A language learners’ forum

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Happy to recommend a much better German film on Netflix: Holiday Secrets. Don’t judge it for having such a basic title. This is four generations of secrets and one gorgeous beach house! With an excellent cast and even better lighting! Technically it’s a three part mini-series, but the episodes are short, it’s basically a movie. I love that despite the plot twists the characters are realistic. They seem like a real family. This could totally happen. There is a lot of jumping back and forth in time, but they cast the younger and older versions of the characters so well you can keep track of everyone. Yay!

Noted down! I've got absence of really good modern series! The ones with a begin and a end in 2 or 3 seasons with completed stories are really my type. I dont like endless series.

So my German textbook came with a surprise 2021 Cow Calendar!



I’m inordinately pleased!

As we say in French: Ah la vache! C'est sympa ça!

javier_getafe wrote:

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Happy to recommend a much better German film on Netflix: Holiday Secrets. Don’t judge it for having such a basic title. This is four generations of secrets and one gorgeous beach house! With an excellent cast and even better lighting! Technically it’s a three part mini-series, but the episodes are short, it’s basically a movie. I love that despite the plot twists the characters are realistic. They seem like a real family. This could totally happen. There is a lot of jumping back and forth in time, but they cast the younger and older versions of the characters so well you can keep track of everyone. Yay!

Noted down! I've got absence of really good modern series! The ones with a begin and a end in 2 or 3 seasons with completed stories are really my type. I dont like endless series.

Holiday Secrets was over! I have been relished the series for the last days and I have to say that it was an utterly pleasure to see how it goes back and forth. Fantastic cast and plot. Very good recommendation, thank you so much. It is moving and touching. If you had another series just like that, let me know please.

Merry Christmas!!

I once had dreams of raising bilingual kids. Unfortunately, my language skills never felt advanced enough to only speak to the kids in a target language, and for practical reasons immersion schools weren’t an option. But all is not lost. I’ve started teaching my oldest kid German. She attended German Saturday school before the pandemic, but it was mostly songs and coloring, and we’ve been home for almost exactly a year, so it’s been awhile. It’s just lovely. For all my angst about whether I could ever find the time/energy to get my active skills to a solid B2, turns out my German is way totally good enough to teach an A1.1 workbook. Kid reads the text and I correct pronunciation and intonation effortlessly. I know this stuff cold. I could easily take the kids to an A2 level, which is solid for a elementary kid. Scale back my ambitions and feel hugely competent? A definite win.

I highly recommend the workbooks we are using. Wilkommen in Deutschland by Milderburger Verlag. Colorful pictures, easy to follow text, really cool color system to show cases, and alternating type colors to show syllables... So user friendly. And really gets you right into actively reading and writing with a full answer key included. Brilliant stuff.

Lawyer&Mom wrote: German and Russian remain. One language easier than French, one language harder than French. Balance!

I am envious of you for finding German to be easier than French. I really had to put my back into the German B2 exam!

Lawyer&Mom wrote: I once had dreams of raising bilingual kids. Unfortunately, my language skills never felt advanced enough to only speak to the kids in a target language, and for practical reasons immersion schools weren’t an option.

You're selling yourself very short indeed! You're more than advanced after 15 years of speaking both German and French. I know that you'll be the best language teacher to your kids!

Lawyer&Mom wrote:I once had dreams of raising bilingual kids. Unfortunately, my language skills never felt advanced enough to only speak to the kids in a target language, and for practical reasons immersion schools weren’t an option. But all is not lost. I’ve started teaching my oldest kid German. She attended German Saturday school before the pandemic, but it was mostly songs and coloring, and we’ve been home for almost exactly a year, so it’s been awhile. It’s just lovely. For all my angst about whether I could ever find the time/energy to get my active skills to a solid B2, turns out my German is way totally good enough to teach an A1.1 workbook. Kid reads the text and I correct pronunciation and intonation effortlessly. I know this stuff cold. I could easily take the kids to an A2 level, which is solid for a elementary kid. Scale back my ambitions and feel hugely competent? A definite win...

This is awesome stuff, Lawyer&Mom! Unsure if you know, but there's a thread here called Homeschoolers United, which might interest you. I'll bump it.

Wife and I did HSing for years, and part of it was German (my wife's reading was in the B2-C1 range). We had our boys at the time, they must have been 8 and 10 when she started, but she allowed them to play Runescape as long as they played in the "German world." Fast forward two year and I return from deployment in Iraq and while resting on the couch, I hear my boys arguing over the difference between two German words, one meaning axe and one meaning hatchet.

Skynet wrote:I am envious of you for finding German to be easier than French. I really had to put my back into the German B2 exam!

I have a degree in German and lived for a year in Germany. And French has that whole “doesn’t sound like it is written” problem. Which is a problem for a visual learner like me. But yeah, French is probably easier than German overall, especially for an English speaker. So much free vocabulary!

Lawyer&Mom wrote:

Skynet wrote:I am envious of you for finding German to be easier than French. I really had to put my back into the German B2 exam!

I have a degree in German and lived for a year in Germany. And French has that whole “doesn’t sound like it is written” problem. Which is a problem for a visual learner like me. But yeah, French is probably easier than German overall, especially for an English speaker. So much free vocabulary!

David Crystal's encyclopedia of (the English) language (the edition I have is from the mid-1990s) cites a study in which German (if you disregard the Gothic script) is considered easier than French for English natives, precisely for that reason. It would be interesting to see what the most recent edition says on the subject. My own view is that German gets easier as you advance, whilst French gets harder.

Started watching the French version of The Circle tonight. It seems fun enough, but I probably wouldn’t watch it in English. So far the contestants only talk directly to the camera or to the computer. Monologues! Recorded without background noise! (Okay, background music added in post, but not background noise.) It’s a language learning dream.