German B2 next for s_allard

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Tristano
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5141
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby Tristano » Thu Jan 04, 2018 10:33 am

Hi @s_allard,
I'll follow eagerly your log,
I'll tell you more: there is a bookmark in my browser called "s_allard's log".

A combination of multiple factors tells me that I will learn a lot out of it.
To add more to my statement, my approach for my languages, including German, is: "breadth breadth breadth". Completely the opposite! But I have a completely different focus and completely different goals. I focus mostly on passive understanding, and producing is not very important to me. But! I have good reasons to want to do what you aim to do in certain cases like:
- I decide with my family to go to vacation to a place which its language doesn't particularly interest me for its own culture and literature, but it's not exactly popular for its people being fluent speakers of a language I already know (ex: Greece, Indonesia, Croatia).
- I meet someone I want to become friend with and I use the language just for fun but without wanting to actually learning its own vocabulary in depth.
- I decide to go to a polyglot gathering and want to learn a bit of the language of the hosting country :ugeek:

In any case, I wish you to deeply enjoy your process and I'm confident enough that you will reach your goals.
Bis bald!
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s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 08, 2018 4:58 pm

Woche 1 - Ein Fortschrittsbericht

Here are some random observations after the first week of my German fast learning experiment.

1. The first week has been very exciting and even exhilarating, as is often the case with a new project. I was able to maintain a schedule of about 60 minutes a day for 6 out of 7 days. I even had to use a timer to keep from spending more time each day.

2. Much of this first week was spent on finding and organizing the learning resources. I have some textbooks and older materials that I got for free. The Internet has made language learning so much easier. The amount of stuff available is really overwhelming. Google Translate and Deep Learning are fabulous. The one resource that I'm really excited about is Easy German on Youtube. It's exactly what I need in this first phase: real everyday spoken German with transcripts.

3. Things are going pretty much according to plan. I use a Excel spreadsheet to outline the components of the kernel language that I'm working on. Instead of the traditional grammar terminology, I use the following categories:
- units or words for things abstract and real (nouns)
- units that represent other units
- units for actions (verbs)
- units to modify or describe things
- units to modify or describe actions
- logical connectors between units
- multiunit idiomatic expressions
- how to ask questions
- how to give orders
- exclamations and interjections
- word order
- useful units for interacting with other speakers.

4. As I build up the inventory of the most useful or common items in each of these categories, I'm starting to collect sample phrases that I'll put into some sort of SRS. A typical examples are: Worüber reden wir heute? (What are we going to talk about today?) and Los geht's! (Let's go!)

5. I have pretty much a complete inventory of the logical connectors (now I'm at 30) and some initial understanding of how they work as in Das ist doch interessant was er da sagt. (What he says is really interesting.)

6. When I'm listening in this phase I concentrate on hearing the structure of the sentences as defined by the logical connectors. I can't really understand much but I'm starting to see how everything works.

7. Using Audacity, I'm spending quite a bit of time working on my phonetics and ear training. I doing exactly what I've always written about: lots of listening and speaking repetition with and without the transcripts.

8. As expected, there's a huge difference between spontaneous spoken German and the formal written language. Right now I'm concentrating on the informal spoken language to be able to start speaking as soon as possible.

9. For the big challenge of mastering the noun case system, the strategy I am using is to learn the nouns immediately in the context of various case variations. I'll come back to this in another post.

10. Another big challenge is mastering the verb conjugation system. Here I'm building an inventory of the most common verbs. The initial goal is around 100. Right now I'm at 50 verbs that I know pretty well. I'm learning each verb as a cluster of its main forms.

11. In all this, memorization is extremely important. But I must stress that for me I'm not memorizing words or forms, I'm memorizing forms of meaning. I therefore stress memorizing whole phrases or sentences. Everything just naturally fits together.
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s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 15, 2018 5:22 pm

Woche 2 - Ein Fortschrittsbericht

1. At the end of my second week of German, I'm even more excited by my progress so far. Things are going according to plan or even better. I've found that the best time to study is first thing in the morning. I set my timer for 60 minutes but I tend to go on for another 15 minutes. Something like 90 minutes would probably be ideal for me. I also find that maintaining an absolute daily schedule is hard to do.

2. I'm really loving the Easy German videos. I've put a few into Audacity and I'm copying the subtitles into my own transcripts. I'm coming to the conclusion that about 5 minutes is a good length. This way I can have many different voices and speaking styles. The transcription process is very long because I'm studying everything as I go along and putting units into my core words database in Excel. For example, at this moment I have 43 verb modifiers or adverbs and 32 connectors. I'm quickly getting a sense of what is really commonly used in the spoken language.

3. I've really been concentrating on the spoken language. The interesting thing is that I'm beginning to parse spoken German quite well. I can now kind of visualize what is being said even though I don't understand much.

4. In terms of specific grammar study, I'm looking at how to best deal with the case system and the verbs. For the case system, I try to learn the nouns always in the context of a prepositional phrase. So I learn die Erde and die Straße with auf der Erde and auf der Straße.

For the verbs, right now I'm concentrating on key auxiliary verbs such as werden, haben and sein. I'm also looking at what conjugated forms are most common. I already see the basic patterns that are quite straight-forward.

5. Although I find things are going well and pretty much according to plan, I must say that the amount of memorization is huge. It's not just memorizing a bunch of words; it's also learning how to use them.
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Xmmm
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby Xmmm » Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:11 pm

Do you count anki reviews as part of the study time? You have a limit of 150 study hours, but wouldn't learning 3000 words take something like 100 hours?
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 15, 2018 7:55 pm

Xmmm wrote:Do you count anki reviews as part of the study time? You have a limit of 150 study hours, but wouldn't learning 3000 words take something like 100 hours?

I haven't given any thought about this because I'm not using Anki yet. We'll see in a week or two.
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s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:50 pm

Woche 3 - Ein Fortschrittsbericht

1. I'm slogging away the best I can. This week I didn't touch German for two whole days. It's really important to keep the momentum going.

2. Making the transcriptions even from something like Easy German is taking way much more time than I expected because I'm studying everything as I go along. I'll probably reduce the length of the recordings to around 4 minutes in order to have more voices and situations.

3. The wonderful thing about Easy German is that it gives a good sense of how to interact in German. I'm really struck by the many disfluencies - transcribed as ähm - in connected speech. I believe this is important because it means that when I start speaking, I can use these pauses as moments to collect my thoughts and form my sentences rather than attempting to come up with perfect phrases in one shot.

4. With all these hours of listening, I'm beginning to get a better idea of what units are important and commonly used. Interestingly, I notice that I'm starting to get quite a good gist of certain recordings where I don't have a transcripts.

5. I've started making flashcards in a little notebook for the time being. My first entry from Easy German is: - Wie fängt man an, Deutsch zu lernen ? - Das is eine sehr gute Frage.

6. I saw a great deal (50% off) and signed up for a month of unlimited German 30-minute classes over Skype with one on one tutors from a company called Albert Learning.
https://www.albert-learning.com/en/
I have my doubts about this whole thing; it's too good to be true. I think there's a catch somewhere. After poking around the Internet I got the impression that they don't always use actual native speakers living in the country of the language but rather people living in low-wage countries.
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aravinda
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby aravinda » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:31 am

I'm following your experiment with great interest and wish you good luck.
By the way, is there a specific reason for using your own terminology for word classes? Just curious.
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s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 29, 2018 1:16 pm

aravinda wrote:I'm following your experiment with great interest and wish you good luck.
By the way, is there a specific reason for using your own terminology for word classes? Just curious.

It's not a big thing; it's just that I'm trying to move away from the usual traditional grammatical terminology that I think is not always helpful.
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s_allard
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby s_allard » Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:14 pm

Woche 4 - Ein Fortschrittsbericht

1. One third of the way there and the trip is exciting as ever. Basically I've spent this first month just working my way intensively through a bunch of Easy German videos that come with transcripts.

2. Just yesterday I came across two Easy German videos with interviews of well-known hyperpolyglots Luca Lamparello and Alex Rawlings. Awesome proficiency. It made me think once again of my contention that you either speak a language well or just don't bother. I'm not saying that you have to speak like a native, but I don't want to mangle a language. That has always been the foundation of my idea that it's best to concentrate on using fewer items really well than a lot poorly.

3. Working with the Easy German videos is providing a very good foundation for understanding and speaking informal conversational German. By now I'm getting a good sense of word order and the most common grammatical structures. I love all those very common little words like gar, gerne, ganz, jetzt, auch, oder, na ja, nee, etc. that keep the conversation going. The one really intriguing word is mal that seems to be in constant use, and I don't really understand why.

4. As much as I enjoy this informal German, I realize that I have to move on to the more formal spoken and written language. This will be the next big push plus some deliberate grammar work.

5. A short comment about this so-called cognate discount. I know that there are many things in common between English and German. As much as this probably helps, I also feel these resemblances can be a source of confusion. Things like wie, wer, wenn, weil have been throwing me off.

6. I must mention a fabulous dictionary that has been a game-changer for me:
https://www.dict.cc/
It's especially valuable because it provides a lot of collocations. I use it constantly.

7. I'm starting to think how to best use the 30-day unlimited tutoring service that I signed up for. I'm going into this with an open mind but I have serious doubts.

8. My Excel spreadsheet for tracking my core language units is coming along nicely. I have to set up a formula to add up all the units. Right now for example I'm at 79 verbs. It doesn't sound like a lot but I can see that some are used a lot.

9. I'm eyeing some deliberate work on the case system. Right now I'm picking it up as I go along especially following the very common prepositions für, auf, bei and zu.

10. A final word: I can't stress enough the value of repetition. After seeing and hearing things many times, things just start to click.
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Axon
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
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Re: German B2 next for s_allard

Postby Axon » Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:57 pm

I love reading this because Easy German was exactly what I started with! It's really unparalleled in quality. I had a few favorites that I'm sure I watched fifty times or more, and it was great over the course of a few years to see them go from 0% to 100% comprehension. If you haven't yet, check out their earlier videos (numbers 1-50) because they have different hosts and a different feel compared to the later ones, in my opinion.
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