Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

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Le Baron
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby Le Baron » Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:17 pm

german2k01 wrote:Did your spoken fluency improve over the course of months when you were attending classes? Did you notice any noticeable improvement?

Yes, greatly! From talking sparingly, with uncertainty, to holding actual conversations with a level of confidence. And as is so often the case you never notice it happening as a process. Too engrossed in doing. If people are levelling questions at you all the time, to which have to formulate fairly involved responses and this is happening all the time, it's going to cause improvement. Also the teachers correct you, but unlike people on the street they actually know what to correct and also don't demoralise you by pulling faces because you said one word which was wrong.

This is the value of such places. Taking you past the annoying barrier. And I deliberately chose to attend the same sort of programme the government uses for immigrants (though I had to pay), because they deal with people year upon year and have to turn out functioning speakers. They don't muck about teaching literature or taking your money for 12 weeks of footling about. When I experienced prior how the authorities taught immigration Dutch I saw it is a very effective method. After they've put you on the road, you can either aim for further higher qualifications or just improve on your own. There's no 10 years of ploughing the same furrow.
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german2k01
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby german2k01 » Sun Jun 05, 2022 8:35 pm

You have a valid point when it comes to producing functional speakers. I mean when I look at Syrian refugees in Germany they are now literally working in government positions and have to interact with local Germans regularly. I would say that they are fluent as long as they are working in their line of work. In reality, no German speaker speaks German like Agatha Christie or Kafka.

When it comes to choosing appropriate content most learners have a vague idea about it. Some start with Harry Potter books and others start with Fyodor Dostoevsky. They literally dive into reading novels right away.


I think it is a good idea to feed your brain with a lot of easy materials for language acquisition to take place. My next question is, how to find a constant supply of materials that hold your interest and at the same time give your brain to absorb a lot of language by osmosis.
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby Le Baron » Mon Jun 06, 2022 11:45 am

german2k01 wrote:I think it is a good idea to feed your brain with a lot of easy materials for language acquisition to take place. My next question is, how to find a constant supply of materials that hold your interest and at the same time give your brain to absorb a lot of language by osmosis.

Maybe someone else here has something to say about this. I recall Jeff Lindqvist remarking that people are always counting on more and more osmosis, rather than some osmosis along with use. Yet the use is always rather tardy in arriving.

Since there are many seemingly contradictory elements and approaches in language acquisition it seems to have caused a rift between approaches. For me the little rhyme: 'use it or you lose it' is crucial I think. For functionality it's better to focus a smaller core of active knowledge and to make it functional, than to see the large scale non-active knowledge as leading to this. The long-term reading and listening and accumulation of language nuances, is something happening alongside.

I consider it like a working apprenticeship: you start the job and learn on the job by being guided how to function in a basic way, though increasingly more sophisticated. Then along the way, which takes time, you accumulate the deeper knowledge and skill. Yet because you are already active, what you learn isn't sitting there unused and theoretical, in some mental storehouse. It is put into practise and that is how mental (and physical) habits are formed. Holding large amounts of mostly unused information is stressful and difficult. I won't claim to know how the brain operates, but it seems to me that it holds information not as whole pieces, but more like binary code which reconstitutes in operation when required. Like the scattered ingredients of a cake brought together to make a whole when required. So it is data plus user-knowledge plus recognition/skill.

A drift from the topic, but worth saying.
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german2k01
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby german2k01 » Mon Jun 06, 2022 4:41 pm

I agree with you. At some point, you need to test your knowledge. You can not be a good programmer just by reading books alone.

I have signed up for a language course in German. It is an intensive course. Taught by German native speakers. 4 hours a day and 5 days a week and it will last for 2 months. It will start on July 7th. Let's see how it goes.

I have signed up for the course because of a couple of reasons.

1. As you said, I need to communicate and test my passive knowledge under stressful conditions.
2. Listening to a German native teacher can be used as a vehicle for exposure to comprehensible input.
3. Gathering personal experiences.

Outside the class, I can always immerse myself in the language by listening to audiobooks, watching tv shows, and reading books.
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby MaggieMae » Tue Jun 14, 2022 11:02 pm

Hueber and Klett are the two publishing companies heralded as the best here in Switzerland. I really loved the Hueber "Schritte Plus Neu" books for A1-B1. Granted, those are aimed at classes, not individual learners, but I still like them. For B1+ to B2, I learned with "Aspekte Neu" (from Klett) but that was a huge jump in difficulty. Hueber does have B1+ to B2 books as well, so it's definitely a personal preference kind of thing.

EVERY SINGLE GERMAN TEACHER I'VE EVER HAD HAS RECOMMENDED KLETT'S "GRAMMATIK AKTIV"! Like, absolutely every single last one of them, and I've had 9 different German teachers throughout my journey. They have 2 books, A1-B1 and B2-C1.

One advantage to all these books are that it's an immersion study in German, so no need to worry about what language it's being translated from. Deepl.com and Linguee are also godsends. Any exercises that you're supposed to do with a partner or group can always be done alone (with yourself as both speaking roles) or you can try and find someone who also either speaks or is learning German to do it with you.

Other than that, ARD Mediathek and ARD Audiothek are great (free!) native source materials for hearing, and Deutche Welle and 20 Minuten are great (also free!) reading sources. If I recall correctly, Deutsche Welle even breaks stuff up into language levels and has vocabulary lists for their videos, but I haven't been to that website in a VERY long time.

One thing I wish I would've known before starting German: learn the articles along with the nouns. A carrot is not "Karotte" it's "die Karotte". It'll make your life a million times easier.

Viel Erfolg mit der deutschen Sprache! Ich drücke Ihnen die Daumen!
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HumanBeing18
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Re: Your Advice about this German Study Plan, Bitte?!

Postby HumanBeing18 » Wed Jun 15, 2022 9:54 pm

Thank you all for your useful information, I did some modification for my study plan,
It'll be like: A0: Pimsleur and MT,
B2/C1: -ambitious I know!- Begegnungen (A1-B1)- Erkundungen (B2-C1), (A-B-C) Grammatik Uebungsgrammatik -from the same author-,
Klett Thematischer Basiswortschatz Deutsch als Fremdsprache -to look up for new words from the main textbooks through it-,
drills using FSI Basic (substitution, transformation and variation drills),
Workplace: Geschäftliche Begegnungen (A2-B1)- Entscheidungen (C1/C2), Training berufliche Kommunikation, some 2000 idioms.

I just have one more question -though it's a bit earlier for this!- I find Deutsch Perfekt magazine suitable for general German and it's graded like (A2-B1-B2), so I need something similar for workplace German, but I've found nothing!, I need your suggestion for that!
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