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.
User avatar
aokoye
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1818
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 6:14 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Languages: English (N), German (~C1), French (Intermediate), Japanese (N4), Swedish (beginner), Dutch (A2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=19262
x 3309
Contact:

Re: German group

Postby aokoye » Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:54 am

There's already a seperate thread about it but I wanted to let this group know that Lingvist has put their German course into public beta. I got an email about it yesterday but didn't actually start playing with it until today.

A brief intro into what Lingvist is for those who haven't used it. It gives you sentences with a word missing and a translation of both the word and the sentence. You type in the word. If you're correct you move on and if you aren't it will show you the word and prompt you to type it again. The textbox limits the amount of characters you can type to the number of letters in the word (this was exceedingly helpful for me when I was using it for French which is really hard for me spelling wise). It also uses an SRS algorithm. Most if not all of the courses have 5,000 words and claim to take you to B2 (reading?) proficiency within 200 hours of using the application. The words are taken from a corpus/corpora and are (supposedly) the 5000 most common words in the language that you're learning. At the moment it's in free public beta but for the entirety of its existence it has warned that eventually it'll likely become a paid service. There are also iOS and Android apps.

It's less fleshed out than the other courses in that it only has vocab (no reading or listening yet) and it appears that some of the features such as saying what gender a noun is aren't turned on for everyone. That said there are supposedly 5k words that you eventually will learn if you stick with it. It also tries to estimate your level if it appears you know some German. Their system of estimation is a mess right now (I know more than 471 German words...) but it appears that if you get a word that you are given/tested on correct the first time it counts it as "learned". At the moment it says I know 600 words which is up from the original 471 estimate.
2 x
Prefered gender pronouns: Masculine

User avatar
CarlyD
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 5:44 pm
Location: California, USA
Languages: English (N), Spanish--A2, German--now studying, A2
x 1325

Re: German group

Postby CarlyD » Wed Jan 04, 2017 4:17 am

I started learning German in 2015 and made a bit of progress in 5 or so months, then returned to Spanish until just a few weeks ago. Now I'm committing to German for this year, while I continue with Spanish just for the Super Challenge.

My main textbook is German Step by Step, which I quite like. I've been looking up all the resources everyone has mentioned as I've read through all the posts and see a lot of great ones.

The only thing I can add is that there's a wealth of resources on Facebook. I've "liked" a number of learning-German groups, and follow several German news sites. I follow Ich liebe Deutsch , Deutsch-lernen und noch mehr, DW Deutsch lernen and several more.
1 x
2024 15,000 pages Reading Challenge--pages: 1180 / 15000

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: German group

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jan 05, 2017 7:29 am

Today, I have finally fully started my 2017 German studies. Yay! That means working with a real course again. Reading and listening will be added to the mix soon. Thanks everyone for being a constant source of inspiration and motivation!

I would like to add some Memrise to the mix but I definitely cannot spend time making my own decks. I've found many made by others, some looked good while others were clearly not, but I haven't properly dived into any. Or I did, but ages ago. So, what are your favourites? Since the search function there sucks, perhaps we could gather some links in the thread instead, with short reviews :-) I'll look into mine and remember which ones I liked. I just remember being very disappointed with those made by Memrise staff.
1 x

User avatar
Brun Ugle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2273
Joined: Mon Jul 27, 2015 12:48 pm
Location: Steinkjer, Norway
Languages: English (N), Norwegian (~C1/C2), Spanish (B1/B2), German (A2/B1?), Japanese (very rusty)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=11484
x 5821
Contact:

Re: German group

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Jan 05, 2017 7:40 am

M23 wrote: I saw that Duolingo recently added a "Clubs" feature to their mobile devices application and was wondering if anyone in this group was interested in using it as an extension of what we have going on here.


I don't know how clubs work, but if you or someone else here starts one, I'll join.
0 x

Jimjam
Yellow Belt
Posts: 86
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 4:14 pm
Location: Canberra, Australia
Languages: English (N), Japanese N4, German B1
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1789
x 92

Re: German group

Postby Jimjam » Thu Jan 05, 2017 1:05 pm

Cavesa wrote: So, what are your favourites? Since the search function there sucks, perhaps we could gather some links in the thread instead, with short reviews :-)

I've been using the "5000 words (top 87%) sorted by frequency" deck and though I'm only 550 words into it, I would definitely recommend it. I have no idea where they got their frequency list from since a few of the words so far would definitely not be in the first 500 most common but either way they have almost all been useful words for around our level (I think we are around the same level)
3 x

User avatar
WalkingAlone13
Orange Belt
Posts: 242
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:03 pm
Languages: English (N) German (B2) Finnish (beginner) Swedish (beginner) Polish (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... f=15&t=742
x 340

Re: German group

Postby WalkingAlone13 » Thu Jan 05, 2017 4:02 pm

Brun Ugle: I think we actually got an extra bargain, it seems like they may have incorrectly priced it by a tenner, even with the reduction. It's now still on sale but for an additional tenner. Mine arrived today! Totally excited to have another 126 hours of German to watch.

Cavesa: I am still getting back to Memrise myself, but before my Memrise break I had a bit of a clean up and the courses I decided were worth keeping are the following;

Coursebooks
http://www.memrise.com/course/425956/hu ... -a1-vocab/ (1267 words/sentences)
http://www.memrise.com/course/1003267/h ... ull-audio/ (1628 words/sentences)
http://www.memrise.com/course/649732/b1 ... -menschen/
http://www.memrise.com/course/620323/ge ... ith-audio/ (1606 words/sentences)

Freq + Duo
http://www.memrise.com/course/198332/40 ... ith-audio/
http://www.memrise.com/course/47049/500 ... frequency/
http://www.memrise.com/course/335725/co ... ocabulary/ (2306 words)

Verb conjugations
I am still working on my own course for this, I finished most of the other "decent" ones I could find, none really went all that far in terms of numbers.

I have completed the first course, about 6 levels off from completing the second one and have already started and finished around six levels in the B1 coursebook. I am only around a third of the way through the Schritte one, but I like it a lot as it has different vocab to the Menschen books, plus I like the Schritte books anyway. Overall, the courses on Memrise using these books are reasonably good, the only real problems I have is the English isn't always so good on the B1 course, nothing major but it can be annoying if you are not 100% sure what you are supposed to be writing in German due to not being able to read the English. This does not happen often, just mentioning it for the sake of being thorough. The A2 one includes some Austrian and Swiss German, but these are clearly marked and if you do not want to confuse yourself, you can just quickly go through and ignore them all before starting.
Overall, the first and second course is roughly 3k words, and if you use the books anyway - not sure if you do, I remember you prefer Themen Aktuelle - it is super useful, they have added classroom vocab as well.

The frequency lists seem okay, I agree with Jimjam regarding the 5k word one. I do not remember why now, but I remember starting the 5k one and then having a break and starting the 4k one. I do not remember why, but I have a feeling I preferred the 4k one for some reason. I will have to get back to both and remind myself why that was.

The Duo one seemed to be the best of the available duo courses on Memrise at the time, not sure if that's still the case. I did not always find I remembered words that I encountered on Duo so I started using this as a means of reinforcement. At the time it was being monitored pretty closely so I never really came across any errors, which is always good.

Unfortunately I never really found a good verb course on Memrise, hence why I started doing my own, but I simply did not have the time to finish it so yeah. I will try and finish it, the problem is I get a lot of random verbs I have to learn from Uni and it proved to be very annoying trying to make sure I incorporated them, etc.

It would be great to see what everyone else is using. I am always especially interested in any textbook courses that people can vouch for. Naturally, if there is a good verb course, conjugated, and with at least 1k verbs, that someone could recommend, that would be amazing.
5 x

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: German group

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jan 05, 2017 4:59 pm

Thanks! Exactly the kind of information I've been looking for. I am right now cleaning my Memrise course list too. It is hard to choose courses, as I can't see the number of words before I start the course.

Some courses I am keeping:

This one you already mentioned + 2 similar ones, that I may get rid off, if the first one is good:
http://www.memrise.com/course/920/5000- ... ds-top-87/ this is the already mentioned one
http://www.memrise.com/course/198332/40 ... ith-audio/
http://www.memrise.com/course/58866/500 ... ct-typing/ this one looks promissing too, even though I am not ready for it now, I believe. It would be too time consuming at this point.

http://www.memrise.com/course/124377/al ... ncophones/ a similar (but a bit smaller) course, just based in French. I want to avoid tying the memorised German words too closely to their English counterparts.

I am right now trying to finally learn the prepositions in a lasting manner. Memrise courses on prepositions are of course bound to be a bit problematic, as you are bound to make false mistakes, because you can't tell which one of the "dat" answers is right, or which one of the prepositions with "ak" are you being asked for. But it depends a lot on the format of the course.

www.memrise.com/course/273527/preposiciones-aleman/ This one is really good, I progress fine despite the "false mistakes".After all, there are only 29 prepositions in the course and it is good for me to see them more times. Don't let the Spanish name of the course discourage you, it is purely in German.

And something for us, beginners struggling with genders: http://www.memrise.com/course/62377/der ... -articles/

When it comes to declination, I found only very stressful courses that made me make so many "false mistakes" I quit. But this format seems to be working: http://www.memrise.com/course/264250/de ... on-aleman/ Again, Spanish based, but the only thing you need to know is El/La, and bueno. I don't need it to learn the declination of pronouns, but I've been struggling with the adjectives really bad and the nouns part is nicely done and could be helpful to someone just beginning. And it is basically a fill in the gap exercise, so no need to guess whether "den" number 2 or "den" number 4 is correct :-)

http://www.memrise.com/course/9284/decl ... e-endings/ this one is not that nice at first sight, but I think it could help me.

http://www.memrise.com/course/61415/100 ... positions/ another thing I struggle with for now

http://www.memrise.com/course/126786/10 ... ast-tense/ I love this one. Of course it is not a course of full conjugation, but it is against something I really really need to learn now.

Coursebook based ones:
http://www.memrise.com/course/227106/da ... t-a1-b1-2/ this one looks really promising. I use different courses, but it looks to cover the A1-B1 vocab well (3109 words), the format is ok, and it is based in Spanish!

I've got quite a lot more coursebook based ones, but I don't know whether they are of good quality. I'll let you know when I'll have tried them out properly.
4 x

User avatar
Brun Ugle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2273
Joined: Mon Jul 27, 2015 12:48 pm
Location: Steinkjer, Norway
Languages: English (N), Norwegian (~C1/C2), Spanish (B1/B2), German (A2/B1?), Japanese (very rusty)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=11484
x 5821
Contact:

Re: German group

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Jan 05, 2017 7:02 pm

WalkingAlone13, I noticed too when I bought it that the price came out lower than was listed. Mine should come in a week and a half.
1 x

whitecastle
White Belt
Posts: 19
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2015 8:53 pm
Languages: Portuguese (N), English (B2), French (B1~B2), German (A2~B1), Latin (Beginner), Italian (Soon), Ancient Greek (Soon)
x 9

Re: German group

Postby whitecastle » Thu Jan 05, 2017 7:44 pm

which online dictionary you use on your online reading?
I use LEOS (the default dictionary which comes with readlang)
1 x

User avatar
aokoye
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1818
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 6:14 pm
Location: Portland, OR
Languages: English (N), German (~C1), French (Intermediate), Japanese (N4), Swedish (beginner), Dutch (A2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=19262
x 3309
Contact:

Re: German group

Postby aokoye » Thu Jan 05, 2017 10:43 pm

For English-German dictionaries I like dict.cc and Beolingus. My favorite monolingual dictionary is Duden.
0 x
Prefered gender pronouns: Masculine


Return to “Study Groups”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests