CarlyD's 2024 German Reading Challenge--15,000 pages

[CarlyD]

You mentioned a couple of Andre Klein books, but I don't think any are on your initial list of books. He's got at least 12 books in the Dino Lernt Deutsch series, and at least another 5 beginner books in his Baumgartner and Mortimer series, so there are quite a few decent beginner's books available if you want to keep it easy for now. Another author who has a lot of easy German readers is Brian Smith. His "German Easy Reader" series has 3 easy, 1 pre-intermediate, and 3 intermediate books, all with audio you can download for free. The books are quality, and use a carefully restricted vocabulary. I've read the 3 easy readers, and they're unfortunately rather boring. But sometimes the feeling of "Wow, I understand all this!!" trumps a dull story. Since then he's churned out a set of 23 graded readers (mostly A1-A2, a couple B1 and one B2 volume). I have no idea of the quality, but I'll probably try a few of them later this year. The problem for your preferences is all of these books are quite reasonably priced on Kindle, but the paperbacks are a little pricey, although still better value than the traditional little readers like "Elvis in Koln" and "Oh Maria".

I have all of Andre Klein's Dino books (maybe not the last one) and need to start them. I tried the first one way too early, got frustrated and haven't gone back. I could do them now. And I really want to get into his Baumgartner and Mortimer series, but I've look at the preview on Amazon, and still too far beyond me. For now.

Brian Smith. Yes, I have several of his books, and yes the early ones are boring. The one I was reading was a really long story about a family that went to the woods for a picnic and I was honestly hoping for a bear to appear. He's lately come out with a new big series of targeted books--Horror stories, mystery stories, sci-fi stories, etc.. My Sexy and Romantic Stories is one of his. His writing may be great for language learning, but the stories just don't pull me in. But I plan to read all the ones that I have.

I do buy all of my books as paperbacks. I like being able to lightly underline words, or put post-it notes in the book. I do have a few German books on my Kindle and I've yet to be able to figure out how to count pages with them. Most of them I went back to Amazon to see how many pages were in the same book in paperback and then used that number. If I can work that out, there are actually quite a few books available through Kindle Unlimited.

[CarlyD]

Ok, my list of books to be read in my 2nd post was apparently a suggestion, and not a plan. I've now read 5 books and only 2 were on the list. Wer verlor das Geld? actually turned out to be a really good story--I don't know why I was thinking it was going to be boring. Lots of words got underlined, so I'll see how it goes when I look at it again in 6 months or so. I'm hoping that I'll wonder why I underlined them in the first place.

I remember buying Café in Berlin (Andre Klein) when I was barely starting German as everyone said it was the perfect way to start. It took me days to get through the first chapter (2 1/2 pages?), even with all the vocab help. I set it aside in frustration, but dutifully picked up the later books in the series for "someday". Then when I should have later started it, I put it off because Andre had released a workbook to go with the book as a free PDF, and I kept thinking I should do both at the same time. I just picked up the book a couple of days ago and have read the first 5 chapters with barely any problem at all. I don't think I checked the vocab help for more than 1 or 2 words each page. I'll look at the workbook again now too.

[CarlyD]

I started this challenge around Jan. 20th--I didn't write down the exact date. I believe I'll hit 1000 pages by March 1st. Yes, most of these books have been at or only a tiny bit above my level, but I plan to reread everything three times during the challenge with the hopes that I can read much quicker and easier, and with very high comprehension without stopping to look up words.

I kept thinking books would get harder as I go on--and they will--but with the rereading, I now think 15,000 pages should be doable. I hope.

[CarlyD]

So I'm finally seeing something that everyone has already seen before, and posted about, and Ollie Richards has designed his whole business about.

Lots of reading improves comprehension better than vocabulary study or textbook study. I'm at 868 pages and suddenly I'm seeing words that instead of "oh, I saw that on Memrise" is now "oh, that's ___". And it's magical.

I did (most of) Ollie Richards Story Learning course and this didn't happen. I think the problem was that each of his chapters was like 1 1/2 pages long--10 chapters and you haven't read a lot. Obviously, I need lots of pages for it to work. And I'm looking forward to when I start rereading the books I've finished to see how that reinforces it. I had planned on doing that about 6 months in, but now I'm wondering if I should reread some books maybe once a month or something? Maybe selected books that I had a bit of a struggle with.

Now I'm wondering that if instead of going back to Spanish and pulling out the old textbooks and verb books, I should just pull out all the fictions books I collected and finally read all of them? Hmmm.....maybe after I hit 25,000 pages in German.

[CarlyD]

I'm beginning to think that the rating (A1, A2, etc.) given to books for learners are just the whim of the publisher. I just recently finished a book that was so easy (barely A1 level) that I felt guilty adding it to my reading challenge. Then I saw the book was rated A2. Hmmm.....

Right now I'm working on a book that is super hard. It's a bilingual parallel text, so I generally have a piece of heavy paper that I lay over the English side and plug through a paragraph at a time, then check the English if I need to.

So an A1 book I would expect to say--"We drove through the forest."
This book--"We navigated through the trees that lined the forest road, dodging the low hanging branches and catching glimpses of the setting sun as we drove." (Based on what I remember.)
And the rating? A2. So far I haven't made it through an entire sentence without having at least 3 words that were totally unknown to me. Did they rate it down because the English was available? The book is Dracula gegen Manah.

My 2nd book is Der Unfall about a girl that is injured during "protests for injustice" and (currently) has amnesia. Learning lots of words about protests, etc. but there's a glossary in the back so no problems.

[CarlyD]

Updating just so my log doesn't get lost. I'm still working on Dracula gegen Manah. Now his friend Sam is missing and Dracula is having a meeting with all the others--Wolfman, Freddy Kruger, Chucky, etc. Weird, but holding my interest.

I'm also working on Petra reist nach Kalifornien, which is pretty good. She's an exchange student to a high school in Ventura and running into mean girls.

I started the online Babbel a few weeks ago. I got a year for some crazy amazing deal a couple of months ago and then let it sit. It's kind of like Busuu, but I actually like it a lot better. Busuu relied too much on vocabulary recall where they showed you a picture that didn't seem to relate to anything and you were supposed to remember the word. I'll see how far I get with Babbel before I go back to Busuu.

Memrise is doing their big split the end of the month--the "official" courses will stay at Memrise, the rest will go to a Memrise Community website. Still haven't figured out if there will be new community courses allowed--I like them a lot better than the official ones. I'm finally near to finishing my beloved A Journey to Germany and hoping to find something good to replace it with.

Next reading goal is 2000 by the end of April.

Aack! Just saw this on the Memrise Community FAQ:

Q: When will you shut down this new URL? How long do I have to access my community courses?

A: Community courses will live in the new URL at least until the end of 2024

Q: What will happen to my community courses after you shut the new site down?

A: Before we do, we’ll have a way to give you your word lists in a format that allows you to take them, and continue to learn them, somewhere else. After we shut down, they will still exist in this format for you.

So this means that ALL the Memrise courses (there really aren't that many "official" courses) will just be gone, possibly by next year? They've been daily pushing people to pay for MemrisePro for weeks now--and they'll get what?

[Tumlare]

Aack! Just saw this on the Memrise Community FAQ:

Q: When will you shut down this new URL? How long do I have to access my community courses?

A: Community courses will live in the new URL at least until the end of 2024

Q: What will happen to my community courses after you shut the new site down?

A: Before we do, we’ll have a way to give you your word lists in a format that allows you to take them, and continue to learn them, somewhere else. After we shut down, they will still exist in this format for you.

So this means that ALL the Memrise courses (there really aren't that many "official" courses) will just be gone, possibly by next year? They've been daily pushing people to pay for MemrisePro for weeks now--and they'll get what?

I used to really enjoy the Memrise official courses. They weren't good for teaching grammar but they were great for reviewing words and phrases with native audio from a variety of speakers. It was very helpful for me when I was beginning to learn Swedish especially since there aren't that many resources available for it compared to more popular languages like FIGS or Japanese. But in addition to removing the community courses they have changed the official courses as well and locked a large chunk of their most basic lessons behind a paywall (for example the numbers 1-10 or basic pronouns like I or you) which just irritates me. I am not opposed to paying for content--I was a MemrisePro user for quite some time and was interested in re-upping my subscription since I am starting to branch into other languages. But with the recent changes to the official courses and the phase out of the community courses I just don't see the point. I agree with you--what value are they giving?