Oh, happy day! I feel like celebrating :-)
This morning I finished Lesson 100 (passive phase) in Assimil's German with Ease. I still have 50 lessons to go in the active phase, but it feels like a great milestone has been achieved. My overall review of the book is that it is excellent, with only a few minor errors mostly due to the translation and editing from French into English. The physical size of the book (compact), the quality of the audio, the amount of content, the fact that it really works, all excellent. I think that for self-study with a single book, you couldn't do any better. You end up being able to read and write reasonably well, and also to understand the spoken word. In addition, you should have good pronunciation at the end if you really focussed on repeating the lessons at the speed in which they were presented. All in all, excellent.
Makes me wonder why they decided to make the book 3 times thicker, with a thin paper cover, lots of wasted space, and no cool little string bookmark (awesome for quickly reading a little bit of the book while waiting for a bus, or while stuck in traffic, where you often only get 20 or 30 seconds to read a few more lines) for the latest edition of the French book. I guess they felt they needed to compete with the massive, but vacuous, offerings from many other providers (such as the Teach Yourself series, for example). The German With Ease book fitted comfortably into my pants pocket. If I stick the new French one in my pocket, people will think I have a serious problem...
As for the level you should be at after completing the book, they say you will be B2. Like I mentioned above, I still have the last 50 lessons of the active phase to go, but I think the level needs to be taken with a grain of salt. I think you will have all the tools you will need to get to this level with a bit of extra work. If you want to be a B2-level speaker only, then you need to practice real-life speaking, but you will find this gets better and better as you go through the lessons. In fact, I believe you could pretty much finish the book without ever having spoken to anyone, and then start having decent conversations. You will, of course, need time practising your new skills, but I doubt you could do that with many other courses. Great for the lone (and time-poor) learner. If you want to pass the B2 exam in German as I do, you will need to acquire more vocabulary and, probably, do a bit of formal review of the grammar (memorising some patterns could allow you to breeze through some parts of the exam). And of course, you will need to practice speaking German (or whatever your target language is) for the exam as well.
So, you need to be tested in some way to know it's worked for you. Formal exams are one thing, and they require some specialised preparation. Just talking to people is another great test and, if you find people you have something in common with, the most fun by far.
Which brings me to my other milestone. Last Sunday my wife, daughter and I went to meet a couple from Austria who've been living in Sydney for just 3 months or so now. I met them on CouchSurfing and I thought we would hit it off. It turns out I couldn't have hoped to find nicer people for my first attempt at conversation since returning from Germany mid-last year. As I've mentioned earlier, we lived in Germany for the first 6 months of 2010, but last Sunday I spoke more German than I had the entire time we lived there.
TERRIBLE!
I know it's terrible. TERRIBLE!
But everything is a learning process, and I've learnt the value of making an effort... And I try not to fear embarassment anymore. I wasn't too bad at doing that on the weekend :-)
Our new friends from Austria, Daniel and Marlene, were just brilliant. We started off speaking in English, but at some stage early on, Daniel suggested we switch to German and we spoke for a few minutes while we waited for my wife to find parking. When she joined us, I switched back to English because she doesn't speak a lot of German. However, once we sat down at lunch, Daniel again said we should speak in German and just switched to it. My wife and Marlene had a long chat in English, and we had a long chat in German. It was really great. I felt as though I started slowly, with lots of pauses, trying to get shit sorted in my head, but as I relaxed more, I just started to let the words flow out of my mouth. Sometimes I had a feeling it was all just coming out as a stream of words, but Daniel would just nod and then ask a question which showed I was making myself somewhat understood. He also suggested small corrections along the way, as well as words I was missing. He could have corrected every mistake, but that wouldn't have been fun for either of us. I felt as though anything he said was just gold. It was a really fun, positive experience. My wife also enjoyed it (and even followed some of what Daniel was saying) and so I am sure we will be getting together again soon.
Unfortunately, I'm still quite time-poor, and they are also very busy (Marlene has taken on the mammoth task of studying for her Masters in English - very brave!), so I know it will never be really frequent practice (probably not even once a week) but anything is good. You take what you can get when you can't dedicate yourself to language learning fulltime! I think we'll all go for a bushwalk sometime.
I was quite happy with how it went. The conversation flowed fairly easily, though I did often find myself not quite sure of what Daniel was saying. He spoke natural German to me, so I will just need to get used to it, it's that simple!
My final "checkpoint" to note is that I looked at a rough guide for self-assessing your level on the CELRF scale, and I can see from that that I have a long way to go to get to B2! But I feel bolstered, I feel confident, and I know how to squeeze the most from each day to reach my target (along with doing everything else I need to in life!). Nothing can stop me now!
Roughly 4 months till my B2 test now...
No comments:
Post a Comment