German group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
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aokoye
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Location: Portland, OR
Languages: English (N), German (~C1), French (Intermediate), Japanese (N4), Swedish (beginner), Dutch (A2)
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Re: German group

Postby aokoye » Wed May 31, 2017 12:45 am

I may have just gotten very lucky and randomly found a German tutor/tandem partner in Portland! A friend of mine was talking about someone he met and how I might want to meet her. She's from Germany and here for a year as her husband is working at a major tech company - I guess she and my friend met at a fundraising event. My friend gave her my contact info and we just got done sending a flurry of text messages back and forth. We've decided to meet at my favorite coffee shop next Friday. She apparently has a lot of experience teaching people German including teaching people who are preparing for TestDaF.

I'm crossing my fingers that this works out!
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Prefered gender pronouns: Masculine

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schlaraffenland
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Re: German group

Postby schlaraffenland » Wed May 31, 2017 7:28 pm

For aokoye, prohairesis, any others preparing themselves for a CEFR exam, or anybody else who's masochistic enough to love practicing German grammar during the long Summer days... :D

Since I didn't see it mentioned here before, here's a link specifically to the online supplementary exercises at Schubert-Verlag for Erkundungen C1. You don't need to own the book nor be familiar with its content to practice these exercises, and you'll get instant corrections. You can also download all the exercises in a nice PDF, but you won't have the benefit of the instant corrections, of course. And it's not just exercises at the C1 level which are offered, but for each of Schubert's DaF textbooks from A1 to C2. Your browser needs to permit JavaScript/popups for the site corrections to work properly.

In fact, even if you're not yet at the C2 level, I'd recommend poking around the exercises there after you've looked at the C1 modules. You can learn a wealth of additional Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen from the pertinent C2 sections. And you can get a feel for the sorts of things that C2-level coursework focuses upon. As you'll see, it's not really that it's hard stuff, per se, but that it's all just really picky at that level.

Have fun!
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: 120 / 150 Expressions françaises (120/150)

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aokoye
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Re: German group

Postby aokoye » Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:43 am

I just wrote a post on my log, but it looks like I'll have weekly German tutoring starting next Thursday for the five weeks leading up to me going to Berlin. I met with the person my acquaintance connected me with this afternoon and it went really well. She really seems to know what she's doing in terms of tutoring in general and has experience in preparing people for TestDaF (and having those students actually pass it).
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Chung
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Re: German group

Postby Chung » Sun Jun 25, 2017 4:20 pm

For any of you who just need to collect more German reference books, and are relying on a grammar reference manual, textbook and a decent bilingual dictionary, I recommend Martin Durrell's Using German: A Guide to Contemporary Usage and Using German Synonyms, and R.B. Farrell's Dictionary of German Synonyms.

Durrell's book on usage is a compact introduction in one book for dealing with nuances, style and register, which I've found are covered haphazardly in other coursebooks, and often but slowly figured out by learners through exposure, tutors or classes instead. He recycles some of the content from his manual on grammar and usage but adds sections on register, regionalisms, and semantics.

His book on using synonyms is rather like a stripped-down thesaurus of several hundred German words with example sentences showing nuances. For example Burg "castle" is followed by Burg, Festung "fortress" and Schloss "stately home, palace, mansion" each of which is accompanied by an example sentence illustrating the different nuance or register, but no usage notes. In this case, you can see how "castle" might be used to translate those German words when style or register are accounted for (e.g. "Michael Jackson's 'Neverland' wasn't a mansion but a friggin' castle!"). Farrell's book is probably more suitable to a learner, however, in that it's like a thesaurus of several hundred English words with usage notes about the possible German translations. These guides on synonyms stem from the belief that enlarging vocabulary is a big part of what makes a non-native speaker come off as progressively less foreign, and they approach the matter by demonstrating the ways in which English-speaking learners may express themselves in German. It reminds me of what aokoye brought up recently a recent session with his tutor when he relied a lot on machen to translate "do, make" and stattfinden "to happen, take place". He concluded that he needed to work on expanding his vocabulary and using synonyms (or more precise terms) which would cut down the lexical repetitiveness to a German audience.

In any case, I think that these books are best for an intermediate learner who doesn't have too much access to a native speaker but wants to start getting an inkling about nuances, register and synonyms without trawling forums or working them out one-by-one indirectly by exposure or asking native speakers. The usage notes in Farrell's book really make it invaluable and easier to read than a drier list of synonyms in Durrell's book.

You can usually find used copies going for peanuts among booksellers with Durrell's usage manual (1st edition) going for about $4 US used as I type this.
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Theodisce
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Re: German group

Postby Theodisce » Tue Jul 04, 2017 6:49 pm

There has been much debating about the number of hours needed to reach fluency. I have the strong feeling that things have changed drastically for me after reaching 2700 hours. Perhaps it's more about self-perception, but this is an important part too. I would say I went through 3 stages in the process of learning German 1. Gosh, I can understand it! 2. Well, I didn't know this, but I could express it with other worlds. 3. Why on earth I'm still not able to express this in such a refined and idiomatic manner as this author. After another 600 hours there is certainly something new dawning on the horizon, I feel that especially my writing has become better.

It's perhaps not related to German in any specific way, but given that the languages has, after all, its own FSI language category, the numbers could perhaps be of some use.

*** (for audiobooks fans)

I cancelled my audible.com membership when the price went from 10 USD to about 17 USD a month. At Audible.de you only need to pay 10 EUR a month and you can buy most audiobooks for just 10 EUR if you don't have any credits. But there is a warning: their audiobook files are immensely larger than those bought at audible.com or audible.fr and you may not be able to play some of them in this audible player (they work fine with the Windows Media Player though).
Last edited by Theodisce on Tue Jul 04, 2017 10:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BCS 400+ : 48 / 50
RUS 2800+ : 74 / 100
SPA 1500+ : 128 / 100
CZE 1900+ : 94 / 50

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BalancingAct
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Languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, English (Prof.), French (Adv. - Prof.), Italian (Adv.), German (Adv. receptive), Spanish (Int. receptive)
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Re: German group

Postby BalancingAct » Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:41 pm

John le Carré: "Why we should learn German"

"To help make the European debate decent and civilised, it is now more important than ever to value the skills of the linguist."

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/02/why-we-should-learn-german-john-le-carre?CMP=share_btn_tw
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aokoye
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Re: German group

Postby aokoye » Thu Jul 06, 2017 7:03 pm

I don't know if this has been posted before but the University of Michigan has a really great page of German resources here. I especially like their grammar section both for the explanations and the exercises.
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DaveBee
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Re: German group

Postby DaveBee » Tue Jul 11, 2017 3:18 pm

Systematiker wrote:I'll hang around and try to help with some recommendations, as I've been living at least part of my life in German for some time now. Off the top of my head, Hueber's Übungsgrammatik für Fortgeschrittene is wonderful once one is advanced enough to get value out of it.

I'll probably mostly recommend media, etc. for input, the process by which I learned German was so convoluted that half the time I can't figure out how I did it.
I was doing some window shopping the other day, and came across German quickly: a grammar for reading German. A lot of the customer reviews seem to be theological students, is this one you've used at all?
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Systematiker
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*Averaged for high receptive skill
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7332
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Re: German group

Postby Systematiker » Tue Jul 11, 2017 4:32 pm

DaveBee wrote:
Systematiker wrote:I'll hang around and try to help with some recommendations, as I've been living at least part of my life in German for some time now. Off the top of my head, Hueber's Übungsgrammatik für Fortgeschrittene is wonderful once one is advanced enough to get value out of it.

I'll probably mostly recommend media, etc. for input, the process by which I learned German was so convoluted that half the time I can't figure out how I did it.
I was doing some window shopping the other day, and came across German quickly: a grammar for reading German. A lot of the customer reviews seem to be theological students, is this one you've used at all?


I'm afraid I can't say anything about that, I haven't had any experience with it at all. I don't think I ever used any resource that was explicitly aimed at theological students or for academic reading, either (though I did have a "reading theological German" or something like that which my dad bought me when I tried German in high school, and I might have opened it once).
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Speakeasy
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Re: German group

Postby Speakeasy » Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:36 pm

DaveBee wrote: I was doing some window shopping the other day, and came across German quickly: a grammar for reading German. A lot of the customer reviews seem to be theological students, is this one you've used at all?
I have a large collection of books/courses that are designed to address the difficulties that many Beginners encounter in learning; that is, the transition from their standard course materials, which emphasize the spoken language, to elaborate written passages wherein Beginners are confronted with complex sentence structures as well as an almost discouraging a level of new vocabulary. Many of these books/courses use authentic texts as a means of presenting and analyzing the basics of German grammar. Then again, some authors simply present a selection of graded materials and assume that the student can request help from a qualified instructor or that he will work things out for himself. As I embarked on my own self-directed programme of reading a large collection of such books (after having already achieved a solid A2 level appreciation of grammar), I noticed that, while many these works presented a “review” of grammar, I did not really learn anything new about the subject. In contrast, I did absorb a considerable amount of new vocabulary “in context” and I found the progressively-more-difficult reading passages quite challenging.

German Quickly, A grammar for Reading German, A. Wilson
I have worked through this book, which is designed for self-study, and my overall impression is that it is an honest, non-scholarly attempt at addressing the transition from speaking to reading. While not all of the texts are drawn from works that theological students would be familiar with, there does seem to be a surprising emphasis on the latter. Exposure to these texts is not at all unpleasant; however, I suspect that many of newly-introduced vocabulary items would be of a lower frequency than those presented in other, similar course books. It is a fine attempt, but there are better examples available …

Blick und Einsicht: Intermediate German Readings, 2nd edition, von Schmidt
Although out-of-print, used copies this little book can be found on the Internet at very low prices. If you cannot find the second edition, purchase the original which, oddly, is titled “Blick und Einsicht: Introductory German Readings.” The approach is quite common: graded readings accompanied by a review of grammar. It achieves the same goals as “German Quickly” and does so by introducing more relevant vocabulary items.

Reading German: A Course Book and Reference Grammar, W. Coles, B. Dodd
Although designed for use in the classroom, this book can be used for self-study. While the authors suggest that a Beginner could use this text, I believe that attempting it before having achieved a level of A2 would be "a bridge too far." The authors have taken an infrequently-used approach with their course in that the progressively-difficult readings are presented in the first half of the book and these are “keyed by number” to a grammar in the appendix. The approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, if you make it through this tome, reading “Der Spiegel” will pose few problems for you.

German for Reading Knowledge, Jannach
Dated, you say? Pfff!!!, I respond; this work did not become a “classic” in the genre by failing to meet the needs of the student. Track down any edition of this work, pay the cheapest price, work through it from cover-to-cover and you won’t regret it.


Other Suggestions
Der Weg zum Lesen, Van Horn Vail, Kimberly Sparks
German for Advanced Intermediates, C.N. Genno
Aus Nach und Fern, L.B. Foltin
Deutsche Denker und Forscher, M. Spann, C.R. Goedsche
Was Deutsche Lesen, Van D’Elden, Firchow
Dichter, Denker und Erzähler, P. Heller, E. Ehrlich
A Reader in German Literature, R. Spaethling, E. Weber


My collection is too large to list all of the titles under this post. Perhaps the question of combined Readers/Grammars and the matter of the transition from learning to speak German to learning to read the language should be part of a separate discussion thread, to be logged outside of this study group.
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