Sorry to say, but I still haven't found the time to post my post-mortem. Hopefully I'll get more time soon!
In the meantime, I wanted to point you to a source of free audio books which I recently found:
http://www.sprechbude.de/
I guess all the material is out of copyright. There's some poetry by Heinrich Heine (of "Die Lorelei" fame) and works by Goethe and Kafka. Speaking of Kafka, how about reading and listening to "Der Prozess" to get the ball rolling:
Der Prozess (audio)
Der Prozess (text)
I haven't started on it yet, but it's quite famous and I believe it's worth a read and/or listen. Anyone who gets into it, please let us all know what you think in the comments. Personally, I still plan on reading Das Parfüm next, properly this time, including adding a lot of the new vocabulary to my Anki list. I haven't started yet because I've been reading some English language books that have been missing out on my attention due to my German studies.
In other news, everything is ticking along. We're still having a Stammtisch at work once a week, I still listen to podcasts (SWR2 Wissen podcasts are my current favourites) every day, and read articles in FAZ every few days.
Oh, and I keep up with my Anki list, of course! I'm adding words much more slowly these days, both due to a reduced necessity and reduced effort :-) Some recent additions have been words I've heard in Podcasts and which I later remembered well enough to look them up (several hours later) so this indicates an improved level of comfort with German. I still have to put in some really focused effort to bring up my listening comprehension to that 95++% region all the time. I'll let you know what I work out for that in the near future!
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ReplyDeleteGreetings from India!
ReplyDeleteGreat job with this blog! Its super useful! I have just cleared A2, and targeting for B1. How much time do you think it will take if I put in 5-10 hrs a week?
cheers!
Guten tag, Vishnu!
DeleteThanks for reading, and for your kind words.
Have you ever heard the english phrase "how long is a piece of string?". I think it applies here :-) In any case, I'm no expert, and the answer would be different for everyone.
For me personally, I felt like I was ready for the B1 exam around mid-February 2011. I started not from zero but definitely from a sub-A1 level, and this was after 9 months. I would have spent another month in focused study to prepare for the actual exam. I think I got most of the way there just by completing Assimil's "German with Ease" to be honest, although translating the German news and other "real world" articles from German radio and then listening to them until I understood them completely certainly helped with my listening comprehension.
The hours per week isn't the real issue. Just make sure you do something every single day. My own preference would be to study an Assimil lesson every day and/or review my Anki list. Listen to the German news and other articles that interest you. Read stuff that interests you, even if it takes a while. Add to your anki list as you do specific study for the exam and do past papers, etc.
I'm not sure if any of this would be overkill for the B1 exam - I was always aiming for the B2 exam first up, so take that into account. Then again, I like to be overprepared!
And just in case the message got lost in the noise above: don't count the hours but do SOMETHING every day :-)
Best of luck!