LingoSchmingo

The things that I find hardest about learning German are those things which are almost the same as in English but not quite. Case in point is dealing with prepositions (on, at, for etc.) in conjunction with verbs.  For example, a German translation of “I can count on him” would be “Ich kann mit ihm rechnen” which back-translated to English ends up as “I can count with him”.  You see the problem?  It’s not always going to be a one-to-one translation so a strategy is needed to remember cases.  My strategy is as follows:

1. Find a noun which starts with the preposition that is used with the verb(!)  Using the case above, I can change things slightly so that I have the following sentence: “Ich kann mit meinen Mitarbeitern rechnen” (I can count on my staff/colleagues). You can see from this sentence that the preposition mit binds with the beginning of the noun Mitarbeitern.
2. Now that I have the preposition and the beginning of the noun to which it is connected, it becomes much easier to remember. I create a two way translation of this sentence and put it into Anki.  Once I’ve seen this sentence a few times and begin to commit it memory it slowly becomes clear to me that “rechnen mit” means to “count on” or “depend (up)on” and the original “Mitarbeter” helper noun gracefully fades away.

In terms of creating sample sentences, it’s best to go with phrases or words which you’re likely to use in day-to-day speech.  These are much easier to remember in the long term.

I don’t have a comprehensive list of my sample sentences to hand but I aim to gradually put together a sample list and post them up on this site somewhere so people can begin to use them with their own learning.

A couple of days ago I was sat in a restaurant in Berlin in the midst of an enjoyable German conversation, able to understand enough of what was being said to make me realise that I’d reached a very important goal – my German had reached a level where I was enjoying it. Up until this point, after spending a few days in Germany I would generally retreat to my bed by 9pm or so, mentally exhausted.  This didn’t happen this time – I could quite happily have sat at that table until 2am, loving the fact that I’d suddenly discovered all of these new insights into other people’s realities.  I was following it all sharply, intently.

This level of competence seems to me to be a good goal to aspire to when I begin my next language.  I would like to be able to sit comfortably in conversation with people, with enough competence to be able to hold onto the thread of the conversation without becoming mentally overloaded by the effort.  I’ve not wanted to give up on learning German too early so far because I think the language deserved a good amount of my focus – some respect.  Before I finish entirely with devoting all my time to German I’m going to get a video of myself up on YouTube speaking the language just to “seal the deal” as it were – see how native German speakers find my attempts – keep your eyes peeled.  Although I’m not going to (and don’t want to) give up on German after this I’ve crossed a line now which I think allows me to start thinking about new adventures…

Just back from a fantastic week in Hamburg and Berlin – Christmas with my wife’s family.  In terms of seeing how my German language learning is progressing it was a massive confidence boost – I was able to sit within groups of native speakers without anyone offering to speak in English, understanding the vast majority of what was being talked about..  The last time I spent a long weekend in Germany I felt exhausted by the end of the day, I imagine from the effort needed to concentrate on what was being said.  This time it was quite the opposite – I felt as if I could understand the vast majority of what was being talked about and  have much more of an ability to add my views and direct conversation the way I would do in English.

One thing which this trip has really brought home to me is just how much my German has improved since I’ve been sticking to a self-directed system of learning.  My sister-in-law’s partner is currently trying to learn English and I mentioned to him that I’d be documenting the way in which I learn so that he could try and apply this to his learning efforts.  I’ve condensed my thoughts about this conversation into a a new page, How I learn, which roughly sketches out my learning style.  There’s no doubt the potential to expand on this but for the moment at least something is there as a foundation.

One thing that’s not so clear to me is whether this information is going to be of help to someone starting out with a new language – a lot of my observations are based upon my perspective with German. I can’t pretend to know how to teach but would love to learn – if you happen to be someone starting out with learning a new language, does this make sense? Am I missing anything blindingly obvious? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

It’s been difficult to keep up with a lot of my German practice lately – I’ve had a family crisis which has taken up most of my time over the last ten days.  As soon as I woke up this morning, though, I got Anki opened up and started going through the backlog of repetitions awaiting me.  It was somewhat reassuring to see many items had actually stuck in my head.

This post is really a bit of an affirmation to myself that, no matter what pressing issues face me along the way, my German will always be patiently waiting for me when I come back to it.  More than that, I think it may be a good thing for me to take my mind off my troubles – a therapy of sorts.

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