Just the other day I came across a really well put-together website called "Slow German". It has lots of articles on topics about German culture and living in Germany, all written in a clear writing style, and each with an accompanying audio file with the text read in (what else) "slow German", i.e., slowly-spoken German. It's all free except for the accompanying study material which is also available to download for 1 euro per article. I don't know what that material is like, but the free material is really good anyway. Everything on the site is in German apart from the site name itself, and the three articles for absolute beginners (top left of homepage), and really that's all you need.
People might worry about listening to slowly-spoken material, but I think there are two ways in which it is useful for the learner. For beginners there is the obvious problem that you may understand nothing of normal speed text, so you will need bridges into the faster pace. I actually found this transition quite short myself as I listened to Deutsche-Welle news in both the slow version and the normal speed version. At first I couldn't believe I was listening to the slow version, it seemed insanely fast! But after a few sessions of listening to the same 2 or 3 news reports in both the slow and the fast versions, spread over a few weeks, I found that I was very comfortable with the fast version. The amount of actual time spent on it was only small really, so it was a great boost to my confidence! Now I listen to the news at full speed and am hardly ever lost, often understanding almost everything. There's still more work to do, of course, but I really think that the use of the bridge of the slow version of the news followed by the fast version, and having the text to read occasionally, made all the difference.
I plan on doing some more of this sort of work in the near future - not just the news reports, but with other articles that Deutsche-Welle makes available with text and audio. I'll have to do the translations myself of course, and when I do I'll post them here. This is to help expand my vocabulary beyond the limited set of what appears in most newsflash style updates. That's not to say I don't understand any other articles on DW - generally, I understand most of them to a greater or lesser extent, but it's something that needs work.
My current "book" learning update is that I've just finished lesson 56 (active phase) of Assimil's New German with Ease. Certainly not the two-per-day pace I said I would achieve, but better than my usual. I've also managed to slip in several kilometres of laps in the pool to prepare for this weekend's Shark Island Ocean Swim down at Cronulla Beach (just one of Sydney's many great beaches). Considering I haven't done much dedicated swimming really since early 2008, I've got into the groove again pretty quickly. Luckily, my mate only wanted to do the 1km swim (in the ocean, that's more like 1.5km at least of pool swimming), so it's all I had to commit to as well :-)
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