Mom, can I read a Nobel Prize winner that hits you in the stomach like a hundred-pound cannonball?"
"Is your Star Wars homework done?"

Once the current Star Wars trilogy is over (THE THRAWN TRILOGY IS AMAZING AND I'll FIGHT ANYONE WHO SAYS IT'S NOT CANON--ah, sorry, just had to let that out), I'll likely put aside all German-learning projects other than reading the book until I've read every chapter, learned all the new vocab (or at least briefly banked it in short-term memory--that's all you need to do if you're a consistent reader), and listened to the whole audiobook. I'll take my time about it, too, and not try to absorb the book in less-than-ideal environments. Coincidentally, just before I started reading it, I read an article that talked about Nietzsche's scorn for people who pride themselves on reading fast rather than thinking deeply, and how he sometimes deliberately wrote in such a way as to torture the impatient. That primed me to want to be slow and careful, and when the book I happened to pick up turned out to be saturated in Nietzsche--well, I practically wanted to go full Emerson-Thoreau just to read it. It's not feasible to do that, but I have been reading as much of it possible out in nature in places where I'm highly unlikely to encounter other people. I read some sections aloud five to ten times.

And now to turn briefly to the problem, if it is a problem, of my very thick American accent. The most recent episode of Deutsches Geplapper features a native Russian speaker who trained herself to speak German exactly like a native German. I'm not the best person to ask if a German speaker sounds like a native, of course, but the host claimed she sounded 100% German to him, and I certainly couldn't detect a trace of anything else. She talked about the different ways of rolling the R, and how she went to the extreme (well, it seems extreme to me) of sticking a pen in her mouth to tame her tongue. I mean, is speaking perfectly intelligible German with a Russian accent really so bad that you'd wanna go through that? It got me thinking about how much I care that I sound totally American as long I'm easily intelligible, and as of right now my answer is...well, not enough to stick a pen in my mouth. Which is kinda silly if you think about it, because I compulsively chew pens to bits when I read in German. Meh.
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Re: Dan Lernt Deutsch, Take Three! (YouTube Video Practice)

Postby Khayyam » Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:43 am

Finished Steppenwolf. What an acid trip. I've never felt so shaken by a book without knowing what shook me. I was planning to start with Goethe as soon as I finished, but I'll need a breather before I go another round with a German heavyweight.

Vocab wasn't too bad, though. Far easier than the vocab in Harry Potter was when I was a beginner.

Yesterday, I went on a hike and listened to the entire latter half--so, about six hours--of the German translation of The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King. My idea when I set out was to listen with full attention nonstop and hike almost nonstop, maintaining my focus on the book by going on autopilot to drink, eat, put on sunscreen, etc. I did pretty well, I think. Sometime quite soon, I'll do a full day hike and listen to something that's 10 or 12 hours long.

I have some vacation time to use, and I've been just toying with the idea of going to the German-speaking world. I can't speak German very well, but I understand most everything I read and hear, and I believe the little German I can speak would be enough to get me by (if very awkwardly) in almost any situation.

And to consider for a moment the very broad picture of my language-learning aspirations: what if I follow this basic pattern with every language I learn in the future? Spend a couple of years on mass input until I can understand most everything I read and hear, then roll the dice hard by plunging into a country where that language predominates? Hundreds of hours of podcast/storytime bliss, followed by a fun and somewhat insane acid test. Pretty wild and possibly infeasible (I think I use that word too much on this site), but I'll chew on it.
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