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!

Das grössere Wunder von Thomas Glavinic: eine kleine Rezension

Hallo liebe Leserinnen/Leser!

Heute probiere ich etwas neues aus. Ich habe beschlossen, dass ich muss mehr Zeit auf Deutsch verbringen. Hier im Blog ist der beste Ort damit anzufangen.

Also, als ich früher erwähnt habe, ich lese im Moment ein sehr interessantes, gut geschriebenes Buch, das heißt Das grössere Wunder. Ich habe nur bis zur 193en Seite erreicht, deshalb muss diese Rezension kurz sein.

Es ist im Großen und Ganzen die Geschichte eines Manns und seiner Kindheit. Gleich am Anfang sind wir in einer chaotischen Szene im Basislager von Mt Everest. Die zwie ersten Sätze stellen die Stimmung für den ersten Kapitel:

"Das Gestern stand klar vor ihm, das Soeben schwand, zerfloss, ungreifbar und verbraucht.
An seinem Zelt wurde der erste Leichnam vorbeigetragen, notdürftig bedeckt mit einer im Wind flatternden Plane."

Ich muss ja zugeben, dass gleich an diesem Punkt hatte ich schreckliche Angst, weil es im ersten Satz zwei Wörter fehlt! Soeben war mir unklar, obwohl es offensichtlich im Gegenteil zum "Gestern" stand. Dazu auch die bedeutung von zerfließen fällt mir nicht ein. Grauhafter Anfang! Ich habe aber gerade durch ein paar Worthäufigkeitlisten gesucht und habe entweder die Wörter nicht gefunden, oder in der zweiten Hälfte einer 10.000 Wörter beinhaltenden Liste. Hier gibt's ein paar Worthäufigkeitlisten:

Von Filmuntertiteln genommen
Von woher bloß weiß ich genommen

Ich habe trotzdem weiter gelesen, und da bin ich froh darüber! In den früheren Kapiteln fand ich alles ein bisschen unwahrscheinlich, und es gab Dialoge die nicht wirklich echt klang. Ich habe vergessen Beispiele zu halten, aber macht nichts. Umso mehr ich gelesen habe, desto besser ging es mir. Der Schreibstil ist leicht zu lesen, sogar wenn mir noch ein paar Wörte fehlen, und besessen von einem subtilen, untertrieben Humor. UND GOTT SEI DANK, weil eine Menge Gewalt steht auch da drin! Im gegensatz zu die Unwahrscheinlichkeiten, habe ich für den Humor einen guten Beispiel beibehalten! An der 188en Seite lass sich es finden eine Szene, in der die Hauptfigur (namens Jonas) erholt sich im Basislager nach einem Gesundheitsschrecken und sein Freund Marc ihn zu einem von Marc vorgeschlagenen Arzt bringt. Der Arzt hat gerade von Jonas blut genommen, um eine Blutsättigungswerte zu bestimmen, und redet über den gesundheitlichen Gefahr auf 7000 Metern und ob Leute die Zeichen selbst erkennen können:

"Gestern sind zwei Australier angekommen, die heute gleich weiter aufgestiegen sind. Entweder sie haben Glück und merken selbst rechtzeitig, wie mies es ihnen geht - und es wird ihnen bei Gott mies gehen -, oder sie verbrigen die nächsten tausend Jahre da oben. Ein Pflaster noch, damit das Kind nicht weinen muss. So. Bin gleich zurück."
Der Arzt verschwand im Zelt nebenan.
"Guter Kerl", sagte Marc leise. "Begnadeter Arzt und komischer Kauz. Hat schon die Pest gehabt."
"So alt wirkt er aber auch wieder nicht."
"Nein, im Ernst."
"Er hat die Pest gehabt?"
"Ja, fast wäre er dran gestorben."
"Wo kriegt man denn die Pest?"
"Keine Ahnung. Irgendwelche Ratten vielleicht?"

Weiss nicht genau, warum mir diese Szene so gut gefallen ist. Es ist nur so.

Das war's für heute. Ich hoffe, dass ich die Zeit finde, um dieses Post zu übersetzen. Inzwischen könnt ihr euch selbst machen!

Ich freue mich auf eure Kommentare! Tschüß!

Der Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - a parallel translation

I don't know how, but somehow I missed this a long time ago - I made a parallel translation of "Der Erlkönig" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which I did in April last year. I also found some free audio of it. Here they are:

My own loose parallel translation

The audio on youtube

To get the audio as an mp3, I just use RealPlayer. It has a plugin that lets you download streamed videos from youtube and you can then extract the mp3. Easy :-)

I didn't put much effort into the translation so don't base your exam preparation on my vocabulary choices! Comment below if you find any issues.

My preparations for what I plan to do in trying to achieve the C2 level exam by the start of next year have not really got started very well. I know I really need to speak German every day, but that certainly hasn't happened yet and the year is almost 1 month down. I have a few plans of attack on this problem which I will discuss more in my future posts.

I'm currently reading a new German book after reading one of the several books in English which I got for my birthday and Christmas (both around the same time). This book was lent to me by my Austrian friend at work. Called das größere Wunder, it is written by an Austrian author but set all over the world. I've had it for a couple of weeks and am about 10% of the way through it. I'll try to pick up the pace a bit! I'll write some more thoughts about it soon as it was a bit of a shock to me in some ways and a great test for my current abilities helping to show me the way to some improvements.

zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen?

Man, oh man... I believe it was only last week that I posted an update about how relaxed, confident and comfortable I had felt in my regular weekly Stammtisch. I also predicted that that could easily be completely different next week. And it was. I felt quite awkward in my Stammtisch yesterday. I straight away couldn't think of the words I wanted to use, nor an alternative way of expressing myself, and it knocked my confidence right at the start. I never really recovered. Sometimes you're up, and sometimes you're down. What had changed? I'm not sure, but when I think back I realise that I haven't listened to German much in the last week, especially not to my two current snippets of German movies that I know fairly well (click these links to find my parallel translations and a link to the videos for short scenes from Der Untergang and Mädchen Mädchen 2), but I also haven't written much in German in the past week, whereas I had corresponded with a few of my German-speaking friends in the week before. A whole week with no other practice is just too long. I'm guessing that at a very high, advanced level of ability those sorts of gaps won't make too much noticeable difference because a small loss from a very high level is still very high. With my extended period of minimal focus on German, and being only an intermediate level, the cracks start to appear very quickly. I've been a naughty boy!

There are a bunch of reasons, probably primarily that I'm trying to learn two new languages to a basic fluency level this year! I've been thinking that I need to make sure I speak German more often each week, but to be honest it'll probably be good enough to just make sure I keep up my correspondence with my German-speaking friends. This probably fits in with my available time the best, because although I'd like to find more chances to actually speak German, I definitely need to find time to practice speaking Chinese.

All this brings me in a roundabout way to the title of this post: zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen. I have in the past often find myself stumbling over the various meanings of these sorts of similar sounding words. There was a time when I never seemed to be able to choose the correct word out of "anmelden" (register) and "abmelden" (cancel a registration), although I think I mostly get it right now. One day, a few months back, I ran into my Austrian friend at work who had been exercising more and eating better and had therefore lost a fair bit of weight. I wanted to let her know that her efforts were working and I said that she looked really different because "du hast so viel angenommen!" which I intended to mean "you've lost so much weight!". However, rather than seeming pleased she looked at me askance. I immediately thought that maybe she felt it was inappropriate to make such a comment, but that's just how I am. I make the same sorts of comments to my male friends as well, so I was just treating her equally. I decided to just move on and not to dwell on it and we had a little chat, but as I walked away and then for several days afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about it because I decided that, on the model of "anmelden" vs "abmelden" I had, in fact, told her that she had put on a lot of weight! MY GOD! I don't normally say that to anyone, but especially not a woman! I felt terrible and wasn't sure if I should apologise or just hope that she would assume I meant to say the opposite.

It took me about two weeks of mulling this over in my mind before I realised that what I had said to her didn't really mean much at all, because the opposite of "abnehmen" isn't "annehmen" it's "zunehmen".

What an idiot I am!

I said, pretty much out of the blue (no supporting context): "You have assumed so much!" or perhaps "you've taken so much". Nice work!

Oh well... Hopefully it will all stick in my head better now that I've mulled it over so much :-)

So here are our contrasting pairs for the day:

abnehmen vs zunehmen
abmelden vs anmelden.

Don't say I never tell you anything useful!

To end up, here's my progress update:
Mandarin: Currently shadowing lesson 45 which I do until I can follow the whole main dialogue at full speed without tripping up to within my own reasonable approximation of correct pronunciation. I also watched part of an episode of "Real Chinese" on TV. Being in Australia I can't watch the full episodes online. Although there's a lot of speaking in English on these shows, I think they're actually quite good for a beginner stage just to give some phrases and pronunciation practice, with an understanding of Chinese culture. Also, they have longer, unsubtitled monologues for more advanced speakers. The episode I was was, unfortunately, the last one, so I won't end up seeing them all until they get repeated. 真糟糕!
Latin: Currently still working on lesson 44.
German: I'm up to page 207 in "Das Todeskreuz". I really don't spend much time at all reading this, as you can tell. I should though because it's a good read.

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

[UPDATE: I noticed a couple of small errors in the transcription which I've now fixed. Both of them came from the original subtitle file I used.]

Today I have another parallel translation of a short scene from a well-known German movie. This is a pretty big change in genre - from high-brow history drama to Mädchen Mädchen 2 (title for English release: "Girls on Top 2"), a fairly low brow comedy about three young female university students trying to find an apartment they can afford in Munich. Despite the location, it seems like largely standard German, though also reasonably colloquial. And instead of being a fairly clearly spoken monologue, this is a quickfire dialogue. Although some of the sounds are run together/lost in such fast speech (see below), it is simple language discussing a simple topic so you can focus on just getting used to German at top speed :-)

Here's the scene - let's hope the link still works!

My advice is to save the audio from the scene so that after you've watched it a couple of times you can then listen to it to your heart's content to get used to the sounds and speed more. As I mentioned in a previous post you can use the free version of RealPlayer to do this. If you hover your mouse over a video in YouTube it will provide you with the option to download it. If this doesn't work for you (it's stopped working for me recently for some reason) then you can open RealPlayer, click File->Open and paste the URL (the text from your browser's address bar) in there. RealPlayer will open the video and definitely give you the option to download it. After you've downloaded it, the Download Manager will have an option to convert to MP3. Click this and you're done :-)

OK, enough foreplay, here's the parallel translation of the scene:

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

I've tried to keep my notes and in-line commentary to a bare minimum - there's a lot more I could have said! I started with a subtitle file I found on the internet but, just as with Der Untergang, there were several discrepancies. I don't know how these arise. Either the subtitles are based on the script and the actors change that a little here and there, or the people doing the transcription just don't have enough time to spend on it (if you look at how much they get paid, you'll see why!). In any case, it gives me some initial work to do before I can do the translation. Where I clearly disagreed with the subtitles, I have just changed the text above. Where I also wasn't sure, I kept the original text from the subtitles. I also tried to stay more phonetically faithful to the original, trying to keep all the nervous stammering at the start, etc. In addition, I try to keep my translations as close to the German as possible to help maintain the mental links better.

I'm still getting used to this very high-speed and more colloquial German myself, so I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions for improvement from you guys. Especially for the line that starts ""Ja, ich hab' nur gehört". I think I can just detect a faint trace of an "er" after "dass" and a "wird" squeezed in between "angegraben" and "die gerade", but that might be my imagination because I want to hear it to make the sentence nice and grammatical. It's altogether possible that this is just a standard kind of error in fast, everyday German. The more I do this sort of work, the more I should be able to explain here on the blog :-)

Finally, my "checkpoint" stuff: Chinese with Ease: currently trying to shadow the audio for lesson 38. The rest of it is done, but the audio seems hard at the moment and it contains a lot of new words. I'm sure it will come together soon if I give it proper attention. In Le Latin I've finished lesson 35 and I'm up to page 168 in "Das Todeskreuz", by which you can tell that I don't read it very often. There's a lot to cram in to a day - I got up at 6 this morning so I could enjoy the beautiful warm water at Bondi Beach before heading to work, but I did manage to read a few pages of "Das Todeskreuz" whilst stuck at traffic lights!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this scene and get some use out of the translation I've provided. Please leave any feedback in the comments below.

Jung in Europa

I just found something on Australian TV which might be of help to locals learning German, depending on their level. It's a short series called "Jung in Europa". I was obviously targeted at high school students of German, but I don't see why anyone couldn't get use out of it :-) It's obviously not an Australian production, but I haven't been able to find the episodes out there on the general "intarwebs". If anyone knows where it can be found online other than through the Australian ABC then let us know in the comments.

Anyway, here's a link for those interested:

http://www.abc.net.au/schoolstv/series/JUNGINEUROPA.htm

Look it up on ABC's iView to see past episodes.

Also, for French, Chinese or Italian learners, the ABC's "Schools TV" has some other similar programs for other languages so check them out if you're interested!

Tips to improve German listening skills (Hörverstehen)

How to improve on your listening skills is obviously going to depend on where you started. So far I can only really give solid tips on how to get to B2, although I am fairly confident that the same sort of idea can help push you beyond B2. I'm currently testing that hypothesis I guess, and you'll see a few more parallel translations posted on the blog as a result.

I've previously posted a bunch of parallel translations during my studies in German so far, the Hitler rant from Downfall being just being the latest in a long line :-) I actually started producing basic translations of the news with much help from Google Translate right back in the early days, so apart from using the material I have already provided, you can make some of your own for whatever material you enjoy. Just get the audio and transcript and match up your translation roughly on a line-by-line basis.

One important thing to do is to find a regular language partner. For the B2 exam, obviously doing all the preparatory listening exercises from an appropriate level of sample exam. Visit the Goethe website, select your appropriate level and look at the "Übungs- und Infomaterial" link. Doing progressively harder exercises until you can handle your target exam's hörverstehen, is a vital exercise. I have some tips on this spread throughout my blog - see here and here, for example.

Here are some pointers from my blog (in addition to this post's content, of course!):
Great website for German learners!
DW Slowly Spoken News 1-Dec-2010
Entenvolk!
DW News 15-01-2011
Desertec - Strom aus der Wüste
Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise

For some of the above you will need to find the audio on the relevant website. The audio links are usually contained in the parallel translation pdf itself. I don't know how far back the archives for DW's slowly-spoken news go, but hopefully they're all still available.

Don't get discouraged! When I first listened to the "slow" news I was totally shocked and couldn't imagine ever understanding it, let alone the full-speed news, but now I find the slow version just way too slow. It won't take long of this sort of parallel text work to pay off and have you understanding more and more of what you're listening to.

Also, if your language partners would let you, you could probably record your conversations and pick a sample which is mainly of them speaking. You would then write up a transcript (perhaps with their help) and work out a translation however you can. This might be useful, depending on circumstances. However, personally, I'm going to focus on snippets from movies for now :-)

My checkpoint update is: Chinese with Ease: just finished lesson 37, Le Latin: about to start lesson 34 and "Das Todeskreuz": page 164. I tried to sort of start a conversation in Mandarin with a work colleague today but it didn't work. She understood what I said and then just said that it was very good because she could understand it. Not quite the desired result!

Anyone with their own tips, feel free to post them in the comments.

Der Untergang - a parallel translation of a famous scene

Today I bring you a parallel translation of a famous scene from the brilliant German film "Der Untergang" (English: "Downfall") mostly about the last days in Hitler's bunker. The screenplay is by Bernd Eichinger who unfortunately passed away in 2011. He was also a producer for the film "Nirgendwo in Afrika" which I watched a couple of years ago. Apart from being a brilliant film, with the insanity of Hitler being portrayed astoundingly well by Bruno Ganz, it has also spawned a massive number of parodies based largely on providing new translations for a scene in which Hitler discovers that his last grand plan for saving Berlin from capture by the Russians could not be mounted due to a lack of manpower. I can't understand the criticisms of this film which say it humanises Hitler too much. He comes across as being completely deranged in the film!

Here's the link to my parallel translation:

Der Untergang - Szene: "Der Angriff Steiner ist nicht erfolgt"

Note that my source for the German was a subtitles file I found on the internet, but which needed some minor fixups at the start. The rest of it seemed fine. I did my own translation and learnt some new stuff along the way, like that "durchbrechen" has a few slightly different meanings - to "break through" as in "come through or suddenly appear", as well as "to break in two" both of which are separable verbs, and then there's the meaning of "break though and destroy the thing in the process, coming out the other side; to smash through" which is inseparable! It is this latter which appears in the text above ("zu durchbrechen" instead of "durchzubrechen"). I also learnt the expression for "to blow one's brains out".

You can find the original scene on youtube fairly easily - here's one that's working at the moment. I used RealPlayer's "Download this Video" and then "Save mp3" options to extract the audio so I can listen to it as I drive to work. Along with the fact that I had to listen to the beginning several times to figure out what corrections to make to the subtitles I was using, I have listened to it and am becoming quite familiar with it. When I feel like I hear every word fairly clearly, I'll find a scene from another movie.

This movie has quite clear audio and speaking overall, so I rate it as less challenging for the learner than movies like "Stalingrad" which is full of moody, wounded, mumbling soldiers, gunfire, explosions and howling winds. I think I'll find a challenging scene in that movie as my next target!

One final disclaimer: as usual, I claim no rights over any of the original text and especially not the audio of the movie! The translation is largely my own, but guided by the efforts of others. I post this here only to help other German learners improve their understanding and appreciation of the German language and cinema.

Enjoy!

Parallel text and audio: "Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise"

Long time no post! So, I haven't yet written the posts I planned on yet, but I have done another parallel translation. This time it's an interesting little article about a physicist who's come up with a plan to introduce "anti-money" into the financial system to replace debt and interest and to bring stability to the world. Of course, it'll never happen because it (a) seems impractical and (b) would reduce the destabilising speculation that makes the very rich very much richer. So, it's doomed. Still, have a listen to the article and read along with my parallel translation where necessary. Here is the original text which I translated, along with a link to the audio:

http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/forschak/1751062


And you can find my parallel translation (i.e., like all the others, side-by-side with the original text) here:

Parallel translation of "Mit Antigeld gegen die Bankenkrise"

As always, all rights to the text and audio belong to dradio. Feel free to post any corrections to the translation in the comments!

Sprechbude

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!

Knaller Frauen

[Allen Deutschmuttersprachlern: Es tut mir leid, wenn ihr hier zufällig gelandet habt. Mein Blog ist kein Fansite für diese Sendung! Es ist nur ein Art Tagesbuch, in dem ich über meine Erfahrungen mit Deutsch schreiben. ABER - wenn ihr mir helfen könnt, wie man Sat1-Sendungen online und kostenlos anschauen kann, ohne in Deutschland zu leben, dann wäre ich super-dankbar!]

Just a quick one to share a link to a funny show that you can watch online for free - and you don't have to live in Germany!

It's called Knaller Frauen. Not sure what it means exactly - maybe "Firecrackers", or "Bombshells"? Not sure. It's just a comedy sketch show - some hit, some miss, but I found it very easy to follow so I'm sure others will as well. Here's a link to a recent episode.

There are plenty of other shows there - not sure what's available to watch in full yet, but when I get a chance I'll try to check it out more.

Now I've got to go practice the long written part of the exam. And yes, I'm writing it out by hand, because I'll have to for the real exam. Sigh...

Just about 18 days to go till my B2 exam, by the way...

[UPDATE: As of today, none of the tv shows on the sat1 website are available outside Germany (or at least, in Australia!) anymore. I was watching part of a show last night "Der letze Bulle" which was pretty good. Man. Why can't shit just be free, and freely available? Copyright sucks :-) ]

Grüße aus Deutschland!

Just a small post which I've meant to do previously. The Goethe Institut did a series a while ago under this name. It is targetted at A2->B1 level but I often find the interviews hard to understand, and although it seems targetted at high school language learners, I find the tweeness amusing and the format quite useful. Anyway, you can find all the text and audio here:

http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/gad/deindex.htm?wt_sc=gad

However, since they are not producing any new episodes, the RSS feed is no longer advertised, but after writing to the person responsible I was told that the feed is still available, so I figured I'd pass it on in case anyone else ever wanted it. I personally find it easier to use the podcast version since it just means selecting a different podcast within the same application on my phone as I drive home, and I could grab the whole lot at once without any fuss. You can find the RSS feed at:

http://media.goethe.de/podcast/gad/rss_de.xml

On a sidenote, just for the record, I did the first audio exercise in the online B2 sample exam from the Goethe Institut just a short while ago and got 8 out of 10. I lost 2 points on a question which required me to listen to a name being spelled out. I heard the name and immediately wrote out the spelling I thought it would be and so didn't pay proper attention to the actual spelling given. The mistake I made was to write a "v" instead of a "w" which is the sort of mistake I could make under pressure even if I was paying attention, so I'm glad I did the practice test!

Podcast addiction...

I'm a bit of a latecomer to the podcast game, considering that I never saw the point in giving mp3's another name. Well, it's mp3 + RSS - how very Apple to name them i-something or pod-something.

Just recently, I discovered how useful RSS is for finding the latest episode in a series or the latest news. I used to like to listen to streaming radio, but I don't have access to it when I'm driving. Podcasts fix that problem Apart from a good selection on Deutsche Welle, I discovered dradio as well which has a good environment program and a really excellent science show (Wissenschaft in Brennpunkt). Links to their science show articles are here.

Of course, it's an addiction. There's only so much time available in a day to really focus on listening, after which it becomes background noise. I don't believe in passive listening, but I do leave it playing at times when I focused on other activities (especially at work) because I get a chance to focus every now and then, and I can take advantage of those little moments. I listen to good articles multiple times.

I did a little self-assessment recently, just on the basis of my own comfort level in certain activities, and I came up as B1 level for everything except speaking which was somehow B2. My speaking still feels pretty bad, so that doesn't leave much hope for everything else...