Postby s_allard » Tue Apr 03, 2018 3:58 am
Woche 13 - Ein Fortschrittsbericht
1. This is the final stretch for the exam at the end of next week. I can't say I'm more than cautiously optimistic. The big challenge is going to be written production.
2. As I've said in nearly every progress report, the learning process is becoming more enjoyable than ever. I guess that's only natural. That's what learning a language is all about. What was just a stream of incomprehensible sounds a few months ago now makes sense.
3. What is really even more exciting is to speak and make sense in a way that is somewhat natural. My fundamental goal is to a) sound fluent, i.e. least disfluencies and hesitations in connected speech b) speak grammatically correctly as much as possible and c) talk about simple topics in a natural way.
My approach to this is my core language strategy that I've discussed ad nauseam at the old HTLAL site and a bit on this site before I usually get shouted down by various naysayers. In a nutshell, the idea is to learn to use very well the high-frequency and the high-value grammatical constructions and content words rather than trying to master vast numbers of words. It goes without saying that I think this whole business of having to learn thousands of words to speak a language well is waste of time.
To be more specific, my Excel spreadsheet of German language items that one could probably call word families now contains around 700 items and is growing slowly every day. Right now I'm concentrating on content words, nouns and verbs. The other categories are growing very slowly because the key high-frequency elements have been identified.
A very important category of forms is something I call connectors. These are the words or expression that bind the other words into phrases or sentences. It's a mixed bag of things like als, auch, auf jeden Fall, da, dort, davon, dabei, davon, dass, mal, na ja, noch, oder, sondern, wenn, sobald, obwohl, je nachdem ob, soforn, vor, etc.
At this point I have 50 of these in my spreadsheet. The neat thing is that these forms appear all the time in all forms of speech and writing. They are key to articulating connected speech. But rather than try to learn all of these forms to perfection, I'm concentrating on those that are really very common.
The same strategy applies to all the other categories. Right now I have 200 verbs in my spreadsheet. That's not a lot when one considers that German must have thousands of verbs. But that's enough for my purposes, and in fact I'm working on really mastering a smaller number - 50 to 100 - of the really high-frequency verbs.
4. Something that I've noticed recently how I'm much more attuned to idioms or more complex multi-word units of speech. Just the other day I heard the rather vulgar form Das geht mir an Arsch vorbei meaning I don't give a shit. Not something I intend to use in the exam but nevertheless interesting. One thing I do intend to place in the exam is Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof "I don't understand a thing".
5. Now that this experiment is coming to an end, I starting to think of what next. I'm giving some thought to continuing German to an even higher level because it is so enjoyable. The problem is that I have no need and no use for it. It is really an intellectual pursuit. Russian and Chinese would be far more useful in the sense that I would have opportunities to use them regularly. I'll think about all that later.
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