Goethe C2 - reviewing my exam mistakes

Something I didn't know before I did the exam is that after failing 2 parts of the Goethe C2 exam (hey, and passing 2 parts!), I was offered the opportunity to head into the Goethe Institut Sydney to review my paper and see where I had gone wrong. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to bring the papers home with me, nor to take photos or copies, and I couldn't see the questions again (this may have been due to them not being available rather than specifically restricted, I'm not sure), but the exam supervisor did discuss the paper with me and explain the examiners' (plural - there were two markers for the written section of the exam, as well as for the spoken section) comments, which was extremely helpful. I don't remember where I went wrong in great detail, but my general impression is that I scored reasonably in those sections to do with "covering all the questions" and perhaps the overall structure and content, but I fell down in vocabulary and, particularly, an area which I believe was called "structure" but basically meant sentence-level grammatical mistakes. There was another area that covered grammar too which also wasn't great, but only one of them got me a "1". If that had been a 2 I would have passed. After all, I only missed out on a bare pass by 2 marks. This sort of grammatical polish and precision is something that can be improved by constant, careful practice and using the language often and extensively, being careful to observe the differences between one's own speech and that of one's interlocutors. Having said that, my impression from reading through many of my mistakes is that I could also have done better in this area just by having enough time to proofread and edit my answer. I write extremely slowly so I only just have enough time to write the 350 or so words required and certainly don't have time to write a rough copy, edit it and then copy it up neatly into the answer paper as many other much more successful C2 participants seem to have reported. However, I am pretty sure that I wrote more than required and I certainly could have forced myself to finish with at least 5 minutes to spare, if not 10. TO make use of this I would need to write my essay with a blank line between each written line to ensure I had space to effect neat corrections, which I also didn't do. So, yeah, this will need to be my strategy on the day. The other area I failed, I completely bombed out in - the listening section. I only got 37! In my single practice session with an official practice paper I got 87 and so didn't do any more practice. So, after the exam, in order to prepare for my re-attempt next year, I tried another official practice paper and got 79! Pretty similar to my first practice, very different to my exam result. I'm not sure what to put this down to. The two factors I can think of are (1) I listen with headphones which increases the clarity of the sound (although on the day I didn't feel this was an issue) and (2) my eyesight is getting worse and on the day of the exam, after having got through the 70 minute reading section of the exam, my eyes were very tired and I remember really struggling to focus on the words for the listening quetions sometimes. I always find the hardest part of the listening test, even in practice, to be just reading the digesting the questions and possible answers fast enough because we don't really get much reading time and I am a slow reader even in English, and naturally even more so in German. So, yeah, I think this was probably a bigger issue on the day. I distinctly remember struggling to read the questions and then not really being sure what the written word was asking, even though I heard the audio very clearly. Listening to genuine, native level content is the thing I do most with my German and I do a fair amount of it. I generally feel like I understand 100%, so the audio itself probably wasn't the issue. I will need to continue practicing, but also I expect that this section will just go better on the day because I won't be doing the reading section again, thus saving my eyes for the listening section. I will still practice this section of course. As for practicing the written section, I will need to pump more essays out with a time limit to get my handwriting speed up, but I also need corrections. The path I was originally going to follow was to use an Italki teacher and/or free writing correction websites to get corrections and use them to improve my writing iteratively. I will likely still be using these avenues, but since the release of ChatGPT I've realised that there's an amazingly powerful tool for free (or near free - they charge USD0.04 per ONE THOUSAND WORDS for their most expensive model. You can ask it to write an essay for you, as well as use it to improve your own writing and to explain the corrections, line-by-line if necessary. It's not perfect but it is good enough to help me improve. Truly worldchanging stuff for language learners that I'll be writing about soon I hope. I'll still be making use of humans, just likely less often, saving time (ChatGPT's feedback is practically instant) and money. In a few months when I plan to retake the Goethe C2 exam (listening and writing sections only) I'll be able to report on how it worked out.

My Experiences with the Goethe-Zertifikat-C2 Exam at the Goethe-Institut Sydney and my results

Well, I finally took the plunge. With no build up in the blog, no readers will be expecting this. And to be honest, I wasn't really expecting it myself. My prep just wasn't what it had been for the B2 - that single-minded, single-language focus that I had for most of the 1-1.5(?) years of preparation to saw me pass with a high score. In fact, it would be hard to describe what I did as "preparation" at all. Since doing the B2 exam in April 2012 I have not really focussed hard on German at any stage in between. The many years since then have been filled with family, work, app development in my "spare" time, keeping fit, getting injured and studying other languages.

I did focus on German occasionally. A few years ago I decided that I wanted to be able to properly understand German comedies. The fast pace of the dialogue, usually with plenty of slang and strange situations, has always challenged me. In order to be able to enjoy these and not just mostly understand them, I had to really bring my level up. My strategy involved using Anki + Subs2SRS to learn, scene by scene, the 2017 movie "Lommbock" (the sequel to the 2001 film "Lammbock"). It seems like a strange thing to do with a comedy, but it was really worthwhile. After learning to hear the dialogue at full pace and, if necessary, what it meant (the translations were hidden on the cards), I then sat through the film again and really enjoyed it, including feeling like I could hear the words and know what was being said, not just remembering the cards. The exception to this is the young teenager character in the movie. That guy really mumbled his lines. I still find it difficult to match up his dialogue with what actually comes out of his mouth.

Last year I had in mind to prepare for the C2 exam, so I read a book off the literature reading list for 2021 and one for 2022. I really enjoyed the book I picked for 2021 ("Der Alte König in seinem Exil") but the one for 2022 ("Weitlings Sommerfrische"), well, not so much. The C2 exam lists 2 books you can read, and then there are 4 options to choose from in the main (80%) writing section, 2 of them basically variations of letters to the editor, and 2 of them variations of reviews of each of the books. The advantage of picking the literature section is that you could memorise a thoroughly corrected essay or two and then try to make it fit the exam questions as best you can. I found the book so boring that I didn't even want to re-read it so I didn't go down this path and chose to focus on one of the other two options in the exam.

Apart from reading those books (and some others), my prep last year consisted of very little. I took advice from Ashwin Purohit who achieved a very high level in German. He passed the C2 exam, but after having heard him on the Easy German channel on YouTube, I'm guessing he aced it. He speaks German beautifully, and very fluently and naturally. And from his own descriptions, he did a LOT of preparation for the exam. I took on some of his advice and expanded my list of podcasts and YouTube channels, as well as occasionally reading the newspaper, though I fell off this bandwagon pretty early on and only got back on very irregularly. I tried his advice with regards to grammar and started reading and doing the exercises in "C-Grammatik: Übungsgrammatik Deutsch als Fremdsprache". However, I found this extremely slow and also that I wasn't really absorbing all the little details. I really only seemed to have a little bit of time late in the night for it and already felt pretty tired.

I guess the main "prep" I've done really is lots of podcast listening (my understanding is pretty much 100% on these), watched more German YouTube videos and also series on Netflix. For the Netflix series, I do usually watch with German subtitles. I don't think they're totally necessary, but to get to 100% understanding I still need them in some scenes. Since my prep wasn't really what I had wanted it to be, I continually delayed signing up to the exam. I've had a few minor personal misfortunes this year - mid year I broke my kneecap which entailed a very slow recovery, then I broke my little toe which slowed down some of my rehab, followed by getting a coughing illness that went through my whole household, but held onto me for about 2 months (ongoing, actually). I missed the earleir exams and then 1 day before the deadline to sign up for the last exam, I decided to just go for it anyway, despite my lack of prep. That was 15 days before the exam! I started to prepare using the book Mit Erfolg zum Goethe Zertifikat C2. I started with the reading section and really had to practice better technique, using highlighters to be able to re-find the important information, in order to get under the target time in the test. What I didn't try was the whole section at once with a single time limit.

A few days in though I was still coughing after 4 weeks or so, so my doctor sent me for an x-ray. I took the films home and looked them myself and saw a big white patch on my left lung. After having lost my mother to lung cancer, you can imagine that I wasn't feeling too confident. My doctor sent me for a CT scan the next day for a clearer image. At this stage I basically stopped studying and was just too worried about these results to continue studying. My medical scare turned out alright in the end, though the cough continued, but it took a toll on my study and enthusiasm.

When I got back to studying, I did the listening section from a practice paper. I smashed it with 87% and so decided not to spend any more time on this section as I clearly had a bigger problem - the writing section! I rarely write in German, and when I do I'm slow and only write relatively short pieces. I don't speak much either, but I feel more confident there and decided that if I could work on my composition it should help with the speaking section for me as well. The target number of words for the composition in the written section is 350 words in an hour. I wrote my first attempt and ran out of time at less than 280 words! I was in deep trouble. Also, I had no real way of telling how good it was, so I practiced another topic, this time writing 340 or so words in the hour, and then sent it off to two of my German speaking friends for correction. This was but a few days before the exam! Luckily, they responded very quickly and I realised that I was in even deeper trouble than I thought. The C2 level is no doddle, and I had neither extensive practice in the language, having spoken almost exclusively English for the 6 months that I lived in Germany at the start of 2010 (12 whole years ago!!), nor extensive coaching (practically none) nor had I done extensive practice. Yeah, it was going to be a struggle. Still, with the feedback I got, as well as finding some Goethe approved examples of good C2 level answers for the writing section, I was able to synthesise a few notes for myself. Since the questions tended to be fairly similar, I was able to compose a whole introductory paragraph, except for minor details, before the exam itself. I took these notes with me and crammed them right before the exam itself.

I got to the test centre (the lovely Goethe-Institut building in Woolahra, Sydney) nice and early and felt fairly relaxed. Unlike my B2 experience, post-covid everyone is kept outside and must get called in. Indeed, the Goethe-Institut is now locked and opened only by appointment it seems. Also unlike my B2 experience, during which the receptionist spoke to everyone in English but I insisted on using only German, the lovely people at the institute all pretty much spoke to me only in German right from the start. On that day they only had C-level exams - two people taking the C1 and two taking the C2 - so it makes sense that they would assume we can speak German well enough to get registered and understand the instructions!

I won't go into great detail about what happened on the day, partially because I can't remember it all that well :-) We kicked off with the reading section of the exam. I felt this was going OK, but my eyes were playing up (sometimes I struggle to focus - probably time for reading glasses, but it's not consistent so I haven't pursued it) and reading was slower than normal. My sleep the previous few nights had been poor as well, which contributes to my eye issues. Still, I was reading OK. The big issue was that while I did one section faster than the required time, I did two slower and had only 5 minutes to do the final 10 minute section. I think this one is harder than 10 minutes personally, and I ended up essentially just guessing these as I ran out of time. With my last 10 seconds I saw a word in one of the ads that made me change my answer and so, apart from random chance, that single answer out of the last 10 points is the only one I was (pretty) sure I got right! I really needed to practice this reading section in one chunk, but finding a whole hour to do anything uninterrupted in my life is generally pretty impossible and when it is possible, that means doing it late at night usually.

After a short break we did the listening section. There were many technical difficulties playing this from a CD via the big screen at the front of the room. The media player kept wanting to play the tracks in random order and our poor examiner didn't know how to fix that. I tried to suggest where to look, but I don't think I could interview. At this stage I found my eyes were really struggling to focus and reading the questions felt very, very slow. I very often hadn't fully read the questions and possible answers in the short gaps (usually something like 30 seconds) and so was flying blind. I was understanding the audio fine, but trying to read the questions and listen to the audio proved impossible. When I looked back at my answers at the sections yes/no questions or the "Person X/Person Y/Both agree with the statement" questions, they all had a very obvious skew. I knew then that something had probably gone pretty horribly wrong, but what could I do about it now?

Next on to the writing section. It has a 20-point section that asks implicit grammatical and vocabulary questions. I usually scored pretty poorly at this in practice - about 8-12 out of 20 - so I just raced through and did as well as I could and tried to get some extra time for the main task (80 points) of writing a "letter to the editor" style composition. I think in the end I wrote about 430 words but I used up all the time on the writing and didn't do any editing. And, unlike most other people, I write so slowly (when I'm trying to be neat, especially) that I had zero chance of writing a draft and then a neat copy. I didn't even really have much time to scribble some initial ideas! Instead, I had to rely on being able to put together a reasonably cogent argument on the fly. I also used those crammed notes I mentioned earlier to get some good "canned" phrases for free. Considering how I had been dreading this part of the exam, I left it feeling better than expected and felt I had a chance of a low pass. The big mistake I made was that I wrote way more than needed but didn't leave myself any time for corrections. It looks like I should have left at least 10 minutes for corrections which could have made a significant difference to the result.

After lunch we did the speaking section. I felt like it went pretty well, but I completely overshot the time on my 5 minute presentation. Under stress, I couldn't comprehend what my watch was telling me and thought there must be something wrong with it. They basically cut me off about 7.5+ minutes and said it had certainly been an extensive presentation. Some of the marks are for the structure of this speech though, and since I had only got halfway(!!!) through my points, I definitely would have to lost marks there. I didn't feel like I really showed my vocabulary on the day so I knew that would count against me. After all, this is the C2 exam. They're going to expect the best!

So, enough of the exam, what results did I get? Well, about 2 weeks after the exam I was emailed let me know my results were available. Each module is out of 100 and the pass mark is 60:

Lesen: 64/100
Hören: 39/100
Schreiben: 58/100
Sprechen: 63/100

Unlike the B2 exam, for which I was reasonably well prepared, this one was always going to be a close run thing. I wasn't particularly surprised about any of my results after how things went on the day EXCEPT the listening section. I knew it hadn't gone as well as my one single practice session when I got 87%, but I certainly wasn't ready for the complete catastrophe that it ended up being. Actually, in a way I was surprised by my writing result. Considering how it had gone in practice, and how little practice I had had, to get within 2 points of passing that section was quite surprising too. I think with more refined exam technique I should have had the time to do a little editing and cleaned up enough mistakes to pass.

The good news is that I did just scrape by in 2 of the sections. The way the C2 is structured is basically as 4 separate modules, so I can now go and get certificates for the 2 modules I passed and I can re-sit just the parts I failed next year (the first opportunity is in March) and if I pass them both then, then I can receive the C2 certificate (if the exam centre can combine the results for me). This result isn't at all unexpected, so I'm glad to know that I only need to redo 2 sections. Of course, I was hoping to only need to redo one section at most, but with a bit of practice and focus on the listening section I'm not too worried about that. And with a few months to focus on the writing section, considering I got so close this time, I can hope to pass it. Sure, I would like to have had awesome prep so I'm not just trying to scrape through, but given my current circumstances in life, I'll take a pass at C2 if I can get it!

I might write some more soon about preparing to retake those two sections, and perhaps even mention some of the other language related stuff I've been doing in recent years that has taken my focus away from German.

Till next time!

Assimil German with Ease over time

Today I'm going to do a mini-review of the differences between the 1987 edition of German with Ease that I learnt German with and the most recent edition (2014). I'll try to be unbiased, though that will be hard as I certainly credit the 1987 edition of the book + CDs with much of my success in passing the German B2 exam. It was pretty much my only source of grammar, and I ended up with an intuitive feel for the grammar that no other course of approach ever has. I'm pretty confident the new edition (2014) could do the same so don't take this comparison as any sort of advice against buying the new edition. I really just want to discuss some of the points of difference that I've noticed.

The idea of the lessons is that they are short, so you can do one a day (although, due to my desire to mimic the whole dialogue as closely as possible, I didn't keep to this timetable as the lessons got harder and longer) and they are usually funny, even if just in a very simple way. It's not Seinfeld, but you'll get a giggle to help cement your understanding and to make it easier to listen to the lesson on repeat many times as I did. Despite listening and repeating many times, I essentially never did the exercises. I just listened to those sentences as well, and repeated. I would read the English whenever I needed to to make sure I was understanding 100% so as to capture nuance as well. One thing that I actually considered to be a great advantage of the method was that it doesn't try to give you tourist-centric dialogues that you can use "from day one". All the other millions of copycat courses do that, and poorly to boot. You will NOT be able to use phrases right from the start if the language is unfamiliar to you. You may say something useful, but you won't understand the replies, so why focus on that? Instead, Assimil builds the intuitive skills needed for comprehension of spoken language, the hardest skill of all.

Since I only have access to chapters 1, 50 and 100 from the 2014 sample linked above, I will just compare those with the same lessons in the 1987 edition and see how they stack up.


Lesson 1
The 1987 has a funny little dialogue at a cafe, but it's definitely not your usual first dialogue in a language course. The customer complains about his tea being cold. The waiter apologises and brings him a new cup, which the customer now likes. Too much it seems as he then complains about the cup being too small! 9 lines and 19 new words.

In the 2014 edition the first lesson is entitled "Good luck" and says that today's a special day because you're starting to learn German. Humour is subjective, but this one is definitely not funny. 5 lines and 14 new words.

Lesson 50
The 1987 edition's 50th lesson is entitled "Being a shop assistant isn't easy". A man goes into a store and gets help picking something for his mother. Not particularly funny but reading it now it is familiar to me. 13 lines and 153 words.

The 2014 edition "Advertisements for Holiday Apartments", in which a couple discuss a possible holiday in Spain. The ad piques the wife's interest by describing its location and reassuring its German audience that the Spanish can speak English. The husband agrees that it sounds good but they don't mention money and, besides, he'd like to go Spain to learn Spanish. OK, so, again, not Seinfeld, but this one is funnier than its 1987 counterpart. 10 lines and 76 words.


Lesson 100
The 1987 editions 100th lesson is called "Don't trust anybody". It is about a reader of the book talking to someone they've just met (it seems) about how sad they are that their German book ("German with Ease") has now finished and how they were looking forward to every day. Their interlocutor is intrigued by someone having such a strong reaction to a book and takes a look and flicks through it. He realises he can understand a little with his school German and finds the pictures funny and so ends up just taking off with the book, leaving its original owner distraught. Silly? Yes, but silly in a funny way and memorable because of it. 15 long lines.

The 2014 edition's lesson 100 is a long email to an old friend telling the story of how she met her now partner. The story is a bit funny too. I think it's sort of memorable, and I think it's a good idea to include at least one informal letter in the book (the 1987 has one at lesson 99). It consists of 16 long lines.

The final complexity between these two lessons is probably pretty similar, although the 1987 edition uses more of the little particles that can be so tricky for learners to master, like "nun", "mal", etc. I can't imagine the transition to that complexity is as smooth in the 2014 edition though because the lessons I've seen from the sample seem so much shorter and simpler. I suspect a reader wouldn't end up as confident of the grammar, etc, and would have a smaller vocab purely because they had been exposed (seemingly, from this admittedly small sample) to much less of the language. And yet, the 2014 book's last lesson ends on page 508 vs the 1987 edition's 386 pages. This is something I've mentioned before - the new books have a format that doesn't fit easily into a pocket, unlike the older format with the very handy red string bookmark built in. All the older editions I've seen of a similar vintage have the same robust cover, whilst the newer editions (one of which I own) tend to be much larger, but with lots of wasted space and padding out and, it seems, possibly even less content overall, and, in language learning, content is king. Sometimes they expand the number of exercises, which I see no value in at all. They're just a way for a beginner to feel like they're not doing well and they go against the principle of assimilation for which the method is rightly famous.

I'm pretty sure I've written about this change to a cheaper but bulkier format before so I won't dwell on it here.

My summary is that I feel like the course has been simplified in being "updated". It's still probably the best method available on the market to get a solo learner to the stage of being able to have conversations and access native content (and then getting one's listening up to native speed). I really didn't study any grammar or do any grammar exercises before completing the B2 exam, so I have to concur that the 1987 edition at least did deliver on its promise of getting me to a B2 level, sort of. Certainly in terms of grammar. I still needed to learn a lot of words and work on some writing skills, but I'd say that Assimil + learning words from appropriate content + speaking with native speakers regularly is enough to pass the B2 exam. I suspect that's still true with the 2014 edition.

What are you experiences with either edition? Let me know in the comments!

Dear Monica - An open letter on the difficulties of language learning in a traditional setting

I recently read an article by one Monica Dux in which she describes her difficult experience in learning German. Her struggles brought back many memories for me of my earlier attempts at learning any language with any seriousness. I felt her pain!

First let me recap briefly her approach and some of the key moments in her article. I think one quote right at the start of the article really sums up her path: "my husband in particular, enduring detailed descriptions of the irregular verbs I’m currently grappling with". Memorising verb tables? That way lies insanity.

Monica takes seemingly traditional German language classes although she is now on Zoom lessons. I'm not sure if that was a post-covid development, or if she has always used online lessons. I think one on one online lessons would always have been better than classroom language learning as you don't spend your time waiting for other people to produce incorrect sentences at a stage when you have no idea what's right or wrong. Either way, the style seems to be the same. Work with a teacher as you go through a traditional textbook for your level. Monica is also supplementing with Duolingo it seems.

The reason I'm so certain that it's a fairly traditional textbook is because of the incredibly slow pace and the attitude of Monica's German tutor. On the timeframe, she says "I take my language classes seriously, so when I started, I decided that five years was enough time to become fluent." Her actual chosen level for "fluency" is B2, which is the same one I chose many years ago. It's not "native like" fluency, but it is often considered (by those who have achieved it) to be the first level where you feel reasonably confident in saying that you "speak" the language. It was a level where I felt I could move to German and get a job in a German-speaking company and, within a short timeframe, feel relatively comfortable because I would mainly just need to acquire more work specific vocabulary as well as more day-to-day language. The B2 level is where you feel you've "acquired" the language. That is, you won't lose it just by not using it. Yes, you can forget vocabulary and be out of practice speaking, etc., but you can more easily get back up to the same level.

The B2 level is a platform for listening to a whole range of native content and enjoying it with a high level of comprehension, as well asc ertainly being the level where most native level content can easily serve as an in-context source of new vocabulary without the crutch of your native language. It's possible to achieve some of those skills earlier, of course, but by B2 you should be able to do these things to a reasonably useful degree. So, toi toi Monica! It was a good choice of goal and certainly plenty of time. I think perhaps this goal was too long in fact as it loses some of the sense of urgency that can bring with it momentum. This is so useful in language learning as you will forget almost as much as you learn over time.

With a solid goal in mind, and a timetable, Monica mentioned it to her tutor who, with stereotypical German directness and certainty, told her that her goal of reacing B2 by a certain date was, essentially, impossible. Worse, although Monica was plowing her way through a B1 textbook at the time (the first of two), her tutor seemed to agree that proficiency might be another 10+ years away! TEN YEARS! A DECADE! EIN JAHRZEHNTEN! ONE EIGHTH OF THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN! Well, to be fair on the tutor, it's unclear from the article if "proficiency" meant C2, or, indeed, if the word meant the same thing to Monica and her tutor. Even so, it seems crazy for someone who's willing to stay focussed on the language for that time. It's been almost 10 years since I passed my B2 exam and I haven't gone on to C1 or C2 yet. I have considered them recently, but I haven't really done the work required, other than reading Sten Nadolny's Weitlings Sommerfrischer. I even translated the first chapter into English and wrote to the publisher to see if they were interested in my translation. No response yet, but surely the English-speaking public is keen to see more works from the author of The Discovery of Slowness? But I digress... I think my main point is that if I had pushed on to get to C2 instead of doing very different things with my "spare" time for most of the intervening period, including studying other languages, I am pretty certain that it wouldn't have taken me 10 years to get that certificate!

https://twitter.com/monicadux/status/1456047563522539522 The distance between the levels is non-linear. Roughly, you could consider the difficulty between levels to double at each step. HOWEVER, there are some important caveats. First, it has to be recognised by anyone who has achieved a high level learning a language after childhood, especially outside an "immersion" environment where you're forced to live the language, that the traditional "classroom + textbook" route is a long, slow road. People do achieve fluency that way, but it's excruciatingly slow and exacting and often, as a result, those who have succeeded along this path and then become language teachers themselves will then have a view that language learning can only have the goal of the level of standardised grammatical perfection that they themselves have achieved, and the only realistic road to that goal is the one they followed.

I used the traditional route for all language learning before learning German. In particular, when I was about 19 I started doing French classes at Alliance Francaise in Sydney. I did their 8 levels of French (without doing any exams) and, at the end of that process, dutifully doing my homework and trying hard in class, I realised that I couldn't really read or speak French, so I took the last two levels again. It was the classic approach of attending classes once a week, following a textbook, trying to perfect one small "simple" area of grammar before moving on to the next, and doing homework exercises on those grammatical points. Sometimes you even learn some vocabulary! This got me to the stage of still not being able to speak, read much, nor understand native content. Looking back, I realise now that the whole approach is pretty terrible. I think the classes are OK - I personally enjoy that style of learning - but they must be supplemented by daily practice and vocabulary acquisition through either of a few different paths. In fact, as I learn with German, the "supplemental exercises" are actually the core. I would only go to a traditional language class now at an intermediate level to prepare for an exam or because I had a lot of spare time and money. Ditto for online tutoring, really. You don't really need it below upper-intermediate, in my opinion, and even then it's perhaps questionable.

Most future projects would be some variant on what worked best for me with German to get to the B2 exam within about 2 years from when I started, and including moving countries and having my first child, having a fulltime job and trying to maintain a "normal" life (as normal as a new parent's life can be). Those key points are listed in other posts on this blog, but I'll condense them here:

• Daily practice: at least a little every day. I wasn't perfect - life does get in the way - but it was a goal I stuck to fairly closely.
• Assimil's brilliant German with Ease (although I used an older edition). This book got me to a B2 level of grammar with strong intuition for "correct" forms. I used a form of shadowing. I would listen and repeat after the audio until I could keep up with the whole dialogue for all participants. At this stage, I had memorised the meaning as well (this is fairly easy - one or two quick reads of the English are generally enough). Only then would I go on to the next lesson. The exercises are unnecessary, indeed even anathema to the assimilation process.
• Anki
. Absolutely amazing and indispensible. I went from thinking I was just hopeless at memorising vocabulary to rapidly acquiring and maintaining a solid vocabulary. Make sure you get the official app only - there are lots of rip-off versions floating about!
• Make friends with a conversation partner. I did this once I had reached I was about 80% of the way through German with Ease, IIRC.
• I made my own parallel translations as well of content that had audio. This was especially helpful for learning to comprehend the news at full speed which is a very relevant skill for passing a language exam.

(One thing to note is that the older version of German with Ease seems better than the latest, from what I've seen in the samples of the latest. I might write more on this later, but I can definitely recommend the older version that I used.)

I did other things as well, such as working through a single B2 exam prep book, as well as reading a German crime novel, and then recording all the unknown words and adding them to my Anki deck, but the above points are the main ones. In other, they were respectively the bedrock of grammar acquisition (including developing a "feel" for what's correct), vocabulary acquisition, developing speaking and conversational listening skills, and finally developing more formal, one-way listening skills.

What's important as a contrast with Monica's approach and my earlier attempt at French fluency is that I did essentially ZERO memorising of grammar rules or verb tables and I attended essentially ZERO traditional lessons. I never even owned or read a grammar to anything more than a passing glance, really. I did NOT follow specific levels in a textbook, except for the brilliantly progressive lessons in German with Ease which really did allow me to develop that elusive "feel" for how to form sentences correctly.

Sure, to progress to C2 I will definitely need to have more deliberate focus on more complex grammar. I think at this stage it's more efficient in terms of time to try to remember a few grammar rules to apply in rare occasions (though practice is still key!) rather than trying to assimilate these through real world examples as the examples are too rare to reinforce the lessons.

Now, after this long, rambling piece, I come to my suggestions for Monica:

• Develop a habit of daily practice. Do at least something small each day.
• I know you're already at B1 but try Assimil's German with Ease (I recommend older version). You can race through the early stuff, but remember to shadow the dialogues. Listen and repeat at full speed and with full comprehension (read the English text once when necessary) until you can repeat it without mistakes (while shadowing). Only then should you move on. DO NOT BOTHER DOING THE EXERCISES!
• You must get Anki. Start out perhaps with a pre-made list of "B2" level words. It won't be perfect, but it will help bootstrap your vocab to a great extent. At some stage you should be making your own list based on words you've gathered from your own sources.
• Find a conversation partner. You can try a language exchange. I've found the best conversation partners for a learner are those who themselves have struggled to learn a foreign language in their late teenage years or later. They understand your pain. Traditionally trained language tutors may not make good conversation partners.
• Ditch the current tutor/language school. They're slowing you down!

I talk about some of these in my post-mortem after having passed the B2 exam. This includes a description of how I make Anki cards so they're really useful (e.g., "sich um jdm kummern" not just "kummern", sometimes with irregular verb forms if I could be bothered looking them up, and nouns with their gender and plural always "der Mann/Männer" rather than just "Mann").

I hope this can help, or anyone in a similar situation as I was myself many years ago. Viel Glück!

On the nature of human language

This post, after a hiatus of so many years, will also be a little change of pace for the blog. Actually, after so many years, just posting is a "change of pace", but this will be a change of pace for other reasons.

The inspiration for this post was when I recently watched a lecture on the evolution of language by a distinguished scholar named Mark Pagel, which you can see for yourself here. He states some uncontroversial points about human history, but interwoven are a number of comments which seem odd, and a general thread that only late Homo Sapiens could speak, and this is taken as a given. For instance, in a discussion on Neanderthal/Sapiens interbreeding in which he states, matter of factly, that we don't know if their children would have had language. Indeed, in his language, he is extremely explicit about this point - at about 29 minutes in he discusses the human family tree, including Neanderthals and Denisovans and states, very firmly that "not a single one of them has language, as far as we can guess". His criteria for this seems to almost totally based on culture toolkits, but for Neanderthals he has to have an an extra reason to exclude them because they seem to have had fairly sophisticated culture (although, at other times, he just discounts Neanderthal culture altogether). His extra "evidence" for this is that, although they had the same FOXP2 gene as us, it is affected by different regulatory genes. This accepts rather uncritically the idea that FOXP2 is a vital component of language communication in humans. It is perhaps possible that modern human languages rely on the gene, but not that language itself (whether spoken, or mixed-mode with signs, or whatever) requires the gene. In any case, this is still highly speculative and should be couched in terms more appropriate to indicate it is.

One of his major points supporting the idea that only Homo sapiens have ever had language is an image shown at around 57 minutes in. It shows the geographical and chronological distribution of human ancestors starting with Homo ergaster then Homo erectus, neanderthalensis and up to sapiens. Even just the initial split of ergaster as separate from erectus is controversial. The image he shows demonstrates that sapiens spread over the whole world in a relatively brief period of time. It seems to me uncontroversial to suggest that sapiens were smarter and more adaptable than most of their forebears, although I'm not sure we can guarantee that there were no Neanderthals, for example, who were smarter than a modern day human, given the wide range of abilities exhibited in any sufficiently large population. The small percentage of neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans perhaps owes more to the neolithic farming revolution than to any specific advantages of Homo sapiens over Homo neanderthalensis. In any case, the image also shows that Homo erectus lasted an extraordinarily long time and covered all of Asia, but almost nothing else (it is unclear from the image, but it seems to be indicating a relatively brief early presence in Africa as well). However, being a big fan of paleoanthropology and John Hawks in particular, this struck me as ringing a little untrue. A quick check of wikipedia reveals a much greater extent, which is to say all of Africa, Europe and Asia, including small islands that can only be reached by boat, showing a level of sophistication and planning which Mark Pagel ignores completely in his lecture. It's not like his lecture is so old that it couldn't include this new information either as it's from 2019. Indeed, his distribution of neanderthals is similarly too limited as they were in Europe, the Levant and central Asia. Certainly one of the most famous neanderthal finds is from well outside of Europe. John Hawks has written on the topic of the "myth" that African populations lack neanderthal ancestry. Wikipedia has a similar type of picture to Pagel's but which shows an African population of erectus persisting until Homo heidelbergensis appears, representing either an evolved state of Homo erectus or a replacement. The main point to note is that this picture, which seems to me based on my other reading, to be more the "consensus" view, is quite a bit different from that presented as uncontroversial in Mark Pagel's lecture. It seems fairly safe to say that Homo erectus was pretty widespread. Not as widespread as sapiens, but we should also remember at the same time that the evidence for sapiens is from more recent time frames and thus more likely to be observed by us whereas our ancestors used stone and wood, lived at much lower densities, may often have lived in areas that are now flooded as a result of sea rise at the end of the last ice age, and are thus just far less likely to be observed by us today. A culture that makes extensive use of wood and hide, for example, will largely disappear without a trace after 100,000+ years, so we shouldn't take the distribution of skeletal and tool finds as being indicative of the whole range of the species, but as a minimum area they must have travelled across at least. To my mind then it would seem clear that both Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were quite successful and widespread, erectus especially so. His almost cartoonish characterisation of the lives of neanderthals seems to belong to another age altogether. I found myself opining as I listened to him, what would be conclude about Australian Aboriginals and their ability to speak any language at all, on the basis of what evidence would survive 100k years. No rock art of highly decorated barks or dilly bags would be found, no instruments (being as they were wood). They had great stone tools which we might be able to determine were hafted, but erectus had pretty good stone tools. Lost are all the dances, ceremonies, songs and other aspects of their intensely symbolic lives. And of course, gone would be all traces of language. Would Mark Pagel conclude they had never had language at all?

There is one funny point he makes in response to a question at about 1:22:00 in the lecture where he says "Nobody I think is saying Hebrew is the mother tongue" which segues nicely into the next source of inspiration for this post, which is Chomskyan linguistics in general, and the following strange lecture given by Chomsky in particular. The link with Mark Pagel's lecture comes at about 1:28 in Pagel's lecture when he says that "the basic structure of language is, again, kind of like Proto-Semitic" and again at around 1:32:50 where he says "Uli(?) and Proto-Semitic are the Ur-languages", Ur-language being a Frankenstein borrowing from German of Ursprache which, in this context, means "the original language". In other words, Chomsky is very clearly suggesting that the ancestor of biblical Hebrew is, indeed, the "original language", at least in our brains, and every other language is just a remapping of this underlying, genetic, built-in grammar to "surface" forms. These latter are Chomsky's way of saying "written languages of the world". I'm hesitant to use the word speech because, as should be obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with Chomsky's work in linguistics, he clearly seems to be "studying" a rarified, pure, written form of languages and then trying, and as can be seen in terms of the history of Chomskyan linguistics and in terms of results, failing, to say something deep and meaningful about what real language is. In fact, although the above linked lecture of Chomsky's is from quite late in his career, it would seem to be the one that best summarises the underlying purpose of the enterprise in Chomsky's mind and that is to prove that Hebrew is essentially the original language, or the basic language grammar at least from which all modern languages are just deviants. To my mind, this actually explains a lot about why he has pursued such a strange mathematical formalism as a mechanism for pontificating about the origins of language which completely eschews statistical methods, comparative linguistics, or, indeed any kind of field work or evidence. He seems to prefer a kind of mental source, pulling all the evidence he needs from the English language itself coupled with his knowledge of some other languages. He apparently spoke fluent Hebrew some 50 years ago, but now doesn't feel comfortable to speak it any more and I couldn't find a video of him speaking any other languages, but he claims reading fluency at least in a few other than English.

Just to clear things up at this put, I am in no way against Chomsky. I may have sympathy for his controversial political stances. I can't say for sure as I've never read any of his books on those topics and his discourses in public honestly strike me as roughly as confused and tortuous as his linguistics, but I certainly don't hold his politics against him at all. In fact, I first really heard of him when I was a teenager and I heard about this wonderful new world of Generative Linguistics which, I read, held all the answers as to how language works and its origin. So I bought a little primer on the field. Unfortunately, the book left me extremely cold. It did its best to present the body of theory (really only hypotheses) in the field, and to discuss the problems and changes made in response to those problems. I don't know why it seemed so obvious to me, but not to many of those involved in the field, but it was clear that this was trying to understand written communication and the formalisms behind it, which is problematic to begin with, but also that it was just a very unsatisfying and unsatisfactory attempt at an explanation. Even in my teenage years, it seemed clear to me that it was as if I had asked for an explanation of all the amazing variety of life on Earth and when I finally read a book purporting to explain it the answer turned out to be something like "God did it". The explained mechanisms had no basis in biological reality and made little to no reference to the variety of languages available in the world. However, I wasn't deterred and just thought that I mustn't be understanding it properly and that in time, with more reading and research, I would understand it better.

I started an electrical engineering degree at university which gave me a solid understanding of higher mathematical concepts, including discrete maths. This seemed to possibly be the key! I think once of the books I read at this time even referenced one of Chomsky's results in computer "languages", which impressed me. However, it was also very clear to me that a formal mathematical language is an extremely different beast to a natural language. Still, Chomsky had a mighty intellectual reputation so I sought more information. At about this time I read two books in this area. One was the very popular and highly praised Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (in 1994) and the other was much less well known amongst the general public, a collection of academic papers from 1998 titled "An Introduction to Connection Modelling of Cognitive Processes". I think I may have read this latter first and I was truly fascinated by its biological approach and its focus on modelling and experiments, even though it was with toy systems at the time due to limited computing power. It demonstrated that complex behaviour and learning was possibly with simple models, including that which Chomsky had "proven" to be impossible using formal mathematical languages, namely that human languages are impossible to learn due to a paucity of stimulus, a point of view which has been parodied as a "paucity of imagination" on Chomsky's part. It showcased small scale models which showed human infant like learning patterns, etc. It literally blew my mind. I felt a great dawning in my brain. Here was a system of modelling with a biological basis which could show human like traits. I could see that the limitations were due to the use of simplified models. In retrospect, I can't understand why the field of connectionist modelling didn't immediately cause the whole field of Chomskyan linguistics to be abandoned and all that wasting funding to be poured into language preservation and connectionist modelling related studies. This way back in 1998, but it took a while for anything much to show in linguistics. Still there are linguistics departments today in thrall to Chomsky's unscientific field of study. It's unscientific in the sense that it is seemingly impossible to disprove as the definitions can always be made slippery enough to evade any issue. My experience with Pinker's "The Language Instinct" was very much the opposite. I read it with a very open mind, expecting to be blown away, but found myself instead continually frustrated at the strawman arguments and false dichotomies which seemed to me very often to be the result of a paucity of imagination as well. Even if it hadn't had those problems, I was still left wondering "so what?". It seemed to basically say that language just appeared in our brains due to a language module and then tried to find something in the brain which could be described thus. It seemed to have no real explanatory or predictive power, quite the opposite of the book on connectionist modelling from a few years later.

At about this time I also read Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species". This was an extremely interesting and careful evaluation of the evolutionary history and neuroscience of human language, including a very careful categorisation of different forms of communication, pointing out that only humans have the highest level of complexity, "symbolic communication". It ended with Deacon's personal pet hypothesis on the evolution of language. It was an interesting take, although highly speculative of course. John Hawk's did a great review of this book. The Symbolic Species and An Introduction to Connectionist Modelling were the first two books I read that took on Chomskyan linguistics head on with actual research, facts and a proper scientific viewpoint. They really resonated with me for both the approach and the results.

Since those days it has become clear to me that there are two broad groups of linguists in the world, those who study real world languages and work in recording and preserving those, learning fascinating new insights along the way, and then Chomskyan linguists who see to be doing the same old ivory tower work, sometimes perturbed by facts from the outside world. The former group very rarely pops their head up over the parapet because they saw no advantage in starting an argument using evidence against what seems more religious than scientific. There have been a few notable exceptions, however. Daniel Everett was certainly one. I've read several of his books which all attack the foundations of Chomskyan linguistics "from the inside" so to speak, as he himself was a former Chomsky devotee, but he has also worked in language documentation in remote, endangered languages and they changed his worldview very starkly. Even his latest book, ostensibly on the topic of the origins of language itself (spoiler: he traces it back to Homo erectus, which I agree at least makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective, although the evidence will always be weak) called "How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention". He's also gone head to head with at least one Chomskyan in a live debate which just reinforced for me the muddle-headed worldview that Chomskyan linguistics induces in its obviously intelligent adherents. Somewhat like hearing a very intelligent person try to explain why they believe in a Young Earth.

Another very strong rejoinder to Chomskyan linguistics was delivered in a paper co-authored by a very highly respected Australian linguist, Nick Evans, who I first learnt of through his grammar of Bininj Kunwok. The paper is titled The Myth of Language Universals and I highly recommend reading it. It is a detailed, clever and careful piece by piece dissection of whichever parts of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device which could be pinned down to a single definition for long enough to take apart. The other dissection of Chomsky, this time by an AI researcher, Peter Norvig who has switched from the grammar rules based approach to a statistical learning approach to language modelling problems, and comes in from a very different direction, that of the philosophy of science itself and the results achieved by the different approaches. For anyone looking for the most comprehensive and comprehensible takedowns of Chomskyan's field of linguistics study, look no further than these two papers.

To wrap up this winding diatribe, I would like to recommend one of Jeffrey Elman's lectures on connectionist models for an update on the field and Michael Tomasello talking about his fascinating research on pinning down the underlying difference between humans and chimps which is the fundamental divide between us socially and, therefore, linguistically.

And, very finally, although I recently watched another lecture on the evolution of languages, the link for which I currently can't find, but which repeated the claim that click languages of Africa represent an ancient language and that we all used to speak using clicks but have lost these. This arrogant view that "primitive" hunter-gatherers must not be innovating in language because their material culture hasn't changed rapidly is thoroughly destroyed, in my opinion, by Tom Güldemann's paper "Clicks, genetics, and “proto-world” from a linguistic perspective". If we can just drop these prejudices and strange mid-20th century ideologies from linguistics, our progress in studying, recording, preserving, understanding and modeling language can only accelerate!

Dear Dana - an open letter on the difficulties of Deutsch pronunciation

Let me start off this post by pointing everyone to a fantastic resource which I've somehow neglected for a long time - the "Easy Languages" youtube channel. The format is street-interviews with real people on a variety of topics with parallel subtitle translations, all done with great humour. They do a great job, and it's a really fun, relaxed way to improve your listening skills. I've been meaning to focus on each episode more to get more out of them in terms of listening to real-world German (and French). They have a wide variety of languages so I really recommend that you go check them out.

OK, so this isn't exactly going to be in an "Open Letter" format :-) I watched another great episode of Easy German from the Easy Languages team and I wanted to make some comments on it as I think what it looks at might be instructive for a broad audience of language learners in general, and German in particular. It shows an American born German learner practising her pronunciation by asking strangers in the street to help her out. Her efforts were really well received and she got some great (albeit highly inaccurate, see below) feedback. At the end of the episode she gives a little piece to camera where she encourages people to go out and practice speaking no matter how bad they feel their accent is. Good advice!

There are some ridiculously unkind comments on this and the previous video she was in, but they were mostly very positive. The main thing is that she's trying and that she wants to improve. And, apart from a very strong American accent in her German, her other German skills are excellent. I want to focus below on what I think she could do to improve her accent rather than the negativity. She does sound as though she can't break what Idahosa Ness calls a "visual addiction". I think I've mostly broken this too, or at least transferred my visual addiction to the International Phonetic Alphabet rather than the vagaries of the spelling system of English. It just means that the sound values that you associate with a letter are so influenced by what you know from your native language that you can't hear when someone tells you something completely different.

One important thing that I learnt is that natives are a FANTASTIC resource for learning a language and improving your accent, but that asking them direct questions about how their language and its sound system function is bound to be ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. Out of all the people who gave her actual advice on how to pronounce the sounds, only one said anything useful, and that was because she presented the sound as an animal noise in a humerous way that moved the concept away from attempting to assign some sound value to a letter and more to training the speech organs to just make the right noise. It's an important step.

I don't personally know Dana or how she learnt German, but because her German is so good except for the pronunciation, I get the feeling that she may benefit from some of the books that helped me improve my accent and understanding of what I'm doing wrong. Don't get me wrong here - I don't sound like a native speaker! My most recent use of my increasingly unpracticed German was with a German work colleague visiting our office. After having had a chat for a while he told me that I had almost no accent, but then he corrected that to say that he could tell I wasn't a native speaker, but from my German he wouldn't have picked me as an English speaker, but perhaps as French if he had to guess. That gave me a good laugh, and also some food for thought about another part of my accent that could probably be cleaned up, but I won't go into the technical details.

Any long time reader of this blog will know that I credit having used Assimil for my semi-decent accent because it gave me many hours of practice listening to and trying to replicate the speech of native speakers. The main workout here is for the muscles of speech production which, unsurprisingly, become very, very efficient at producing the sounds of your native tongue with a minimum of effort, at the expense of an array of muscle motions that you don't normally need. It's a very mechanical process, and just requires plenty of practice. At Dana's advanced stage of German she might find any of the Assimil material a bit boring, but I think anyone could use it to deconstruct their accent. Just listen to the audio and try to match it exactly. Don't look at the words unless you don't know the word and can't figure it out from context and, even then, you should only need to do this once or twice. Keep going until you can reproduce both sides of the dialogue in real time without making any mistakes. Obviously, your accent won't be perfect, but aim to get as close to the original as you can hear yourself.

That's step 1.

In all of the following, where I've written "German" assume I mean "Hochdeutsch", unless otherwise specified. The sounds in different dialects vary widely. If you're just looking for some quick hacks to improve your pronunciation of German in particular, skip to the summary section at the end of the post.

Step 2: Read "A Practical Introduction to Phonetics" by Catford. Seriously. This may sound like a lot of effort, but it's not actually heavy reading and is full of practical exercises to gain control of your vocal tract. I really highly recommend this for language learners struggling with their pronunciation of all those "strange" sound in whatever language they're learning. I couldn't do some of the exercises related to ejective sounds, so don't feel bad if you don't master all the sounds. You won't need to, but you will develop a greater understanding of how they work. I downloaded an Anki list called "IPA motherload" later on and, after listening to the ejective sounds a few times, realised that I could actually produce them all and, thanks to Catford, I understood what was going on in my vocal tract when I did. Bonus!

Step 3: For German learners at intermediate level or above, read Linguistische Phonetik by Joerg Mayer from Stuttgart University. It's in German, and covers most of the same material as the Catford book, but with more details on looking at spectrographs and, more usefully for German learners, on the specifics of German pronunciation. It's free, and it's in German. What more could you want! Some of the material in it is particularly relevant to sorting out all the different ways to pronounce "ch" and "r" in German. These are particular problems that Dana has, along with just generally pronouncing vowels as per her own dialect of American English. The German vowels are well covered in the Mayer work.

Step 4: Read the section on German Phonology on wikipedia. With the above introductory material, it should all hopefully make better sense.

Step 4: Keep practicing with a native. Record them and record yourself trying to emulate them. This is vital for self-awareness. But remember - don't ask them for advice on what you're doing wrong, because the tips will probably be wrong and therefore more confusing. Also the tips from the comments in the youtube video above linked to should be avoided. I mean, what does it mean to pronounce ü as "u" + "e". Maybe if you think it means to pronounce it further forward than an "u" alone. Also note that many Germans seem to be taught that they all pronounce "r" all the time as a trill in the front of their mouth (tip of the tongue behind the top teeth). This is one possible form, but other forms seem more common in everyday speech. Note the lady teaching Dana to say "verrückt" makes this mistake and then says a very different sound at the back of her mouth. However, it's correct for the FIRST 'r' in "Bratwurst". Sound complicated? Not really. Understand there are different sounds for the same letter, know what they are and how to produce them, practice, and then you will hear them better from natives. Some people do this quite intuitively, but I needed the above books and to listen and repeat a lot to catch on to these.

So, my very rough, very broad, tips, for improving some of Dana's main problems are:

1) Forget the letters altogether and just focus on what you're hearing and the way natives move their mouths. At first, the letters will have such a strong power over you in terms of pronunciation that you might really struggle to hear what's actually being said. Throw away your crutch - you're healed of your visual addiction!

2) Vowels: German vowels are often "tenser" and closer than what we think of as their English counterparts. So, if you're struggling to say words like "sehen" like a native, try again but close your mouth a little more. This will probably push you more in the right direction.

3) Umlauts: They're just different sounds, basically. Forget the letter and it's "weird" appearance. "ü" is actually the same as the /i/ sound from English words like "three" and "tree" but with the lips rounded rather than unrounded. I guess this is like an "u" in that, in English at least, it has the most lip-rounding of any vowel. In German, "ü" has just as much lip-rounding as "u" (approximately). But I digress. To practice "ü" say a long German "i" and round your lips. Practice rounding and unrounding your lips. There, you've said it. I might go into the others in more detail in the future, but there's a bit more variety of possible pronunciations in these, depending on the word and vowel length. You can read a table of examples in the Myer book mentioned above, p.44. Very roughly, if you are a native English speaker you shouldn't have any trouble with getting in the right general area for these if you start with the unrounded version and then round your lips. Once you get used to this skill, it will unlock a whole world of new vowels which don't exist in English.

4) ich-laut and ach-laut, written as "ch" in German. These are particular problems for Dana in terms of how close her accent is to that of a native, but probably not a huge deal usually in terms of comprehensibility. Still, there are plenty of word pairs which only differ in these sounds ("nacht" vs "nackt" is a classic example), so they're definitely worth working on and not really hard for an English speaker to learn. Dana has done what most people do when faced with sounds they aren't familiar with and pronounces them with the closest sound from her own native language. When she says "ich" it rhymes with English "wish" and her "ach-laut" is just a "k". These are sort of close in their own way. As a language learner, it's a good idea to know vaguely where this difference pops up, but don't memorise it. Learn to pronounce (and then recognise) the different sounds, and then you will just learn the correct pronunciation when you first hear the word. Eventually you will develop an intuitive feel for this.

So, producing the sounds. I was going to go into a more detailed explanation here, but I think that would lose most readers, and I don't want that. So, in simple terms, the "ach-laut" is like a weak 'k' sound. When you say 'k' (do it now a few times) your tongue is making contact with the soft part of the roof of your mouth. To get to 'nacht' from 'nackt', just make a weaker contacts and hold it. Eventually you will get the balance right and find a spot where the sound is just right. If you're doing it right, you should be able to sustain it indefinitely, as opposed to the 'k' which relies on the tongue completely blocking the flow of air through your mouth, even if just for an instant. If you feel like you don't have the spot quite right, start again by repeating "ka ka ka ka" and then keep weakening it. Listen to examples of this sound on wikipedia to make sure you know what it sounds like. This is just a starting point. The sound is often (depending on the word and dialect) produced even further back than /k/. Just knowing that there's a similar sound but "further back", you will be better able to listen for the difference and try to replicate it. This "further back" version in words like "Fach" is really good for clearing your throat - so practice by practicing a "throat clearing" sound and then move to be something more socially acceptable :-)

The 'ich-laut' is also fairly easy for an English speaker. Say a long /i/ sound, like in "three" and "tree" and hold it. Say "treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee". Once you are happy you can hold a steady version of this sound concentrate on just moving your tongue closer to the roof of your mouth. You also need to stop your vocal cords from vibrating, which is also easy to do. English speakers do this all the time - it's the difference between "fat" and "vat". In "vat" the vocal cords are vibrating in the 'v' and not in the 'f'. Practice switching between 'f' and 'v' and you will soon get control of this vibration (known as "voicing") as a separate factor. In fact, if you take an "eeeeeeee" and turn off the voicing, you are already most of the way to the ich-laut. And remember, you're NOT trying to pronounce 'ich' here, you're trying to squeeze the "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" sound with your tongue until you hear the hissing sound. So go on, SQUEEZE THAT "EEEEEEEEEE"!

Note that the German 'r' sometimes (depending on dialect and the specific word) will sound like either version of the ach-laut, so you're really increasing your pronunciation by practising these sounds. I won't go into the other details of 'r' as I fear it would be information overload for now. It's covered quite well in the books I mentioned above.

So, anyway, those were the major issues I noticed, and my tips. I hope they're helpful to some of you.

To summarise:

* German vowels are often "tenser" than what you might expect as an English speaker, especially 'i' and 'e', so squeeze them a little.
* To say "ich" properly, take your 'i' ("eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee") learn to turn off the vibration of your vocal cords (say "ffffffffffvvvvvvvvvvvvvffffffffffffffvvvvvvvvvvvvv" over and over until you can control this vibration for any other sound) and then squeeze your "eeeeeee" really hard, until it hisses. When you're "eeeeeeeeeee" is hissing, you've hit the spot :-) Imagine there's something on the roof of your mouth that you want to squash. In fact, just turning off the vibration (voicing) will get you most of the way to the ich-laut.
* Ignore the "weirdness" of umlauts. Just remember that they're often lip-rounded versions of vowels you're probably already familiar with, or can get close to, so go on and make friends with the umlaut today!
* To avoid confusing "Nacht" with "nackt", clear your throat :-) Then practice sustaining a "throat-clearing" sound. Also practice saying "ack" over and over, but let it get weaker and weaker. These are the two versions of the ach-laut. "Nacht" is really somewhere between throat-clearing and a weak k, but now you know the rough area, go find it!

As usual, please leave any questions or comments below, and all the best of luck to Dana and all other language learners out there struggling with their unruly mouths!

Parallel translation: Die Zeit - Kapitän von Flüchtlingsschiff festgenommen

I like to make frequent updates, say, every 4 or 5 months. Who knows, maybe they'll even become more frequent someday. In the meantime, I translated an article from Die Zeit online recently. Here it is for your reading pleasure:

2015-04-21 - Die Zeit - Kapitän von Flüchtlingsschiff festgenommen

As usual, all rights remain with the rightsholder. This translation (completely unchecked :-) ) is my own, and for educational purposes, etc, etc. The original link can be found here.

Not much to report in terms of updates, really. I spoke with my Austrian friends recently who had some exciting family news. However, they're really busy and I probably only get to speak with them about as often as I've been posting here of late. My Austrian friend at work is still in Austria so my weekly practice sessions have evaportated. I did manage to get to a French meetup recently. I hope to do one French and one German meetup each month starting from this month :-) That's just for a start. I haven't committed to any other plans or new goals. I just try to listen to something in French and German every day still, although daily practice would, of course, be even better. 

I hope to put up more parallel translations. I think it's a really good form of practice if I can find the time, and hopefully some of you find them helpful too. I had a vague idea of doing the British Diploma in Translation, but since it has a substantial cost just for the test it seems unlikely at this stage. In any case, I'll try to do some of the suggested technical translations either under exam conditions (2 hours) or just when I can, and see how that goes. If I could get some translation work somehow in the meantime it would be a big help. I think my only chance of doing the Diploma is to make the study fund the exam. I have an electrical engineering background so I have a pretty good understanding of the content required for technical translations. Now just to find some work somehow!

Hope all of you are going well with your language learning!