german2k01 wrote:I am curious to know what kind of benefits learners derive from listening or reading if they have already memorized the first 5000 common words or so via the Anki deck or vocabulary lists. Their comprehension rate must be super fast, I suppose?
A couple of evenings ago I used an article about a museum in Ukraine as goodnight reading material, and I hardly had to refer to the translation (it was a bilingual printout). I haven't tested my Ukrainian vocabulary, but it
might already be at the 5000 headwords level, and the reason that it is at that level is that I have done my stint with wordlists. After less than four months of study where I also have done other things (like studying ichtyological nomenclature, just to mention one thing) I'm fairly satisfied with my level, and it's precisely now where I
almost can hack my way through a standard non-fiction text that I also can start having fun with the language - and maybe absorb some of the idiomatics and grammar through extensive reading.
As for being able to understand German without caring about tenses: if you haven't got a clue about the tenses the Germans use, your understanding will by definition be incomplete - it's as simple as that! But German is actually not that hard to understand: they have a a present, a simple past and a compound past - basically the same tenses as in English. With some context and simple situations you may be able to guess the correct tempora, and when you have been doing this for some time you'll probably also have learnt to recognize the verbal forms and maybe even use them in your own speech. But you
could have arrived at that stage after just an hour or two if you had had a peek into a grammar book (even one of the small language guides would suffice for the purpose), and then you would have been better equipped to decode the formulations of the natives and learn from your observations.