LingoSchmingo

I’m subscribed to a blog written by another German learner – a guy called Clarence at http://thefineapps.com/.   It seems as if Clarence is a big fan of audio books.  So I thought I’d take the plunge and actually buy an audio book.

I decided on the German translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  Up until this point, my listening to German generally involved either talking with German friends or listening to a daily edition of German news at Deutsche Welle.  In fact, there is a lot of great content at Deutsche Welle.  I’d actually tried to listen to some freely available audio content at The Gutenberg Project but didn’t have too much luck in finding anything easy to listen to.

I think it’s important to find something that’s pleasant to listen to.  Many of my German friends comment on how ugly German must sound. I disagree.   If I could use one adjective to describe German it would be crunchy.  Like biting into a crisp apple.  There’s something satisfying about finally being able to roll an “r” in the back of your throat and equally so to hear it spoken confidently.  Drrrringend, frrrrech, grrrrrausam.   I really love the way these words sound!

Back to the audio book – the content of Die Verwandlung is a level higher than my current understanding but I know enough of the base of surrounding content to allow me to infer a certain amount of the remainder of the words.  Since I also have the text of the book within my LWT application I’m able to work on unknown words and phrases in my own time.

Reading to any great extent is still an issue for me, especially with German.  I often get the feeling that the sheer length of certain words and dealing with compound adjectives can ruin the flow of reading for me.  It’s getting better which I’m sure implies that I need to read more but for the moment having an audio version of a fairly complex text is really helping me out a lot.

It’s been a difficult three weeks in terms of focussing on German.  My father died suddenly and unexpectedly.  This obviously threw everything into turmoil, not just my German learning. Not an easy time to focus on anything, to be honest.

Still… I’m back at work now, which has brought a bit more rhythm back into my daily life.  More than this, I’m starting to develop a morning habit of doing my SRS reviews: LWT, sentences and computer terms (I’ve switched my computer interface to German at home and work).

Problems encountered

1. Distractions. See above.
2. Lack of a goal.  Still an issue I haven’t dealt with.  I’m pretty sure I could pass the Goethe B2 exam so the C1 exam would be more of a challenge.  Plus, if I book it, the fact that I would be wasting money if I didn’t study properly would be a good incentive to focus.

Discoveries

1. “Easy” books. I’ve started reading “Hallo, Mr Gott, hier spricht Anna.” (Reading the Wikipedia entry I just realised that the book is set in the East End of London, where I currently live!)  What I’ve found whilst reading this book is that I understand enough of the text to allow for a flow whilst reading.  This really gives me a lot of self-confidence and makes it much easier to tolerate any feelings of being stuck when I talk with people or try and read the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
2. Revisiting LWT audio items. This is something I realised this morning on the way into work.  There are a few Deutsche Welle news mp3 files on my phone.  These are all over a month old now but the text within them is what I’ve been using with my LWT lessons.  I found it interesting to realise that even though I may have remembered the meaning within my SRS tests, when I hear the same words spoken in context that I don’t necessarily remember the meaning of the words.  This makes me feel that a combination of doing my daily tests and listening to the same texts could help to reinforce the meanings
3. Speaking “Zeitungsdeutsch” to my wife. This made me laugh.  I use the phrase “meines Erachtens” whilst talking to my wife this morning.  She mentioned that I sounded like a newspaper.  Brilliant.

Plan for the coming week

1. Continue to translate items within LWT and get the vocabulary/phrases across into Anki
2. Continue with German book ”Hallo, Mr Gott, hier spricht Anna.“
3. Download requirements for Goethe C1 exam.  Begin assessing what I need to learn.

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.

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.