An opera fan's log - French, German, Italian, etc

[Deinonysus]

I was able to make a deal with Norwegian: I'll spend some time getting my German better, and then I'll start learning Norwegian through German. I ordered Langenscheidt's Norwegisch mit System and it should arrive in around a month. That series seems to be their equivalent to Assimil's Super-Packs. Unlike Assimil's main courses which have a CEFR B2 symbol on the logo, this one has a logo that says "A1-B1". However, I took a look at the preview on Langenscheidt's website and I was very impressed with the production values. Unlike Assimil, it has full color illustrations, and the dialog I started to listen to even had sound effects. Alexander Argüelles speaks very highly of the old-school Langenscheidt materials, so I'm interested to see how good their new stuff is.

The way I see it, getting a language from zero to fluency boils down to basically three steps (this is an assumption because I have never reached fluency in a foreign language):

1. Figure out the basics
2. Massive vocabulary increase
3. Massive extensive use (input and output)

I think the main reason my French has outpaced my German is that English shares so much vocabulary with French, especially advanced vocabulary, that I was able to skip step two and go straight to step 3. In German, I still have a lot of vocabulary to learn before I can enjoy extensive reading without looking things up or missing a lot of information.

I couple of years ago, I used a Memrise course of the 5000 most common German words. I got about 1500 words in, but it was starting to get cumbersome. I was doing so much reviewing that it was hard to find the time to learn new words. I think part of the problem was that it was all words, not just parts of speech, so the formats were all different.

I think what I want to try this time is to make two main Anki decks. One will be adapted from this list of around the 3000 most common Germon nouns, with gender and plural. Unfortunately, this does not have information about which words change with case such as Name or Präsident, so I'll just have to learn that separately.

I also picked up a copy of Barron's 501 German Verbs and I want to adapt that into an Anki deck too. I'm thinking I want to put the Präsens and Präteritum conjugations as well as the Hilfsverb and Partizip. I'll see how it goes.

I also still need to finish making my Anki deck for general noun gender rules. And I should probably make one for the Präpositionen that I mentioned in the last post. That would be the lowest-hanging fruit so I should probably start with those.

I'm also working on Clozemaster but I don't think it's nearly as good for learning new vocabulary as it is for putting vocabulary you already know into context. I'm still early on so I haven't run into any unknown vocabulary yet. Once I get those Anki decks set up, that should be the priority over Clozemaster.

[Deinonysus]

I'm posting this for my future reference:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/1097 ... xplanation

This is a terrific article that someone wrote on the Duolingo forums about German weak nouns, and they say that they covered most of them. This will need to be a fifth Anki deck.

[Deinonysus]

Der Thread über Babylonisch hat mir Lust gegeben, Hebräisch zu lernen. Meistens sind andere Sprachen für mich interessanter als Hebräisch. Viele Leute mögen Hebräisch, weil sie religiös sind. Aber ich bin nicht religiös, so für mich, Hebräisch ist nur eine Sprache, auf die ich mit meinen Eltern sprechen kann. Aber sie ist eine sehr alte und historische Sprache, und wann ich an Babylonisch denke, erinnert das mich daran. Wenn ich bereit bin, Hebräisch wieder zu lernen, vielleicht soll ich an Babylonisch lesen, um mein Interesse zu stärken.

[Deinonysus]

Well, Babylonian has definitely piqued my interest in Hebrew! If it fades by the time I'm ready to work on Hebrew again, I think I'll need to revisit Babylonian.

I didn't end up needing to make an Anki deck for dative vs. accusative prepositions. I just kind of memorized them through use.

We have also been going over a set of important verbs of position. There are pairs of similar words where one means to place something in a certain position, and another one means that something is simply in that position. The action/placement verbs always take the accusative and are all weak (past participle ends in -t), and the position verbs always take the dative and are all strong (past participle ends in -en). English has similar pairs of words, although obviously there is no case difference. For example, you lay (or have laid) something down, but you lie down (or have lain). You set something down (or have set), but you sit down (or have sat).

Here is a chart of the German words, with the past participle in parentheses:

orientation	action	position
lying	legen (gelegt)	liegen (gelegen)
standing	stellen (gestellt)	stehen (gestanden)
sitting	setzen (gesetzt)	sitzen (gesessen)
hanging	hängt (gehängt)	hängt (gehangen)

Note how closely many of the German verbs match up with their English counterparts.

There is also stecken (gesteckt), which is the same for action or position.

Importing my list of ~3000 nouns into Anki provides a technical challenge, because I want to color code the cards by gender. I think that will be my last deck that I work on. The next one should be to finish off the deck of rules for guessing gender. After that, I want to start the verbs off with a list of the 55 essential verbs that Barron's 501 verbs lists, with a lot of grammatical information. Later on that should allow me to use much less information for the remaining 446 verbs.

[Deinonysus]

A few lists that I previously thought should be Anki decks probably aren't good candidates. Flash cards are great for correlating elements of one list to a corresponding element of another list, such as translations or genders. However, flash cards won't necessarily help me learn which nouns are weak, when all the cards in the deck are weak nouns so I have nothing to compare them to. So in cases like this, I type the full list in a text editor over and over until I have it.

This is what I'm starting to do with the list of weak verbs. I'm breaking it down into sub-lists:

1. Herz
2. Weak nouns that add an "s" in genetive singular
3. Other masculine nouns ending in -e
4. Masculine nouns with Latin or Greek endings
5. Other random weak nouns

Herz (heart) is the easiest list because it only consists of one element. Herz is unique because it is the only neuter gender weak noun, so it takes a special declension:

	Singular	Plural
Nominativ	das Herz	die Herzen
Akkusativ	das Herz	die Herzen
Dativ	dem Herzen	den Herzen
Genitiv	des Herzens	der Herzen

The next sub-list consists of the other weak nouns that add an -s in the genitive singular:

Nominativ	Akkusativ	Genetiv	Englisch
der Buchstabe	den Buchstaben	des Buchstabes	the letter
der Friede	den Frieden	des Friedens	the peace
der Funke	den Funken	des Funkens	the spark
der Gedanke	den Gedanken	des Gedankens	the thought
der Glaube	den Glauben	des Glaubens	the belief
der Name	den Namen	des Namens	the name
der Same	den Samen	des Samens	the seed
der Wille	den Willen	des Willens	the will

That's plenty for now. I'll list out the next sub-list I'm working on in another post.

[Deinonysus]

Duolingo
I think I got a bit burned out on German Duolingo. Maybe it was a mistake to try and get early skills up to levels 4 and 5. I'm working on getting some later skills from level 1 up to 2 right now, and maybe I should only go up to level three for a while. I think since I'm already quite familiar with German the higher levels are overkill. I'm touching up weak areas rather than learning much that's new. This is completely diffirent from Indonesian, where I really did need the higher levels in order to get the unfamiliar vocabulary to stick.

Pimsleur
I've been working on Pimsleur German V to keep me going between semesters. I thought I had only gone up to German IV, but the first few lessons were very familiar, so I checked my emails and sure enough, I checked the first half of German V out from the library around two years ago. I don't remember how far I got. But I never did get to the second half, so at least that will be new.

Verbs
I'm very pleased with Barron's 501 Verbs so far. I haven't started memorizing yet, but it goes into a lot of detail and has a good outline of which verbs are the most important to memorize.

Nouns
I still haven't finished my Anki Deck of gender rules. Maybe I can finally get around to it today. I also found some new sources for weak nouns, which adds a lot of new vocabulary:
https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/g ... weak-nouns
http://joycep.myweb.port.ac.uk/abinitio/chap11-9.html
https://german.stackexchange.com/questi ... nsed-nouns

Now I have enough vocabulary from different sources that I think I'll need to put a spreadsheet together. This collection of nouns is a bit random, but if I know which verbs are weak from the very beginning, it can only help me in the long run.

I checked on Amazon to see if I could find an equivalent of Barron's 501 Verbs for nouns, and I didn't, but I think I may have found something even better. There is a series of three books by Thomas Gerstmann, of stories containing only one noun gender! I bought the "der" book first because I believe that is the most commonly used gender, and that's the gender I've been working on since all but one of the weak nouns are masculine.

I love this because when I try to remember a noun, I can remember it the context of a story and it will be used alongside other nouns of the same gender. I have a feeling that this will be much more effective than flash cards.

I also got a book called Der, Die, Das: The Secrets of German Gender by Constantin Vayenas. This will clearly be more thorough than the single web page that I'm basing my gender rules Anki deck on.

[Deinonysus]

Anki
Well I finally finished making my Gender Rules Anki deck! It took me so long that a lot of the older cards were already on a long repeat cycle, so I just kept marking everything as hard to do a soft reset and make it so that nothing would take more than one day to repeat.

I added pictures for everything, which is part of why it took so long. I got the idea from Fluent Forever. I was skeptical, but the Quizlets from my German class all have pictures and I noticed that it really does help me remember, so I thought I'd try it out myself. So far I think it's effective, but if I end up going through with my plan of a 3000-noun deck, it would be tedious to add pictures for everything, so I may only do it for the toughest words.

Word order
I found some great explanations in the Duolingo comments on the word order when there is both a direct (accusative) and an indirect (dative) object. One comment had mnemonics for different cases: DAN PAD PIN.

• DAN: Dative before Accusative with two nouns. z.B. Er gibt dem Mann den Hut.
• PAD: With two Pronouns, Accusative before Dative. z.B. Er gibt ihn ihm.
• PIN: Pronouns In front of Nouns. z.B. Er gibt ihm den Hut, oder Er gibt ihn dem Mann.

But: An indefinite noun is often new information, so it is common to put the new information last to emphasize it.
Er gibt dem Mann einen Hut.
Er gibt den Hut einem Mann.

[Deinonysus]

Verben

Tomorrow is the final exam (Abschlussprüfung) for the German class that I'm auditing. I'm not doing it for credit so my grade doesn't matter and it's just for funsies, but it's still a great opportunity to consolidate what I've learned. That's right, I'm a weirdo, but if you're reading this you probably are too, so I'm in good company.

I have already mentioned most of the things I'll be concentrating on (1. dative, accusative, and two-way prepositions, and 2. verbs of action vs position). I will add to this, 3. modal verbs (more about them shortly).

I've been working on memorizing the full conjugation for sein (to be). My format, based on Barron's 501 Verbs, is:

• Infinitive, preterite 3rd person singular, Past Participle (+ "ist" if that is the helping verb), and present 3rd person singular.
• Informal singular, informal plural, and formal imperative
• Present conjugation (1st through 3rd person singular, then plural)
• Preterite conjugation
• Conditional/Subjunctive II conjugation
• Subjunctive I conjugation

For sein, this would be:

• sein, wäre, ist gewesen, ist
• sei, seid, seien Sie
• ich bin, du bist, es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind
• ich war, du warst, es war, wir waren, ihr wart, sie waren
• ich wäre, du wärest, es wäre, wir wären, ihr wäret, sie wären
• ich sei, du seiest, es sei, wir seien, ihr seiet, sie seien

Barrons also lists the variations with different prefixes, so I'll want to learn those as well. I don't believe it listed any for sein.

The next two obvious verbs to work on are the other two helping verbs, haben (to have) and werden (to become, but also used like "will" in English to create the future tense).

After that should be the six modal verbs: dürfen ("may"), können ("can"), mögen ("to like"), müssen ("must"), sollen ("should"), and wollen ("to want"). Unlike in English, they all get fully conjugated. These are actually on my test tomorrow, so I'm bumping them up, but I'll only be working on the present and preterite conjugation for now since that's what will be on the test.

Wordschatz

I'll also be going over the Quizlets for the more general vocabulary (Wortschatz) that we learned in the course.

I've taken a look at my book of "der" stories and I really love it! I think the best approach would be to memorize all of the stories, not word for word but enough to get from one vocabulary word to the next in a logical order. That could be a lot of work so I'll see how it goes, but it should be much more effective than Anki.

I'll also want to finish learning the weak nouns that I could find. There's a lot of them and I'm not sure what the best way is to memorize them all, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Dativ

I forgot to write this earlier but I'll add as an afterthought since it will also be on the test:

Dative verbs:

• danken
• gefallen
• schmecken
• gehören
• helfen
• gehen (for how someone is doing)
• leidtun
• wehtun
• guttun

Dative adjectives:

• warm
• heiß
• kalt
• schlecht
• langweilig
• peinlich

[Deinonysus]

Heute Morgen habe ich meine Abschlussprüfung gemacht. Ich hatte vor, zwei stunden zu verbringen, aber es war nicht schwer, und ich habe nur eine Stunde gebraucht. Ich hatte schon gefragt, spät zur Arbeit zu kommen, so doch ich ein bisschen Zeit hatte, war ich nach Hause gefahren, um etwas Klavier zu spielen. Ich habe diesen Nachmittag eine Klavierlektion und ich wollte üben. Ich lerne « La fille aux cheveux de lin » von Debussy. Es ist das schwerste Stück, dass ich je gelernt habe, aber es ist sehr schön, und es gefällt mir sehr. Debussy ist mein Lieblingsklavierkomponist und es war ein großes Ziel für mich, ein Stück von ihm zu spielen können.

Jetzt gibt es eine Büroparty. Partys sind mir meistens langweilig, so jetzt schreibe ich hier anstatt.

[Deinonysus]

Duolingo
I am getting frustrated with the German Duolingo tree, for the following reasons (which I ought to nail to the door of their headquarters, per German tradition):

1. Most importantly: the German tree is no longer being actively maintained!. This is very disappointing coming from the Indonesian tree which is very actively improving its questions and accepted responses by responding to reports. There are many issues with the German tree that users have been complaining about in the comments for years, and there is nothing that can be done about them. Even the comment section moderaters are complaining.
2. According to the comment section mods, some questions from Pearson, which apparently runs a paid version of Duolingo for educational institutions, have leaked into the standard version of Duolingo. Unfortunately, many of these questions are strangely worded or unnatural, and there are many valid responses that they don't accept.
3. They regularly introduce advanced concepts with no introduction, well before the skills that addresses them. For example, weak nouns were introduced early, which led me to work on them more comprehensively on my own. A worse example is that they introduced a nouns that declines like an adjective ("Verwandte(r)", or family member/relative) around 1/3 of the way through the tree, but they don't actually cover how to decline adjectives until 2/3 of the way down the tree!

Also, this isn't specific to the German tree, but the mobile app is garbage.

That said, Duolingo is noticeably helping me, so I'll keep at it despite the frustrations.

Adjective Declension
Since that verdammte grüne Owl brought it up, I'd might as well learn how to decline adjectives. I have a vague intuitive idea of how to do it in some cases, but I never learned it systematically. But there's no reason for that. The whole chart can fit on one index card, if you write small.

Here's a screenshot of Wiktionary's excellent chart of the declension of the adjective verwandt (sorry mobile users!):