L-R, monolingual or bilingual?

[Sahmilat]

I'm at a roughly upper-intermediate level with my German and I'm wanting to do more extensive reading and listening. I found some free audiobooks of some classic literature that is easy to find both in original text and in translation in the public domain. If I can already understand most of what I'm reading on the first pass, with only a few words here and there that I don't know, is it still worthwhile to read a translation (in my case into English) while I listen to the TL, or do you think it would make more sense to immerse myself entirely in the target language by both reading and listening to the TL? Or do you do both?

[jeff_lindqvist]

If the English translation is good (or necessary) - read it. Otherwise I think you can start with German. I think you'll be able to figure out things along the way.

[Brun Ugle]

I personally would do both. LR at a higher level is a bit different than LR from zero. When you start from zero, you should first do L2R2 (listen to target language and read target language) until you learn to hear the word boundaries. Then you move on to L2R1. At this point you are listening to your target language while reading your native language, allowing you to match sound to meaning and pick up vocabulary.

At your level, what you would be picking up would not be vocabulary so much as how things are most naturally expressed in the target language. What you read in English won’t be expressed the same way in German, using the same words and structures. So what you should be looking to do is to become aware of the different ways of expressing things so that when you try to speak or write German you won’t be plugging German words into essentially English patterns and ways of thinking.

Also don’t forget the other steps. Everyone seems to ignore the shadowing and translation steps. I think they could be very useful at higher levels.

[DaveAgain]

Also don’t forget the other steps. Everyone seems to ignore the shadowing and translation steps. I think they could be very useful at higher levels.

What's the translation step? You surely don't translate a whole book?

[Brun Ugle]

Also don’t forget the other steps. Everyone seems to ignore the shadowing and translation steps. I think they could be very useful at higher levels.

What's the translation step? You surely don't translate a whole book?

I don’t know of anyone who’s ever done it. It would be a huge undertaking. But doing some passages could be useful.

There was also talk about transcribing from the audiobook. I had forgotten about that part.