german2k01 wrote: A lot of the AJATT guys have gotten to N1+ and never studied any grammar. I'm sure for highly inflected languages it may be different, but TY and Hugo's Simplified German was essentially all I ever needed for German grammar. Not so much the vocabulary, which is seemingly limitless.
Where do you rate your speaking ability on CEFR? As an aside - how did you approach studying Grammar for German? Every day did you pick a separate grammar issue to tackle with? Did you apply it consciously while reading texts in German?
Sorry for the WOT barely related to this thread! TL;DR: I frontloaded a lot of intensive learning for German and slowly introduced a lot of extensive learning later on, which got me to a pretty decent level fairly quickly.My speaking and writing abilities were always on par with my reading and listening abilities per the CEFR guidelines, if not at times surpassing them. The only exception might be after I began college when I only had time for reading (which I also put on hiatus eventually).
After I went through Pimsleur, I quickly skimmed through Michel Thomas. At this point, I was left with fairly good automaticity and excellent pronunciation, but no ability to read or write and pretty basic vocabulary and grammar.
I then systematically worked through Teach Yourself German by John Adams and Hugo's Simplified German (first generation) in parallel as prescribed in the books. This basically concluded my explicit grammar instruction. After this last step, I realized I developed a huge level-up in speaking abilities despite not speaking for months.
After this I watched hundreds of hours of TV shows of stuff I had already watched in English and knew the basic plot of, not pausing and rarely looking up words. Long series aimed at adolescents is best to start off with. My listening comprehension slowly lifted like a fog, such that I went from picking out random words, to whole sentences, to huge chunks, to basically full comprehension. In parallel, I read every graded reader and bilingual text I could get my hands on (note, as mentioned, I tried to intensively read Harry Potter too early, so I gave up on that and focused on readers). For learning new vocabulary, I would make lists from random sources and use Iversen's method for memorizing them. I also used Iversen's method to go through the TY vocabulary lists.
At some point I worked through Assimil German without Toil and Assimil German with Ease. I remember shadowing German without Toil and systematically working through German with Ease, as prescribed by Dr. Arguelles (for each dialog: blind shadow day 1, shadow with L1 text day 2, shadow with L2 text day 3, scriptorium day 4, etc.). I don't think I bothered doing any of the exercises or paying much attention to the grammar notes. When I shadowed, I tried to make my voice sound
exactly like the speaker's (I can still remember their voices and some of the dialogs years later). I had to make long daily and weekly trips at the time, so I would play all the dialogs I worked through on a loop while driving. I think I also worked through a volume of the FSI course, but really only used it as an audio source.
After the TY/Hugo's stage I also wrote a
lot and would have Germans correct my writings through language exchanges (lang-8). I had conversations online - I started with text/IMs (you have time to think and look stuff up) and slowly went to audio conversations. I would talk to Germans in person every chance I got (there were a lot of Bavarians and a few Swiss people in my area). The writings I submitted for correction were always very personal to my life and usually involved something I wanted to know how to say in German, but wasn't sure if it was exactly correct. Sometimes I would memorize them like "scripts" and later record a video, then get feedback from native speakers. One trick I learned was having one native speaker correct it, then another correct that version, and so on.
After that I mainly just read a lot and listened to native podcasts. I have no idea what my CEFR level was since I never bothered intentionally looking at CEFR focused vocab and probably actively avoided it since I found it boring (e.g. business, education, the environment, etc.). I'm sure I could have quickly picked it up easily enough if I tried. I read a lot of non-fiction that interested me, but looking back, not enough fiction. I would say above B2 in all areas after 1.5 years. I dabbled with a lot of other stuff too which I now don't remember (probably because it was ineffective, e.g. listening while you sleep). I would have done a lot of stuff differently now if I had to do it again, especially since I didn't know about stuff like italki and Anki at the time.