OK, so this isn't going to be anything so dramatic as an open letter... But still, what's up with all the hillbilly music on Deutsche Welle Radio these days? I started listening to them about 3 months ago, but as far as I can remember it didn't use to have so much filler music... Or is it my imagination? Perhaps in the early days I was glad to have a break from a stream of speech I was having difficulty understanding... Maybe I was listening to it at different times.
I'm not sure, but last night while listening to "Das Magazin" I swear about half of the time was dodgy music. Not even any lyrics to help me with my German. Just filler music. Very strange, and somewhat irritating...
Then again, I'm getting it for free, so how can I really complain? :-)
Speaking of free resources, here's a bunch I've been using, or have stumbled across, as I aim for my goal of passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2. I've been meaning to put together this list for a while, which adds to my earlier post of translation tools. These are in no particular order, and they haven't been selected for any particular reason, other than that I've read them sometime in the past and liked them:
* Deutsche Welle: Plenty of articles here. Especially good is the Learning German section, which has stories with glossaries, the slowly-spoken news, and the telenovela "Jojo sucht das Glück" in which the actors speak very fast and very abbreviated. Good listening practice for the "real-world".
* Goethe-Institut Exams Page: Click around here and you will find several example exam questions - for all levels of exams. Downloadable and online. Here is an online B2 sample exam, and here is the B2 samples download page. Of course, you can't practice your speaking online, and you have to try to check your own written composition, but it's better than nothing. Use real people to practice speaking and listening!
* Slow German: As mentioned before - short, clear texts with downloadable audio for free.
* Australien-Blogger: A German speaker living in Melbourne, Australia and blogging about Australia and its culture. It's aimed at German-speakers, but people familiar with the topics he's blogging about (I guess that would mainly be Australians :-) ) will find it an interesting resource for learning German.
* Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: A very highbrow newspaper, but it's worth stretching for the quality of analysis available. On an unrelated rant, european newspapers like FAZ and Le Monde put to shame the poor level of analysis and bias that seems to characterise English-speaking media (and Australian media in particular). End of rant...
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in German! "Die galaktische Geschichte ist ein bißchen durcheinandergeraten". It seems to be just as witty in German as it was in English. I have no idea about the copyright, etc, of the material, so caveat lector. RIP Douglas Adams...
I'm actually very lucky to be learning German. There is so much out there that's helpful. There's a lot of helpful information in a lot of languages, of course, but probably the best, and most easily accessible, is in the big languages. For comparison, a quick look into a much smaller european language, Maltese, reveals that learning it would be much harder. My Nokia Internet Radio app on my N97 doesn't find any maltese internet radio stations when I do a search (though I'm sure they exist) and, although Google Translate advertises that it can handle Maltese, I asked it to translated a pretty easy sentence - "I love you". The translation? "I love you." Hmmm... Suspicious. In this case I know what it should be ("inhobok", if you're curious), but this indicates to me that it might be generally a bit useless. It would seem that finding native speakers for smaller languages (which, in itself, would often be more difficult) might actually be even more essential.
****
My diary update - I'm just finishing up Lesson 7 (review lesson) in Perfectionnement Allemand, about 1 week after I planned to finish lesson 6. My rate is as slow as ever :-) I've been keeping up with the Anki reviews for the most part. I did manage to get all the words from Aufgabe 3 into my Anki list, but I didn't do Aufgabe 4. Today I am starting on this Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 sample to see how I'm travelling. Still a lot more work to do I would say, but I've got to get an idea.
As for the rained-out BBQ-turned-cafe lunch, it was a bit of a wash out in terms of German practice. There were 7 people there, 4 of whom only spoke English, a 5th was my daughter who doesn't speak anything at all yet :-), and then my two Austrian friends. Because of the setting of being around a table, the opportunity to start speaking in German really didn't present itself - it would have excluded most of the table. So, damn :-) As we were leaving one of my Austrian friends said "and next time we will have to practice German more". Absolutely!
On the plus side, it looks like I might be able to set up some more extended practice periods in German starting mid to late June with one of my Austrian friends. I think, considering that my exam should be booked in by around then, I will do whatever I can to take advantage of this offer. Once again I am struck by how generous and helpful people have been with my German learning...
Anyone with some more helpful sites for learning German - feel free to post them in the comments!
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Rained out BBQ...
But we'll still be meeting up with our Austrian friends, and some of their friends, who are a mixed group of German and English speakers, so the opportunity will not be wasted!
Today has been a good day. I finally listened to and repeated Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 4 enough to call it finished and then I ended up with enough time to do all of lesson 5 in one half hour session. I haven't had the chance to do that for so long! I can't even remember the last time I managed to finish a whole lesson in a day given a morning and an evening commute, and time over breakfast (which I used to have before my daughter was born :-) ). So, quite a buzz.
I've also been keeping up with my Anki reviews each day, which are very easy to slip in between other things. Learning lists of words has its problems, but because it fits in so well with other tasks in the day, in tiny little 20-30 seconds chunks sometimes, then it's a great way to use time that otherwise would not really be usable at all.
Since this "aspirational goal" thing worked so well last time, I'm going to do the same again. I'll aim to finish Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 6 by tomorrow night, and hopefully get all the words that bothered me from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 into my Anki list. With other family events and going out today, that's probably good enough, but I'll squeeze in the "aspirational" goal of doing Aufgabe 4 as well. Why the hell not!
Now, off to speak some German :-)
Since my last post, I've also managed to do another lesson from Lesetraining B2 and I got the correct answers, although, again, I didn't go somewhere quiet to do it, and I was quite tired so it took more time than it has to if I'm going to pass the Goethe B2 exam! I really feel that the book is helping me to prepare for the "bookish" parts of the test, because I am learning the style of questions they will ask. It sometimes seems quite artificial to me - but that's because this time in learning a language, I've taken a different path. I did have formal courses, but I think I knew everything that the classes covered already because my workplace in Germany (who were, after all, paying for the course!) insisted that I do the beginner's class. People who have taken formal classes all the way up to B2 level will have had a lot more practice at the kinds of fill-in-the-blanks exercises that tend to make up a big part of formal exams.
The example from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 was that there was a given question, and you had to state whether the young people who had written about "leaving childhood" saw it as positive, negative or mixed. The first part was a simple multiple choice between these three options. Then there were two columns labelled "+" and "-" in which you had to write the key phrases that they said that were positive or negative. I misunderstood and thought the people who had a bet both ways should be left out, although in hindsight it's obvious that I needed to split up their statements to find one positive and one negative. Still, in an exam situation, I probably would have stuffed that up, so it's definitely worth practicing, for both the vocabulary and exactly this sort of question-style issue.
Today has been a good day. I finally listened to and repeated Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 4 enough to call it finished and then I ended up with enough time to do all of lesson 5 in one half hour session. I haven't had the chance to do that for so long! I can't even remember the last time I managed to finish a whole lesson in a day given a morning and an evening commute, and time over breakfast (which I used to have before my daughter was born :-) ). So, quite a buzz.
I've also been keeping up with my Anki reviews each day, which are very easy to slip in between other things. Learning lists of words has its problems, but because it fits in so well with other tasks in the day, in tiny little 20-30 seconds chunks sometimes, then it's a great way to use time that otherwise would not really be usable at all.
Since this "aspirational goal" thing worked so well last time, I'm going to do the same again. I'll aim to finish Perfectionnement Allemand lesson 6 by tomorrow night, and hopefully get all the words that bothered me from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 into my Anki list. With other family events and going out today, that's probably good enough, but I'll squeeze in the "aspirational" goal of doing Aufgabe 4 as well. Why the hell not!
Now, off to speak some German :-)
Since my last post, I've also managed to do another lesson from Lesetraining B2 and I got the correct answers, although, again, I didn't go somewhere quiet to do it, and I was quite tired so it took more time than it has to if I'm going to pass the Goethe B2 exam! I really feel that the book is helping me to prepare for the "bookish" parts of the test, because I am learning the style of questions they will ask. It sometimes seems quite artificial to me - but that's because this time in learning a language, I've taken a different path. I did have formal courses, but I think I knew everything that the classes covered already because my workplace in Germany (who were, after all, paying for the course!) insisted that I do the beginner's class. People who have taken formal classes all the way up to B2 level will have had a lot more practice at the kinds of fill-in-the-blanks exercises that tend to make up a big part of formal exams.
The example from Aufgabe 3 in Lesetraining B2 was that there was a given question, and you had to state whether the young people who had written about "leaving childhood" saw it as positive, negative or mixed. The first part was a simple multiple choice between these three options. Then there were two columns labelled "+" and "-" in which you had to write the key phrases that they said that were positive or negative. I misunderstood and thought the people who had a bet both ways should be left out, although in hindsight it's obvious that I needed to split up their statements to find one positive and one negative. Still, in an exam situation, I probably would have stuffed that up, so it's definitely worth practicing, for both the vocabulary and exactly this sort of question-style issue.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Quick update...
I finished lesson 3 in Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand and started listening to lesson 4, and I've read a bit. I also did my Anki review for the first 2 questions from Lesetraining B2 and some review from my general intermediate-to-advanced German word list. I like doing the Anki reviews, even though sometimes it's hard to get words to stick out of context. While I recognise this weakness, I know that I have had words introduced to me for the first time via Anki and then later heard them on the radio or whatever, so it is useful for a relatively modest time-investment that can be done whenever it's convenient.
I'm not sure how much I'll get done today since I'm working from home (no commute) and we have a family get-together tonight. My goal is to finish the reading side of lesson 4 so I can just focus on getting the shadowing right, and doing my Anki reviews for today. An aspirational goal would be to read another question from Lesetraining B2.
And just as a random musing, I think I need to do one of the practice B2 tests available online sometime soon to get a good guage on where I'm going next.
This Saturday I'm hoping to meet up with our Austrian friends with a group of their friends to a BBQ. I think most of their other friends will be english-speakers, but I'll try to speak German whenever I can :-)
I'm not sure how much I'll get done today since I'm working from home (no commute) and we have a family get-together tonight. My goal is to finish the reading side of lesson 4 so I can just focus on getting the shadowing right, and doing my Anki reviews for today. An aspirational goal would be to read another question from Lesetraining B2.
And just as a random musing, I think I need to do one of the practice B2 tests available online sometime soon to get a good guage on where I'm going next.
This Saturday I'm hoping to meet up with our Austrian friends with a group of their friends to a BBQ. I think most of their other friends will be english-speakers, but I'll try to speak German whenever I can :-)
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Lesetraining fortsetzung...
I haven't progressed past lesson 3 in Perfectionnement Allemand. I think I was shadowing the audio pretty well last night driving home and I was planning to do it just once more to call it "done". That hasn't happened yet. I'm just being too much of a perfectionist! Well, writing this has inspired me to do it pretty soon and call it done :-)
There was some better news when I did the second question of Lesetraining B2 (if you'll recall, the first question I tried didn't go very well for me). I was able to read it pretty well without needing to look up and words and I could answer all the questions pretty easily. I didn't know every word, but I was able to work out any gaps pretty easily, and there weren't many. This might be indicative of the type of question. The first question required you only to match up a short description of a group of students with a list of ads for plays. Perhaps this is deemed easier than the second style of question, which had a few different parts and is probably deemed to need more discernment to answer rather than just matching keywords. And that may be true. It is also possibly the case that I found it much easier because I was already quite familiar with the content about Ötzi the frozen mummy from the copper age. In any case, I plan to add the few words I didn't know to my Anki list and then try the next question. Perhaps not in front of the TV this time :-)
Speaking of that book, I just noticed that the link above has a link to sample pages and listening samples, but when I opened it up I discovered, to my great joy, that it is a PDF of all the answers! How awesome is that! Here I was, thinking I could never know the answers, and they were out there all along. This is going to make the book much more useful! I marked my first two questions and I got all the answers correct, so I'm off to a good start (if I ignore the fact that I wasn't sure/didn't know at all 80 words from the first reading question!).
And just to make it easy for anyone searching the internet for these answers, I'll repeat myself. This link contains ALL THE ANSWERS for Lesetraining B2: Leseverstehen in Progression bis zum Goethe-Zertifikat B2.
One final note - I recently received a long email from my former German teacher in Frankfurt. We correspond semi-regularly, and she has been very helpful, completely out of the kindness of her heart, which I must say I greatly appreciate considering that it's something she normally gets paid for! This letter was quite long, and on a variety of topics, and I look forward to replying to it. One thing she did to be helpful for underline words and phrases that she probably considers to be at the next level I need to learn to progress towards my goal of completing the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 exam, or maybe just more generally to be able to interact in German competently. How nice is that! And all this at a time when her website she uses to sell her children's books, and language learning books, has been hacked by a human from the other end of the spectrum of human kindness. Hopefully she'll get it back online soon, and perhaps some of the readers of this blog will buy some of her entertaining children's books (or any of the other books she sells on her site), to help them get off the ground in German, or to read to their children, etc. Check it out over at Khorshid Verlag (not an affiliate link or anything, and currently still offline due to the hack) and see if anything appeals :-)
There was some better news when I did the second question of Lesetraining B2 (if you'll recall, the first question I tried didn't go very well for me). I was able to read it pretty well without needing to look up and words and I could answer all the questions pretty easily. I didn't know every word, but I was able to work out any gaps pretty easily, and there weren't many. This might be indicative of the type of question. The first question required you only to match up a short description of a group of students with a list of ads for plays. Perhaps this is deemed easier than the second style of question, which had a few different parts and is probably deemed to need more discernment to answer rather than just matching keywords. And that may be true. It is also possibly the case that I found it much easier because I was already quite familiar with the content about Ötzi the frozen mummy from the copper age. In any case, I plan to add the few words I didn't know to my Anki list and then try the next question. Perhaps not in front of the TV this time :-)
Speaking of that book, I just noticed that the link above has a link to sample pages and listening samples, but when I opened it up I discovered, to my great joy, that it is a PDF of all the answers! How awesome is that! Here I was, thinking I could never know the answers, and they were out there all along. This is going to make the book much more useful! I marked my first two questions and I got all the answers correct, so I'm off to a good start (if I ignore the fact that I wasn't sure/didn't know at all 80 words from the first reading question!).
And just to make it easy for anyone searching the internet for these answers, I'll repeat myself. This link contains ALL THE ANSWERS for Lesetraining B2: Leseverstehen in Progression bis zum Goethe-Zertifikat B2.
One final note - I recently received a long email from my former German teacher in Frankfurt. We correspond semi-regularly, and she has been very helpful, completely out of the kindness of her heart, which I must say I greatly appreciate considering that it's something she normally gets paid for! This letter was quite long, and on a variety of topics, and I look forward to replying to it. One thing she did to be helpful for underline words and phrases that she probably considers to be at the next level I need to learn to progress towards my goal of completing the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 exam, or maybe just more generally to be able to interact in German competently. How nice is that! And all this at a time when her website she uses to sell her children's books, and language learning books, has been hacked by a human from the other end of the spectrum of human kindness. Hopefully she'll get it back online soon, and perhaps some of the readers of this blog will buy some of her entertaining children's books (or any of the other books she sells on her site), to help them get off the ground in German, or to read to their children, etc. Check it out over at Khorshid Verlag (not an affiliate link or anything, and currently still offline due to the hack) and see if anything appeals :-)
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Three months to go...
It's really not much time!
My "book-learning" update: I've done the first two lessons of Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Advanced German). I'm glad I know a bit of French otherwise I would probably spend a lot of time just looking up words. So, current status is that I'm on the third lesson. One minor disappointment with Perfectionnement Allemand is that it is the new edition. What's wrong with that? Just a few minor gripes with the actual format of the book. The slightly older versions (same edition in terms of content I believe) were compact, with semi-hard covers and a red-string bookmark. I can't stress how useful I found this older format. Hard-wearing thanks to the semi-hard cover and quality binding meant that my copy of "New German With Ease" has lasted a lot of abuse extremely well. It doesn't have a lot of reference material at the end, but that has just helped by keeping the size down so that it fits into just about any pocket I have, including my pants pocket, which can make it remarkably accessible. And the red-string bookmark means convenient, instant access to the page you're up to. It doesn't bulk up the book like most bookmarks, and because it's attached it saves a little time every time you want to access it. Considering that sometimes all I might have is 20 seconds at a traffic light to look up a phrase I had difficulty with, this quick access can really add up.
Still, I have to say that even just in the first few lessons the quality and quantity of dialog, extra information and new vocabulary seems excellent, as ever. By the third lesson it definitely seems to be beyond the end of New German With Ease. Very impressive stuff.
My other book is Lesetraining B2: Leseverstehen in Progression bis zum Goethe-Zertifikat B2. I haven't done a lot from this book yet. I started reading the first test question and realised that what my former German teacher told me via email about the B2 exam was definitely going to be true for me:
"Im "echten" Test gibt es natürlich Aufgaben zu Hör-/Leseverstehen, zum mündlichen und schriftlichen ausdruck - das ist auf B2-Niveau nicht mehr nur Grammatik. Man braucht einen entsprechenden Wortschatz. Und eine Menge Motivation."
Here was the very first test question and already there felt like a lot of words I didn't know! A lot of motivation would definitely be needed!
Not to worry, though. This was the point, after all. I expected to need to learn a lot of vocabulary, and it doesn't seem the book will disappoint in that respect :-) All good preparation for the test then! The method I've chosen to deal with this is to note down all the words I don't understand (partially or fully) on a piece of paper and then look them up using Linguee to add into a new Anki list. Since I finished doing this, I've reviewed the list a couple of times, and then re-read the question. It's like a whole new world! Now I can come up with answers and feel fairly confident that they're correct (remember that the book has NO ANSWERS!) [EDIT: The answers have been found! See this post for details]. Now I just need to do that for every question in the book and hopefully I'll have covered a whole bunch of vocabulary that I need for the exam but am current missing :-) That might not be easy however - I looked up about 80 words and phrases for the first question alone!
And just three months to go...
My "book-learning" update: I've done the first two lessons of Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Advanced German). I'm glad I know a bit of French otherwise I would probably spend a lot of time just looking up words. So, current status is that I'm on the third lesson. One minor disappointment with Perfectionnement Allemand is that it is the new edition. What's wrong with that? Just a few minor gripes with the actual format of the book. The slightly older versions (same edition in terms of content I believe) were compact, with semi-hard covers and a red-string bookmark. I can't stress how useful I found this older format. Hard-wearing thanks to the semi-hard cover and quality binding meant that my copy of "New German With Ease" has lasted a lot of abuse extremely well. It doesn't have a lot of reference material at the end, but that has just helped by keeping the size down so that it fits into just about any pocket I have, including my pants pocket, which can make it remarkably accessible. And the red-string bookmark means convenient, instant access to the page you're up to. It doesn't bulk up the book like most bookmarks, and because it's attached it saves a little time every time you want to access it. Considering that sometimes all I might have is 20 seconds at a traffic light to look up a phrase I had difficulty with, this quick access can really add up.
Still, I have to say that even just in the first few lessons the quality and quantity of dialog, extra information and new vocabulary seems excellent, as ever. By the third lesson it definitely seems to be beyond the end of New German With Ease. Very impressive stuff.
My other book is Lesetraining B2: Leseverstehen in Progression bis zum Goethe-Zertifikat B2. I haven't done a lot from this book yet. I started reading the first test question and realised that what my former German teacher told me via email about the B2 exam was definitely going to be true for me:
"Im "echten" Test gibt es natürlich Aufgaben zu Hör-/Leseverstehen, zum mündlichen und schriftlichen ausdruck - das ist auf B2-Niveau nicht mehr nur Grammatik. Man braucht einen entsprechenden Wortschatz. Und eine Menge Motivation."
Here was the very first test question and already there felt like a lot of words I didn't know! A lot of motivation would definitely be needed!
Not to worry, though. This was the point, after all. I expected to need to learn a lot of vocabulary, and it doesn't seem the book will disappoint in that respect :-) All good preparation for the test then! The method I've chosen to deal with this is to note down all the words I don't understand (partially or fully) on a piece of paper and then look them up using Linguee to add into a new Anki list. Since I finished doing this, I've reviewed the list a couple of times, and then re-read the question. It's like a whole new world! Now I can come up with answers and feel fairly confident that they're correct (remember that the book has NO ANSWERS!) [EDIT: The answers have been found! See this post for details]. Now I just need to do that for every question in the book and hopefully I'll have covered a whole bunch of vocabulary that I need for the exam but am current missing :-) That might not be easy however - I looked up about 80 words and phrases for the first question alone!
And just three months to go...
Saturday, April 9, 2011
A couple of new arrivals...
Recently the two books I ordered to finish off my preparation for the Goethe Institute B2 exam from bookdepository.co.uk - Lesetraining B2 and Assimil's "Perfectionnement Allemand" (Assimil's advanced German course which is only available for French speakers) arrived. I also recently had a job interview for a job in Paris (I currently live in Sydney, after having moved back from Germany mid last year, so it would require another big move in a very short space of time) and I didn't focus on my German studies so much in the meantime. With these new books, and the time I have to dedicate to the task, I've decided to "mothball" Assimil's German with Ease for at, having completed the whole passive phase and lesson 58 active phase. My original idea was to continue with Perfectionnement Allemand as though it was just a continuation of the one book - do the new lessons as passive phase, and continue with the active phase. The problem is really just time, so I'll just focus on doing the passive phase for Perfectionnement Allemand and the practice exercises in Lesetraining which is designed to help prepare for the written comprehension section of the B2 exam.
One big warning for anyone else looking for a book like Lesetraining B2 - it doesn't have any answers!! I can't find any, but I keep hoping I'm just missing them somehow! Unbelievable... [EDIT: The answers have been found! See this post for details] It'll still be useful though - I've decided to add vocabulary that I don't know to a new Anki list. The logic here is that although the vocabulary used in the B2 exam must be quite large, there is almost certainly a reasonably finite set of what they're able to use in any exam because it has to be fair and consistent to all past and future exam entrants. Actually, now that I've written that it seems both self-evident and nonsensical at the same time. Well, it makes sense to me!
As for "Perfectionnement Allemand", it looks and sounds great. I've listened to the first two lessons, but I haven't gone through with the text. I understood them all pretty much, but I need to read the notes, etc. As I mentioned right at the start, my French isn't great, but I think it'll do the trick, along with some amount of help from Google Translate, Linguee and perhaps some help from the forums on How To Learn Any Language where I've seen someone posting about using this course even though they speak no French. This is possible because the audio is ALL in the target language, though of course it helps massively if you can't understand the parallel translation :-)
One final note - I made a comment on someone's review of Assimil's "German With Ease" and they read my comment and actually amended their review to add an extra star! The reason I felt the need to comment was not that I think this book is the only way to learn German, but my experience with it has just been so positive compared to previous attempts (along with some very simple and very good advice from Benny the Irish Polyglot) that I just feel the need to share what I've learnt along the way. Here is what the original reviewer added to his review in response to my comments:
"April 2011 -
After having tried other German learning techniques, I believe the Assimil approach is one of the best. This method (like all methods) does require perseverance and patience, something I did not really appreciate when I first wrote this review. My comments about timing, etc. still stand, but can be overcome using things like an iPod (which makes it easier to pause and restart), or actually speaking over the audio after you have reviewed it or heard it a few times (see comments to this post from "Crno Srce", they are valuable)."
One big warning for anyone else looking for a book like Lesetraining B2 - it doesn't have any answers!! I can't find any, but I keep hoping I'm just missing them somehow! Unbelievable... [EDIT: The answers have been found! See this post for details] It'll still be useful though - I've decided to add vocabulary that I don't know to a new Anki list. The logic here is that although the vocabulary used in the B2 exam must be quite large, there is almost certainly a reasonably finite set of what they're able to use in any exam because it has to be fair and consistent to all past and future exam entrants. Actually, now that I've written that it seems both self-evident and nonsensical at the same time. Well, it makes sense to me!
As for "Perfectionnement Allemand", it looks and sounds great. I've listened to the first two lessons, but I haven't gone through with the text. I understood them all pretty much, but I need to read the notes, etc. As I mentioned right at the start, my French isn't great, but I think it'll do the trick, along with some amount of help from Google Translate, Linguee and perhaps some help from the forums on How To Learn Any Language where I've seen someone posting about using this course even though they speak no French. This is possible because the audio is ALL in the target language, though of course it helps massively if you can't understand the parallel translation :-)
One final note - I made a comment on someone's review of Assimil's "German With Ease" and they read my comment and actually amended their review to add an extra star! The reason I felt the need to comment was not that I think this book is the only way to learn German, but my experience with it has just been so positive compared to previous attempts (along with some very simple and very good advice from Benny the Irish Polyglot) that I just feel the need to share what I've learnt along the way. Here is what the original reviewer added to his review in response to my comments:
"April 2011 -
After having tried other German learning techniques, I believe the Assimil approach is one of the best. This method (like all methods) does require perseverance and patience, something I did not really appreciate when I first wrote this review. My comments about timing, etc. still stand, but can be overcome using things like an iPod (which makes it easier to pause and restart), or actually speaking over the audio after you have reviewed it or heard it a few times (see comments to this post from "Crno Srce", they are valuable)."
Since I now know that at least one other person in the world found the advice useful, I've reproduced the main part of it here:
***
I do have some specific advice to address your issues. Definitely, listen to the audio. My "ideal" day (the way I was able to practice at the start) is to listen to the new lesson several times, trying to understand it as best I can, and guessing at the meanings of new words. Then I read the lesson + the translations several times while having breakfast, and also read it a few times out loud in German only. After that I would listen to the lesson on repeat on my mobile phone for my whole commute. I used to take public transport, so I would often be able to read along with the audio quite a lot, but I felt too self-conscious to repeat the lessons out loud. Now I have to commute by car, so I just listen to the audio on repeat and steal a few moments here and there at traffic lights to check what I'm hearing, or remind myself of the translation. The most important thing I do is that, after a few initial listenings, I repeat along with the actors at their speed. I start speaking just after they start, and I have to keep up, while also listening to the next few words. Of course, by this stage I know the lesson reasonably well from having read it and listened to it a fair bit, but it still requires being able to hear different words to what you're repeating. Still, it is VERY doable. The lessons get faster and more complex as you go along, but as long as I make sure I can repeat the lesson along with the actors without making mistakes, I never feel that I'm getting lost in later lessons. If you use a digital music player, you will probably find it easier to repeat specific sections of the text, which I sometimes do to practice a passage I find particularly difficult.
As for pronunciation, I basically never used the pronunciation guides for each lesson. Then again, because the text uses bold to indicate the stressed syllable, and German is so easy to pronounce once you know the writing rules and have heard the sounds a few times, you should be able to get a decent pronunciation just from reading. Of course, there's no substitute for listening to the audio and trying constantly to correct your pronunciation to match that of the actors (in particular, you won't know which vowel sounds are long and which are short just from reading the text). Also, listening to the current lesson on repeat allows you to use time when you can't read (driving, exercising, washing the dishes :-), etc).
As for pronunciation, I basically never used the pronunciation guides for each lesson. Then again, because the text uses bold to indicate the stressed syllable, and German is so easy to pronounce once you know the writing rules and have heard the sounds a few times, you should be able to get a decent pronunciation just from reading. Of course, there's no substitute for listening to the audio and trying constantly to correct your pronunciation to match that of the actors (in particular, you won't know which vowel sounds are long and which are short just from reading the text). Also, listening to the current lesson on repeat allows you to use time when you can't read (driving, exercising, washing the dishes :-), etc).
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More updates to come, in German in the future...
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