LingoSchmingo

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.