Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

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StringerBell
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby StringerBell » Fri Oct 26, 2018 1:05 am

hedgehog.chess wrote:I’m slowly going through the book on English tenses. I haven’t even dealt with all the present ones yet. From what I’ve seen so far, there are really big holes in my knowledge. So from now on I’m going to be more conscious, so to speak, and try to think about the presented rules instead of trusting my gut feeling.


I'm also working on which of the million tenses to use in Italian...it seems like when I go with my gut feeling it's more often right than wrong, but when I try to think about it I usually get it wrong. I hope you have better results than me!

If you ever want to do some practice with using these tenses in your writing and you'd like some feedback about what sounds right, I'd be happy to help. :D

hedgehog.chess wrote:Last week I’ve started listening to Pet Sematary by Stephen King. The reader is Michael C. Hall (better known as Dexter) and from what I’ve heard until now he’s doing a great job.


I was just looking at this book yesterday (translated into Polish, obviously!). But I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so I put it on the back burner for now. Dzieci z Bullerbyn is a little more suited to my Polish level at the moment. :lol:
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Wed Nov 14, 2018 8:38 am

German

Audiobook listened:

Herrscher des Nordens - Thors Hammer by Ulf Schiewe

Story of Harald Sigurdsson, brother of Norwegian king Olaf. The first part of the trilogy leads us through his youth, first experiences as a hunter, warrior and commander. It started quite slow but it finally gained momentum. Very entertaining, I’ve just started reading the second part.

A month has passed since I claimed that trying to push myself to C1 would make no sense and enjoying native media would be enough. Reading in German is really fun but it just serves maintaining the level I have now. That’s my opinion anyway. So I’m going to start working harder on the language soon, without goals in the shape of lofty CEFR levels. I like getting better, what can I say. More on this later, after I actually have something to write about.

English

Finished the chapter on present tenses in Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Czasy.

Audiobook listened:

Pet Sematary by Stephen King
No introduction needed. Michael C. Hall is a great reader.

StringerBell wrote:
hedgehog.chess wrote:I’m slowly going through the book on English tenses. I haven’t even dealt with all the present ones yet. From what I’ve seen so far, there are really big holes in my knowledge. So from now on I’m going to be more conscious, so to speak, and try to think about the presented rules instead of trusting my gut feeling.

I'm also working on which of the million tenses to use in Italian...it seems like when I go with my gut feeling it's more often right than wrong, but when I try to think about it I usually get it wrong. I hope you have better results than me!

The book I use gives nice rules of thumb and sometimes I just try to create some for myself. The author himself admits that rules are nice but getting a feeling what sounds right is better :) That’s one of the things I like about the book- it’s honest, no magic pills offered.
StringerBell wrote:
hedgehog.chess wrote:Last week I’ve started listening to Pet Sematary by Stephen King. The reader is Michael C. Hall (better known as Dexter) and from what I’ve heard until now he’s doing a great job.

I was just looking at this book yesterday (translated into Polish, obviously!). But I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so I put it on the back burner for now. Dzieci z Bullerbyn is a little more suited to my Polish level at the moment. :lol:

For some reason, which I can’t remember now, I really hated Dzieci z Bullerbyn. Rasmus i włóczęga was quite touching and as I’ve mentioned before the Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Pończoszanka ) books are great.
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hedgehog.chess
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Fri Dec 14, 2018 8:52 am

German
Books read:
Herrscher des Nordens- Odins Blutraben by Ulf Schiewe
The continuation of Herrscher des Nordens- Thors Hammer . I was so into it(it’s of course nothing bad in itself, in fact it was great but it was eating up too much of my desk time) that I decided to finish the trilogy listening to the audiobook version of the last part.

Dreizehn ( 13) Alpträume. Hochspannung vom Feinsten.
Finally finished reading this collection of translated short-stories by Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Agatha Christie and so on. I can put it safely back on the bookcrossing shelf for the others to enjoy.

Audiobook listened:
Herrscher des Nordens– Die letzte Schlacht by Ulf Schiewe

As I’ve already mention in StringerBell’s log I started transcribing a series. It was only one episode but still gave me some insight. The unlucky series I picked is “Lindestraße” :) I definitely didn’t pick it up for its artistic values… But the last 50 episodes are always available free and legal with subtitles on the site LINK There’s even a download link for each episode so in fact the authors encourage spreading it further! A YouTube channel is also available.

Some ideas after the first transcribed episode(again quoting myself):

I tried to do it with one half-an-hour episode and was quite surprised how many things I still didn’t understand while trying to transcribe it. Even after ~300 hours of German audiobooks under my belt... It’s just not the same thing as Cavesa mentioned some time ago. I was quite skeptical then but have to agree now. I understood the general ideas what were they talking about when watching for the first time (without transcription). But while transcribing I did not manage to do more than 5-6 minutes in an hour of work because I had do rewind multiple times . And even after that some lines remained a mystery to me.
Subtitles are a nice safety net, I don’t think it would be very productive to listen to something for the 11th time when you couldn’t understand after the first ten. Or good for one’s sanity :) So a lot of frustration is guaranteed. On the other hand I hope the phrases I picked up that way will stay with me because of the involved work. When I listen to an audiobook I often say to myself “What a cool expression, I have to remember that!” but after about an hour it’s already gone… I’m just at the beginning stage of this so I don’t know how much of an impact it will have in the long run but for now I’m optimistic even If I can’t commit that much time to it as Iguanamon did.(certainly not every day) Input alone is not enough to get me any further.

After 2 weeks I still remember some not so obvious phrases from that episode (z.B. auf den Trichter bringen, kraft des Gesetzes befähigt sein,die Stammzelle usw.) without reviewing them in the meantime.
I definitely plan to continue doing this. As you mentioned it’s brutal--it exposes my flaws in a couple departments at the same time. Listening is obvious, vocabulary, writing/correct spelling(I’m doing it old school with paper and pen so no auto corrections) and speaking (the recorded summaries I’ve mentioned before). So exactly a kick in the butt I need to improve. And it seems to have the best invested time/possible gains ratio because it's so intense and time is my worst enemy.

English
Finished the chapter on past tenses in Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Czasy.
But I‘m still mostly relying on my gut’s feeling, although I sometimes stop and try to figure out if something I write is in correct tense according to the rules. Still a long way ahead…
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Sat Dec 22, 2018 2:55 am

German

Audiobooks listened:

Hiobs Brüder (Gekürzte Ausgabe) by Rebecca Gablé
I forgot to mention it in the last update but it has finally found its way into my log now. In medieval England there’s a place which we would today call an asylum. The people living in that “institution” are not necessarily mentally ill. They were brought together there because they don’t fit in or are considered dangerous for the society. Siamese twins, a psychopathic killer, an epileptic and a man suffering from amnesia are a few examples. One day, after a mighty storm some of them manage to escape. This weird bunch travels through England trying to find a place where they could safely live.
I can understand why Rebecca Gablé is so popular. The book reminds me of some kind of telenovela set in 12th century England. But I liked it anyway. The fact that I listened to an abridged version spoiled the experience somehow—I was sometimes left under the impression that the characters have mastered the fine art of teleportation…

Elefant by Martin Suter
The story of a miniature pink glowing elephant (result of a DNA-manipulation experiment) doesn’t convince me at all. It's some kind of simplistic good guys(people trying to protect the elephant) vs bad guys (Biogenetic industry) scenario.

Transcription

I’ve completed the second episode of “Lindenstraße”. It went quicker than the first one, but only because it contained a higher amount of music, sad looks and dramatic close-ups… Lots of rewinding and frustration… But a lot of useful everyday expressions too. The spoken everyday German is very different from what you can hear in an audiobook-- lots of syllables seems to just disappear and I had to guess what could or should be said :) Two characters from Bayern are really tough nuts to crack. Sometimes, even the subtitles aren’t very helpful. Oh and they are not a 1:1 transcription. I would say about 90%-the things left out are mostly particles.
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Kat
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby Kat » Wed Dec 26, 2018 3:57 pm

hedgehog.chess wrote:Sometimes, even the subtitles aren’t very helpful.


Wenn du möchtest, kann ich gern einen Blick auf die Stellen werfen, die dir Schwierigkeiten machen.
Schreib einfach den Namen/die Nummer der Folge und den Zeitstempel auf.
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Transcription challenge: 1. episode of De Ijzeren Eeuw (The Iron Century)
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:15 am

Kat wrote:
hedgehog.chess wrote:Sometimes, even the subtitles aren’t very helpful.

Wenn du möchtest, kann ich gern einen Blick auf die Stellen werfen, die dir Schwierigkeiten machen.
Schreib einfach den Namen/die Nummer der Folge und den Zeitstempel auf.

Ich habe mich vielleicht nicht klar genug ausgedrückt. Das Problem liegt völlig an mir bzw. an meinen Ohren :) Was ich gemeint habe, ist, dass selbst wenn ich die Untertiteln vor mir habe, kann ich manchmal nicht glauben, dass der Schauspieler tatsächlich so etwas gesagt hat. Ich kann die Wörter einfach nicht erkennen, weil sie entweder für mich zu schnell oder mit einem Akzent ausgesprochen werden. Hoffentlich gewöhne ich mich nach einigen Folgen an die Schauspieler und ihre Sprechweisen und das Problem löst sich von selbst.
Auf diese Weise habe ich meinen ersten öffentlichen Beitrag auf Deutsch verfasst.:)
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2018 Summary

Postby hedgehog.chess » Sun Dec 30, 2018 8:19 am

2018 Summary

I know there is going to be a lot of other summaries coming so I will try to be brief. All the stats concern German if not stated otherwise.

Listening: approx. 310 hours of audiobooks mostly while commuting.
I haven’t logged other things like podcasts but there were a lot of them too. I could observe a significant improvement in that area, but was still not enough to understand a middle class Endlose-Serie without problems… More about it below.
Reading: approx. 4400 pages since April—I should have started it much earlier. Shoulda coulda woulda—story of my language learning in 3 words :)
I rediscovered reading so to speak. I used to be an avid reader as a teenager but for the last couple of years the number of books read by me in any language was close to zero. In the process I’ve found out that I like genres I didn’t really expect to like and have never read in Polish. In addition to that I sometimes flick in one or two short articles from “Der Postillon”.
Writing: Not much writing up until June when I became a PM here from a native speaker. We are still exchanging PMs in German for what I’m extremely grateful. It was arguably the best thing that has happened to my German. And it seems I’m not that bad at it. Of course Google and dictionaries help a lot. But I was forced to use more complicated constructions than “I+verb+rest of sentence” not to bore my conversation partner to death.:)
Speaking: Not much to talk about here…(pun intended) By far the worst of my skills… I really have to make something to improve it if just a little bit. The most obvious thing to do would be finding a conversational partner/teacher on italki. The problem is finding the time and place where I could have an hour-long undisturbed conversation. One other idea is talking to myself about the series I watch and recording it. That way I could also actively use the new vocabulary from the watched episode. I will probably start slowly with that.
Oh, I did finish a phonetics course: Praxisbuch Phonetik. Aussprachetraining für Deutsch als Fremdsprache by Daniela Niebisch
Grammar: Finished grammar books for B1 and B2 levels: “Niemiecki w tłumaczeniach”. I still use it as reference when I don’t remember some constructions and so on. Now two volumes of “Sag’s besser” are looking at me impatiently from the shelf.
Dialang tests: They placed me on more or less B2 level.(C1 in two tests)
Achieving without goals attitude: I only started applying it in September.( Shoulda coulda woulda…) That really helps to achieve more, at least for me. I have other things in life I have to worry about. It takes what it takes, no need to stress out I’m not moving fast enough. I certainly won’t claim I always succeed in that battle. I’ve always been keen on numbers, so I sometimes catch myself calculating how many pages a day I would have to read to finish the book in a X number of days. Well, it’s a process.
SRS-- Anki and Supermemo: It was a great refresher for more common words at the beginning of the year. I’ve reached the point where more and more obscure words are cropping up in the Supermemo (B1-B2) course. I don’t predict to encounter them anytime soon nor do I think they were very useful so I decided to set the number on new words to zero. Instead of that discovering new idioms and Redewendungen seems to be more beneficial.
Transcription: I’ve discovered it only recently as a method but put my hopes in it. (It was of course recommended here quite a while ago by iguanamon, and mentioned to me by Kat 2-3 months ago) Quite exhausting, frustrating, the series I use “Lindenstraße” is not great, but if it will help me to reach another level I’m willing to stick with it. The pace will not be great. With the current speed of work I could probably do about 2 episodes a month. I really don’t like to write what I would like to do. I prefer to write about something I’ve already done. I will keep you posted.
Another language(?): I’m considering adding Russian to the mix this year(I resisted the temptation in 2018), but if so I will probably just be dabbling in it à la Expugnator. Seeing how much time studying/maintain two languages takes, I don’t see me adding a L5 in any foreseeable future.
English: Re-launch of working on English started in October I think. I‘m mostly trying to fill in the gaps in my grammar but my vocabulary is also in need of refreshing. I want it to stay SRS-free though.
Persistency: 364 study days up to this point of 2018. On particularly busy days it meant just doing SRS, to keep me in the game. I’m fairly optimistic about reaching a perfect 365/365 tomorrow.;)

Hmm, it didn’t end up that brief after all.

All in all a good year :) See you in 2019!
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Wed Mar 06, 2019 10:52 am

German
Let’s start with in my opinion the most important thing, that is the transcription of the ‘Lindenstraße’ series. January was a bummer but in February I did manage to transcribe 3 whole episodes and about 5 minutes of the 4th one in 10 days.

My routine(if one can even speak about one with so limited practice) Maybe it will be useful for someone:
  • Watch the episode just to get a gist what is it about
  • Transcription and checking the correctness with subtitles . Transcribing one scene and checking it immediately after that is the way to go for me. I tend not to rewind a sentence not more than 5 times. If I don’t get it after that it most likely contains a word or an expression I haven’t encountered before. While checking I google or the unknown words and expressions.
  • After transcription is completed, I watch the whole episode while reading my transcript.
  • Watch the episode again without a transcript.
  • I’ve converted some episodes to mp3 and listened to them 2-3 times while commuting to work.
The whole process is exhausting, especially since it’s just a beginning of the journey for me in that matter. I don’t know how long I will be able to continue that way because it’s so time consuming, but so far I really like the results.
My speaking is a mixed bag of successes and failures. Sometimes I know I speak really well but some days like today I can’t even put one coherent sentence together. The other thing is I really get put down when I’m not performing well(in German). What’s interesting, I don’t have such problems while speaking English even if I know that what I said was total ‘Tarzan style’ crap. That means the problem is purely psychological and I have to find a way to break this barrier.
I’m currently working with Sag’s besser vol.1 which nicely exposes my flaws in the basics.

Books:
Sebastian Fitzek- Flugangst 7A
Akif Pirinçci- Felidae
A detective story set in the cats world. But if you take a moment to think about it it’s so much more.
Patrick Süskind- Das Parfum
Andreas Eschbach- Die Haarteppichknüpfer
X-Files: Blut

Audiobooks:
David Safier-Mieses Karma hoch 2
Arno Strobel-Das Dorf
Ursula Poznanski-Elanus
Hamed Abdel-Samad-Integration: Ein Protokoll des Scheiterns
Patrick Süskind-Das Parfum
I just couldn’t miss a chance to listen to Gert Westphal.

English
Finished the book Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Czasy. Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Mów pełnymi zdaniami is up next.
Last edited by hedgehog.chess on Wed Mar 06, 2019 4:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby cjareck » Wed Mar 06, 2019 12:07 pm

hedgehog.chess wrote:German
My routine(if one can even speak about one with so limited practice) Maybe it will be useful for someone:
  • Watch the episode just to get a gist what is it about
  • Transcription and checking the correctness with subtitles . Transcribing one scene and checking it immediately after that is the way to go for me. I tend not to rewind a sentence not more than 5 times. If I don’t get it after that it most likely contains a word or an expression I haven’t encountered before. While checking I google or the unknown words and expressions.
  • After transcription is completed, I watch the whole episode while reading my transcript.
  • Watch the episode again without a transcript.
  • I’ve converted some episodes to mp3 and listened to them 2-3 times while commuting to work.
The whole process is exhausting, especially since it’s just a beginning of the journey for me in that matter. I don’t know how long I will be able to continue that way because it’s so time consuming, but so far I really like the results.

How long are the episodes and how much time it takes to transcript one?

hedgehog.chess wrote:Finished the book Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Czasy. Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Mów pełnymi zdaniami is up next.

Could you please rate the series? And is there a particular order in which the books should be done? I heard some positive feedback about it and perhaps I will try to motivate my wife to start working with that. But she is a beginner in English.
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Re: Persistence is Key (EN/DE)

Postby hedgehog.chess » Wed Mar 06, 2019 12:30 pm

cjareck wrote:
hedgehog.chess wrote:German
My routine(if one can even speak about one with so limited practice) Maybe it will be useful for someone:
  • Watch the episode just to get a gist what is it about
  • Transcription and checking the correctness with subtitles . Transcribing one scene and checking it immediately after that is the way to go for me. I tend not to rewind a sentence not more than 5 times. If I don’t get it after that it most likely contains a word or an expression I haven’t encountered before. While checking I google or the unknown words and expressions.
  • After transcription is completed, I watch the whole episode while reading my transcript.
  • Watch the episode again without a transcript.
  • I’ve converted some episodes to mp3 and listened to them 2-3 times while commuting to work.
The whole process is exhausting, especially since it’s just a beginning of the journey for me in that matter. I don’t know how long I will be able to continue that way because it’s so time consuming, but so far I really like the results.

How long are the episodes and how much time it takes to transcript one?

One episode is about half an hour long. My transcription speed would be one hour of work=5-7 minutes of an episode.
cjareck wrote:
hedgehog.chess wrote:Finished the book Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Czasy. Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Mów pełnymi zdaniami is up next.

Could you please rate the series? And is there a particular order in which the books should be done? I heard some positive feedback about it and perhaps I will try to motivate my wife to start working with that. But she is a beginner in English.

Well, I love it! It introduces grammar rules in a very digestible form. There is a series of 6 books which presents grammar from A1 to C2 called Angielski w tłumaczeniach. Gramatyka. There are samples on the publisher’s website if you want to see which one would be the most suitable for your wife. https://prestonpublishing.pl/16-angielski
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