This is one of those "checkpoint" posts really. Apart from the last few days being spent sick as a dog in bed, I've finally been working through the sample exam section of Lesetraining B2 (as opposed to the practice section!) and my results have been encouraging so far, both in terms of time taken and results, so I'm pretty happy right now. It's made me think that I need to focus on listening skills again as much as possible. Here are the results I got recently:
Part B, Test 8: 22/25 including 7/10 in the part I always found the hardest before (filling in the blanks).
Part B, Test 9: 19/25 - a couple of rushed mistakes. Done at lunchtime at work while eating lunch in 34 mins (80 mins allowed for the real exam).
Part B, Test 10: 22/25 done in about 54 mins, spread out over a few days.
I still need to add the words I didn't know or was unsure about to my Anki list. I only just got to the stage of not having any new words introduced to me from the last time I added a tonne of vocab. Fun times ahead!
I've also done one of the practice writing questions from the online version of the B2 exam. My time was broken up into two chunks, with the second being quite a distracted chunk indeed. However, I managed to keep within the time limit (60 minutes I think?) and produced a 280 word answer where 180 are required, which means that if I had kept myself to the topic better, I could have easily finished with plenty of time to spare to check for mistakes. I've sent it to my Austrian friend for corrections whenever she gets time. I'm not in a rush at the moment, though I plan to do more of this as I really feel that just this one piece of written composition helped.
Practice makes less imperfect, I guess...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Adding up the costs...
Just for the sake of it, I've decided to try to do a brief rundown of how much money I've spent on learning German so far. I'm very conscious of price in my studies. The question is not "how much do I need to spend?" but rather "why spend anything at all?"
The biggest cost for a lot of people in language learning could be their language courses, or private tutors. I've used both of these in the past for languages other than German and I was much less successful, despite as much calendar time passing, as well as a not insignificant amount of money passing out of my bank account! I felt as though I just needed to go to the class, put in the time there and with *assigned* homework, and one day I would know when I was ready. The secrets would be revealed to me, and I'd magically be able to read, write and speak with confidence.
Well, the magic never happened.
Now that I don't go to classes, I do something most days. Anki reviewing and listening to German podcasts being the two main daily activities. I get to speak about once a week at the moment, and I find the odd moment here or there to do some study-type activities. I've also met up with my new German-speaking friends both in and out of work, whenever that's been possible. But what I've done very little of is spend my hard-earned cash :-)
I've been lucky too to receive gifts from friends and family, and to get a few items on loan from my sister. I've listed these below as well. Which of them would I have bought myself? Probably none of them, though I appreciate all of them immensely. I do think that one of the books I received as a present is a really good confidence boost, if only in the sense of achievement I get from easily following the story (but still not understanding every single word!). I don't know what I would do about this in the future. Probably check out my local library to see what they have. I might try to buy some books second-hand as well wherever possible, though this can be quite hit and miss. Maybe I can just wait till I receive some more presents!
So, the tally. First the items I have bought (note that none of the links below are affiliate links):
And that's it so far. AU$70. The textbooks for a couple of levels of German at the Goethe Institute probably cost something like that.
I've been given the following as various kinds of presents or loans:
Of course, much of my reading and listening comes from online - Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, etc. In fact, without the internet, I don't think I could make anywhere near the progress I've been able to without spending some more money on content. In the old days, it just wasn't that easy to get foreign language material for free. Possible yes, but not easy!
There might be something I've actually spent money on that's missing from this list, but I can't think of it at the moment. I'm going to try to keep my total expenditure (excluding the cost of the exam) to be below $100, which means I can't spend more than another $30. I'd really rather not even spend that :-)
The biggest cost for a lot of people in language learning could be their language courses, or private tutors. I've used both of these in the past for languages other than German and I was much less successful, despite as much calendar time passing, as well as a not insignificant amount of money passing out of my bank account! I felt as though I just needed to go to the class, put in the time there and with *assigned* homework, and one day I would know when I was ready. The secrets would be revealed to me, and I'd magically be able to read, write and speak with confidence.
Well, the magic never happened.
Now that I don't go to classes, I do something most days. Anki reviewing and listening to German podcasts being the two main daily activities. I get to speak about once a week at the moment, and I find the odd moment here or there to do some study-type activities. I've also met up with my new German-speaking friends both in and out of work, whenever that's been possible. But what I've done very little of is spend my hard-earned cash :-)
I've been lucky too to receive gifts from friends and family, and to get a few items on loan from my sister. I've listed these below as well. Which of them would I have bought myself? Probably none of them, though I appreciate all of them immensely. I do think that one of the books I received as a present is a really good confidence boost, if only in the sense of achievement I get from easily following the story (but still not understanding every single word!). I don't know what I would do about this in the future. Probably check out my local library to see what they have. I might try to buy some books second-hand as well wherever possible, though this can be quite hit and miss. Maybe I can just wait till I receive some more presents!
So, the tally. First the items I have bought (note that none of the links below are affiliate links):
- Lesetraining B2 - AU$25 delivered from The Book Depository.
- Perfectionnement Allemand ("Using German") by Assimil - AU$25 also from the Book Depository. This is without audio - with audio it's about $100. Unfortunately I couldn't stretch to this, but I was lucky enough to later find it second-hand.
- Das Parfum - the movie. Can't remember but it was pretty cheap (bought while in Germany). AU$10 at the most.
- Das Parfum - the book. Got it second-hand online (bought while in Germany) for about AU$10 as well.
And that's it so far. AU$70. The textbooks for a couple of levels of German at the Goethe Institute probably cost something like that.
I've been given the following as various kinds of presents or loans:
- Assimil's German with Ease, which I received as a going-away gift before I left for Germany. This was the start of it all for me really. Without this book, I don't think I would have lasted on this path for so long. I learnt reading, pronunciation, listening comprehension and grammar all at the same time in a way I could apply immediately through lots and lots of examples of native speakers. Just perfect!
- Grimm's Fairy Tales - actually a gift from our Austrian friends for my daughter's first birthday, but she needs some help reading it :-)
- Der Beobachter by Charlotte Linke, an author from where I lived in Germany (Frankfurt-am-Main). It's not the sort of thing that I would read in English (maybe I should start?), but then I think that can be a good thing some times. I decided not to be daunted by the enormous size of this book (600+ pages of story!) and just get started on it, and I'm now about page 107 or so. I think this is faster than I read the Lord of the Rings (in English!) the first time I tried, because I just hated Hobbits so much. Please, LOTR fans - don't kill me!
- Two other 600+ page novels. Haven't touched either of these yet.
- Two other children's books to read to my daughter. Have read these to my daughter already a couple of times. One of them is all about the noises animals make, which is pretty cool to know, really :-)
- Duden's Bildwörterbuch + some grammar books on loan from my sister. I've only ever really flicked through these.
Of course, much of my reading and listening comes from online - Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, etc. In fact, without the internet, I don't think I could make anywhere near the progress I've been able to without spending some more money on content. In the old days, it just wasn't that easy to get foreign language material for free. Possible yes, but not easy!
There might be something I've actually spent money on that's missing from this list, but I can't think of it at the moment. I'm going to try to keep my total expenditure (excluding the cost of the exam) to be below $100, which means I can't spend more than another $30. I'd really rather not even spend that :-)
Friday, January 13, 2012
Weichnachtsgeschenke...
Before two weeks pass into the New Year, I should do a bit of an update!
I scored at Christmas! My Austrian friends were getting a visit from their parents and so they had them bring over a couple of books for me - just some normal Bestseller, sold-in-airports types of books, but they're just what I've been looking for. The one I started on was from a German author from my old hometown (or rather, where I lived for 6 months) - Frankfurt am Main. It's called "Der Beobachter" by Charlotte Link. At 650 pages all, I have to admit that I found the prospect daunting. To be honest, I rarely read fiction books in English, and I'm hardly a super-fast reader as it is, but I've got through 60 odd pages already and I'm really enjoying it. There have only been one or two passages where the meaning was a little unclear to me. This is not to say there haven't been many words I haven't understood. There've been plenty! I intended to add unknown words to my Anki list, but so far I only managed to add those from the back and inside covers and the first couple of pages. It just takes a lot of time, and it's time I could be spending actually reading the book. Still, I should do it every now and then because words do pop up multiple times. Perhaps I'll make that my rule - if it pops up twice, and I don't know it, I'll write it down somewhere so I can add it to Anki later.
I also got another fat novel and two children's books in German as gifts from my parents for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading the children's books to my daughter!
I did manage to keep studying German throughout the break too, despite working between Christmas and New Year's and the rest of the time mostly being about family things. I made sure I stayed on track with Anki as a minimum. I went to a BBQ with my wife and daughter to my Austrian friends' house and had a chance to talk to their visiting parents and sister. The parents spoke no English, so it was a good opportunity. They were lovely and I really enjoyed talking to them. They took a while to speak to me too much. They probably weren't sure how much I would understand. I had to remember too that Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which is pretty much all I understand, is just about no one's actual first language. If I hadn't been there, they would have been speaking "in dialect" as they put it. My friend's mother was really nice and, for the first hour or so at least, spoke to me really, really slowly :-)
Unfortunately, apart from this language practice, and once at work between Christmas and New Year's, I haven't had much practice lately. It looks like I'll have more of a chance in mid-January but I've been accelerating my efforts in other areas, with the goal, of course, of getting ready for a Goethe exam sometime soonish. This means I need to be intensify this area as well. I've been giving this a little thought and hope to come up with something soon.
Some other news - I finally did another lesson from Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Using German) - lesson 18 complete! I had decided not to do it anymore, but since my speaking practice has dropped off a bit, I figured I may as well do some more as a weak substitute. It's better than nothing! I think now that I've left it for so long I realise that I've been enjoying real world material more and it's probably more useful for building the vocabulary I really want. However, as a source of parallel translations with recordings all already prepared, it's hard to beat for the drive to work.
Oh yeah, and I realised the other day that I bought Lesetraining B2 in mid-March (got it early April I think?) and I hadn't even finished the first half of the book, which contains tests that get progressively harder in order to prepare you for the second half, which is the real practice tests. I'm not sure how much of a difference in difficulty there really is, but anyway, I recently finished all of Part A! That includes adding any vocab I didn't know to my Anki list. When I think back to how hard I found some of the first lessons, I realise that I've come a long way. Today at lunch I also did the first part of the first question in Part B. Got 5 out of 5, did it in 10 minutes (15 would be available in the exam), and added the roughly 10 words I either didn't know or just wasn't 100% sure about to my Anki list. I plan on using my time better to get through the rest of these sample questions before I've had the book for a year!
I suppose that's part of the reason why my posts have become less frequent (if that's possible). And with that, I'll sign off so I can continue to work on the first New Year's Resolution that I've made in a long time - to get to bed earlier. Not to sleep longer, no, but just to get to bed, maybe read for a few minutes first, and just generally live life a bit earlier in the day!
Tschau!
I scored at Christmas! My Austrian friends were getting a visit from their parents and so they had them bring over a couple of books for me - just some normal Bestseller, sold-in-airports types of books, but they're just what I've been looking for. The one I started on was from a German author from my old hometown (or rather, where I lived for 6 months) - Frankfurt am Main. It's called "Der Beobachter" by Charlotte Link. At 650 pages all, I have to admit that I found the prospect daunting. To be honest, I rarely read fiction books in English, and I'm hardly a super-fast reader as it is, but I've got through 60 odd pages already and I'm really enjoying it. There have only been one or two passages where the meaning was a little unclear to me. This is not to say there haven't been many words I haven't understood. There've been plenty! I intended to add unknown words to my Anki list, but so far I only managed to add those from the back and inside covers and the first couple of pages. It just takes a lot of time, and it's time I could be spending actually reading the book. Still, I should do it every now and then because words do pop up multiple times. Perhaps I'll make that my rule - if it pops up twice, and I don't know it, I'll write it down somewhere so I can add it to Anki later.
I also got another fat novel and two children's books in German as gifts from my parents for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading the children's books to my daughter!
I did manage to keep studying German throughout the break too, despite working between Christmas and New Year's and the rest of the time mostly being about family things. I made sure I stayed on track with Anki as a minimum. I went to a BBQ with my wife and daughter to my Austrian friends' house and had a chance to talk to their visiting parents and sister. The parents spoke no English, so it was a good opportunity. They were lovely and I really enjoyed talking to them. They took a while to speak to me too much. They probably weren't sure how much I would understand. I had to remember too that Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which is pretty much all I understand, is just about no one's actual first language. If I hadn't been there, they would have been speaking "in dialect" as they put it. My friend's mother was really nice and, for the first hour or so at least, spoke to me really, really slowly :-)
Unfortunately, apart from this language practice, and once at work between Christmas and New Year's, I haven't had much practice lately. It looks like I'll have more of a chance in mid-January but I've been accelerating my efforts in other areas, with the goal, of course, of getting ready for a Goethe exam sometime soonish. This means I need to be intensify this area as well. I've been giving this a little thought and hope to come up with something soon.
Some other news - I finally did another lesson from Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Using German) - lesson 18 complete! I had decided not to do it anymore, but since my speaking practice has dropped off a bit, I figured I may as well do some more as a weak substitute. It's better than nothing! I think now that I've left it for so long I realise that I've been enjoying real world material more and it's probably more useful for building the vocabulary I really want. However, as a source of parallel translations with recordings all already prepared, it's hard to beat for the drive to work.
Oh yeah, and I realised the other day that I bought Lesetraining B2 in mid-March (got it early April I think?) and I hadn't even finished the first half of the book, which contains tests that get progressively harder in order to prepare you for the second half, which is the real practice tests. I'm not sure how much of a difference in difficulty there really is, but anyway, I recently finished all of Part A! That includes adding any vocab I didn't know to my Anki list. When I think back to how hard I found some of the first lessons, I realise that I've come a long way. Today at lunch I also did the first part of the first question in Part B. Got 5 out of 5, did it in 10 minutes (15 would be available in the exam), and added the roughly 10 words I either didn't know or just wasn't 100% sure about to my Anki list. I plan on using my time better to get through the rest of these sample questions before I've had the book for a year!
I suppose that's part of the reason why my posts have become less frequent (if that's possible). And with that, I'll sign off so I can continue to work on the first New Year's Resolution that I've made in a long time - to get to bed earlier. Not to sleep longer, no, but just to get to bed, maybe read for a few minutes first, and just generally live life a bit earlier in the day!
Tschau!
Thursday, January 5, 2012
How many words does an adult know?
I've been wondering this a little lately, so I thought I'd lay down some thoughts just briefly since it's really not the purpose of this blog.
To be honest, I'm not too hung up on the number of words I know in German, though I must admit I did get a little thrill when my own Anki list passed the 2,000 card mark! That's over 1,000 pairs of mappings from German to English. I say mappings because it's quite rare for my cards to be a 1-to-1 pairing. I map 1 to N words to 1 to N words. N is probably never bigger than four. This means that the number of words represented in these mapping pairs is a lot more than 1,000. Probably at least 2,000. And yet, that's not too important to me really. The most important thing for me is that I am adding new words all the time because then at least I know I'm growing my possible vocabulary. Like I've said before, sure, it's not all about words, but they are a massive part of the task, especially, I feel, at my intermediate stage, but it's probably true at any stage. It's the one thing you will always need to increase to become a fully literate, high-functioning individual in a foreign language.
I read a very interesting article recently:
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
The basic gist of it is that reading substantially enhances your vocabulary (in your own language) and that early differences in reading ability and word recognition are magnified throughout your life. Perhaps the same could be said of reading a foreign language?
It also makes this very interesting point which seems to me to also relate to language learning:
"Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.
Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOME
And compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIAL"
For a brachial specialist, the answer would be different of course, but I agreed somewhat with his assessment. Perhaps "fop" is more familiar to me than to him, but really all that's going on in your brain is some very clever neural network processing (with time sequencing of course). This maps firings to other firings to other firings, and you have meaning. Items that fire frequently are reinforced (hence the name "reinforcement learning") and less frequent items degrade over time to some extent.
I feel this way about German. I can think in German at times, and it feels pretty much like thinking in English except that I get stuck on some concepts. English and German have started to differentiate themselves in my head so that switching between them can be slow. Sometimes I'll get stuck for a word and first have to think of the word in English before it comes to me in German, at which point I switch back. This feeling of switching is probably fairly normal at an intermediate stage. Although I can (sometimes!) hold a relatively long conversation in German, I still have a long way to go. I feel like I have internalised many words and structures so that, normally, I can produce correct sentences at normal speed without thinking *consciously* about them. The same goes for comprehending. However, both, in general, require my full focus. English does not require my full focus, though it is still hard to listen to details if I don't pay attention, of course!
In German, it feels like the main conscious effort is in maintaining that focus, that attention. It's tiring. No, it doesn't often come easy yet, but I feel it slowly changing over time.
I think the interesting point for me from the link above was that people who read have a larger vocabulary than people who don't. This may not be *universally* true, but it sounds pretty reasonable as an assumption. This has two corollaries for language learning: (1) If you want a large vocabulary in the language you're studying, you're going to need to read LOTS and (2) When you read in a language you're learning, you will likely encounter a lot more unknown words than in general conversation. I would say that this is all even more so for literature as opposed to just general websites.
Of course, you don't just want a large vocabulary. You need to comprehend native speech at full-speed and interact. To be able to do that, you need to practice that skill. It won't just appear by magic. You also need to understand incomplete input over noisy channels (telephones, radios, speech partner mumbling, etc). Again, this is an acquired skill through practice.
After all, you wouldn't expect to become a Chess Grandmaster by just watching lots of games being played, would you? And yet, Chess is a purely deterministic, mathematically simple problem (albeit one with a very, very large search space). Chess Grandmasters are made through study, practice, instruction and LOTS and LOTS of progressively harder practice.
Anyway, enough talking about practice - I'll get back to actually doing it :-) I'll give an update on what I've been up to lately in my next post...
To be honest, I'm not too hung up on the number of words I know in German, though I must admit I did get a little thrill when my own Anki list passed the 2,000 card mark! That's over 1,000 pairs of mappings from German to English. I say mappings because it's quite rare for my cards to be a 1-to-1 pairing. I map 1 to N words to 1 to N words. N is probably never bigger than four. This means that the number of words represented in these mapping pairs is a lot more than 1,000. Probably at least 2,000. And yet, that's not too important to me really. The most important thing for me is that I am adding new words all the time because then at least I know I'm growing my possible vocabulary. Like I've said before, sure, it's not all about words, but they are a massive part of the task, especially, I feel, at my intermediate stage, but it's probably true at any stage. It's the one thing you will always need to increase to become a fully literate, high-functioning individual in a foreign language.
I read a very interesting article recently:
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
The basic gist of it is that reading substantially enhances your vocabulary (in your own language) and that early differences in reading ability and word recognition are magnified throughout your life. Perhaps the same could be said of reading a foreign language?
It also makes this very interesting point which seems to me to also relate to language learning:
"Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.
Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOME
And compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIAL"
For a brachial specialist, the answer would be different of course, but I agreed somewhat with his assessment. Perhaps "fop" is more familiar to me than to him, but really all that's going on in your brain is some very clever neural network processing (with time sequencing of course). This maps firings to other firings to other firings, and you have meaning. Items that fire frequently are reinforced (hence the name "reinforcement learning") and less frequent items degrade over time to some extent.
I feel this way about German. I can think in German at times, and it feels pretty much like thinking in English except that I get stuck on some concepts. English and German have started to differentiate themselves in my head so that switching between them can be slow. Sometimes I'll get stuck for a word and first have to think of the word in English before it comes to me in German, at which point I switch back. This feeling of switching is probably fairly normal at an intermediate stage. Although I can (sometimes!) hold a relatively long conversation in German, I still have a long way to go. I feel like I have internalised many words and structures so that, normally, I can produce correct sentences at normal speed without thinking *consciously* about them. The same goes for comprehending. However, both, in general, require my full focus. English does not require my full focus, though it is still hard to listen to details if I don't pay attention, of course!
In German, it feels like the main conscious effort is in maintaining that focus, that attention. It's tiring. No, it doesn't often come easy yet, but I feel it slowly changing over time.
I think the interesting point for me from the link above was that people who read have a larger vocabulary than people who don't. This may not be *universally* true, but it sounds pretty reasonable as an assumption. This has two corollaries for language learning: (1) If you want a large vocabulary in the language you're studying, you're going to need to read LOTS and (2) When you read in a language you're learning, you will likely encounter a lot more unknown words than in general conversation. I would say that this is all even more so for literature as opposed to just general websites.
Of course, you don't just want a large vocabulary. You need to comprehend native speech at full-speed and interact. To be able to do that, you need to practice that skill. It won't just appear by magic. You also need to understand incomplete input over noisy channels (telephones, radios, speech partner mumbling, etc). Again, this is an acquired skill through practice.
After all, you wouldn't expect to become a Chess Grandmaster by just watching lots of games being played, would you? And yet, Chess is a purely deterministic, mathematically simple problem (albeit one with a very, very large search space). Chess Grandmasters are made through study, practice, instruction and LOTS and LOTS of progressively harder practice.
Anyway, enough talking about practice - I'll get back to actually doing it :-) I'll give an update on what I've been up to lately in my next post...
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