LingoSchmingo

My (German) wife came back yesterday after ten days away travelling with work.  Naturally we spent a fair bit of time catching up with what had been happening in each other’s lives.  When it came to my turn to talk about the week I’d had I thought I’d mention that I’d been reading Rumpelstilzchen in German .  She asked me to recount how the story went – it had been a while since she’d heard it.  So I tried to explain – this is when it all got very interesting.

I realised that there are still a lot of basic grammatical phrases that I still can’t use fluidly in such situations, an example being “so he asked her what she had been doing” .  I was really struggling to find my way a lot of the time.  In the end, though, I think I got my point across but it was a bit of a wake-up call.  With a bit more fluency in these kind of connecting phrases I feel that my spoken German would be a lot better.

The outcome of this situation: I’ve learnt that telling stories is a great way for me to judge my current language ability.  Fairy tales, my day at work, general chitchat.  I’d also like to dig out the digital dictaphone I have hanging around and record these situations – will be a good way to work out where I’m finding problems.  It will be equally good to find out the places where things are going well.

I use Ubuntu at work and at home – I’ve had no excuse not to do this so, first thing this morning, both environments were flipped over to German.  Abgemacht, so zu sagen.  All I have to do now is work out how the hell to find things I use all the time.  And God forbid the sysadmin has to ever do anything to my machine in future

Another update from my last week learning German

Learning with Texts

I’ve spent a lot of time translating words from German into English from the store of articles which I have stored in my LWT app.  Quite a lot to add!  I have no idea whether knowing the word for debt-waiver (Forderungsverzicht) will ever come in handy in my life, though.  In addition to the news articles I also added a couple of Brothers Grimm fairy tales: Rumpelstilchen, Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäpchen)  and Hänsel & Gretel.  A good thing about adding these kinds of stories is that I already know the gist of what’s going on so it becomes much easier to glean unknown items based upon their context.  These stories are much lighter than the news articles, which is fun but there are also some old-fashioned turns of phrase to come to terms with (think “one upon a time” etc.)

Reviewing using Anki
I did my daily reviews using Anki.  By the end of the week this was amounting to about 30 minutes a day but rather than do this all at one sitting I managed to find the time to do a lot of reviews on my mobile phone when I had five minutes spare: I’ve got Anki hooked up with an online account so that I can either run the app at home or call up the online interface when I’m on the move.

Problems encountered

1. Impatience. A fairly persistent issue this week has been that I’ve been quite hard on myself regarding the lack of progress I’ve made (or not) in German over the years.  I keep telling myself that I should be much better.  I know with some people this kind of a feeling is an incentive to work harder but in my case I tend to become rather more depressed about things.  My default remedy for this is to do someting. anything in German however small – it seems to work quite well at the moment.
2. Need for comfort.  I still watch too much stuff in English.  Since I don’t have a TV most of what I watch is online and almost all of this in English.  Not good.  All it took today was to watch an episode of “The Simpsons” in German to make me realise that there are still quite a lot of seemingly basic phrases I still have to master in German.  If I’m really serious about getting my German to a good level I have to cut out the English media.
3. Lack of a goal.  I don’t really have a goal at present.  I’m enjoying the sense of learning at present but I’m unsure how long this will last.  If I had a defined goal it may be easier to find the internal kick I need when I’m feel indolent.  A Goethe exam could be a goal but I’m unsure how much of studying for this would be directly relevant to improving my language compared to how much effort would need to be directed towards learning how to pass a language exam.

Discoveries

1. Finding new words in other contexts. Learning a new word is all fine and well but I’ve realised that sometimes the only reason I’m seemingly remembering the word is because of the context it sits in with the cloze test I’ve already seen about twenty times i.e.  I’m remembering the word by virtue of where it sits in the sentence.  Not the best way to really know a word.  What I decided to do was to take such a new word and find at least one other context which is fairly close to a phrase which I may use in day-to-day speech and add this to sample German sentences which I learn in tandem with my regular LWT sentences.  An example is the word überzeugen. I’d seen it a few times in some news articles but was finding it hard to remember.  As a way of getting this easier into my memory I looked up a sentence containing this word at Tatoeba and came back with “Ich versuche ihn zu überzeugen.” – “I’m trying to convince him“.  It feels to me as if shorter phrases such as this one are much more likely to anchor the word, especially if they are phrases which I use frequently.  Perhaps a fault with that last sentence is that I spend relatively small amount of my life trying to convince people to doing anything, ha!
2. “Easy” TV.  This week I’ve watched cartoons in German.  I felt somewhat guilty for doing so but by the end of an episode also felt quite happy at the amount of content which I already knew.  In addition, I was aware of turns of phrase which contained words I knew but which made no sense: idioms in this case.  One I learned from The Simpsons was “Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen!” which literally translates as “you can take poison on that” but which means “you can bet your life on it”.  I have no idea where the idiom comes from – some kind of Middle Ages witch-test or other, I guess – having read three Brothers Grimm fairy tales it seems as if there’s a lot of darkness tucked away deep in the Germany psyche

Plan for the coming week

1. Continue to translate items within LWT and get the vocabulary/phrases across into Anki
2. Begin my German book (Kleider machen Leute)
3. Watch less English TV.  There’s plenty of German TV out there for me to be watching.
4. Work out some kind of goal to aim for.

I thought it would be helpful to give a bit of an update of what exactly I think I’ve achieved over the last week or so.

Learning with Texts
The majority of work I did this week involved translating the texts which I current have imported into the Learning With Texts (LWT) feature which is hosted at Fluent In Three Months.  I’ve found LWT an incredibly useful tool for learning words and phrases since the context is continually stressed – words exists as part of  “real life” sentences.   In terms of the content that I have placed with LWT, most of what I have added is from Deutsche Welle spoken news, each item of which is roughly five minutes in length.  These news items work very well for me due to the fact that they exist as audio items with a corresponding transcript – my style of learning (as far as I’m presently aware) is much more attuned to listening. I have to make more of an effort to read, so anything which exists as both forms is a real help in my efforts to expand my learning options. Having the audio also helps since my intention is to play back these audio items in the future just to check just how well I have really learned all the items. Once I can understand the majority of the audio then I’ll know I’ve made progress.

Reviewing using Anki
Adding all of these items is all well and good but will amount to nothing unless I can commit them all to memory.  To quote from its website, “Anki is a program which makes learning things easy“.  Just what I need.  And it’s free. Bonus.  I’ve had nothing but good experiences with it so far and am going to continue using this to start getting all of this new language committed to memory.

Some stats

1. Anki – words and phrases in system: 630.  This constitutes stuff I really don’t know right now – most of the words I already know aren’t actually being added to Anki.

Problems encountered

1. “Dryness”. The problem with having news articles as the main focus of my learning was that I’ve it all found it a bit dry.  It probably doesn’t help that the majority of the news over the last week (at least from the focus of the German media) has been focused on the slow death of the Euro – it’s all rather depressing.  Perhaps I’m being a tad naïve, but I think my willingness to learn would be enhanced if I was able to be enthused by the subject matter.
2. Repetition.  It has been a bit monotonous translating words and phrases within LWT.  Can get a bit repetitive.

Plan for the coming week

1. Continue to translate items within LWT and get the vocabulary/phrases across into Anki
2. Start a German book.
3. Watch more German TV.  I have the box set of Stromberg here, all waiting to be watched.It would be great if I could find some (German) subtitles, though – a lot of the idioms are a bit over my head which detracts from the flow somewhat.
4. Get a bit more excitement into LWT.  Deutsche Welle seem to have a lot more human interest items on their website – I’ll focus on these a bit more.

• Translated first paragraph of news from Deutsche Welle and exported new terms into Anki
• Did Anki reviews

• Did Anki review
• Translated more items stored within LWT
• Listened to Deutsche Welle news

• Finished translating ”Was mich vom Glauben abhält, sind seine Reden“
• Did daily Anki review

1. Started to translate LWT article, ”Was mich vom Glauben abhält, sind seine Reden“
2. Did daily Anki review

I’ve already placed about ten articles within LWT. I’m using the LWT implementation used at Fluent in 3 Months.  Finding it incredibly useful. Thanks Benny .) I tend to place items in here as soon as I see something which interests me.  Problem is, there’s quite a bit of a backlog of stuff in there, all of which needs reviewing.  I still have work to do in getting words and phrases translated before importing into

Having a little bit of time on my hands (I’m on holiday) I was able to have a bit of a look around the web for some language resources which could help me along the way.  I had some nice feedback from Clarence at TheFineApps, pointing me towards some observations that he’s been able to make on the language learning path.  Trying out new, fun ways of learning is something I can’t disagree with – the more it feels like hard work the less likely I am to stick to it.  So I had a bit of a look around.  Once I’d found Lang-8 I stopped looking – this looks to me like it could be a great place to improve my written language, as well as helping other people out. From what I can tell, this is a place where it’s possible to post snippets in your target language and hope that people will be able to post comments and corrections.  Since most of the post here are in English I thought I’d help do some correcting.  What I found interesting about this is that, having had no formal languages teaching experience, I’m at a loss why we would say in English “I am crossing the road” rather than “I am crossing *a* road”.  It’s given me plenty of food for thought.  Written German isn’t my strong point so I’ll be looking to use this site more and more to help me gain more confidence.  I’ve posted a cursory couple of paragraphs about a trip I made to The British Museum yesterday.  All done off the top of my head so no checking for adjective declination and cases etc. (this probably says a lot about my approach to the finer points of language learning!)

I’m also aware that the only way I’m going to progress is to start doing a little bit every day and ensure that I keep things moving slowly but surely.  I think Clarence’s daily posting log is a really good idea – from my experience it’s much easier to keep moving forward when I can see where I’ve come from.  I’ll probably do something similar, although not post these to Twitter or Facebook for these “check in” tasks.

When it comes to learning new things, I’m all for keeping it short and sweet.  I’m the kind of person who would much rather write a postcard to someone – filling in one small side of card is infinitely easier than having to fill two sides of paper.

I guess this is why the Deutsche Welle news site works so well for me – the site consists of news bulletins, roughly five minutes long.  Content is available as audio with an attached transcript.  I’ve just started using the LWT concept so this works brilliantly for me – I listen to the audio, referring to the text when I hear something which doesn’t make sense.  Content is updated pretty much daily.

The rest of the site is well worth a visit, too.  Plenty of resources for German learners.