Just recently I've been going through more of the practice listening test material supplied by the Goethe Institute for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 exam. I've got one more of these to go. I realised after starting one of them that I had done it once before, but I didn't remember the details enough to really help me answer anything, so it was still decent practice/checking my current level. They both went well - in the Modellsatz test, I got 20/25 for the two listening test questions, and in Uebungssatz 01 (which I had done before but forgotten) I got 23/25. I think the real reason for the difference in results is just that I was familiar with the exam format the second time. This practice is really important because, the more familiar you are with the exam format, the better you can concentrate on showing what you know. Both of these test results were with the normal time/repetition restrictions from the actual exam (the audio Goethe supplies has all the correct repeats and gaps built in already). After I do Uebungssatz03 (I wonder where I can find Uebungssatz02? Or 04??), I'll either work on the test exams from TestDaF because they are on a scale from B2-C1, or just the C1 practice exams.
I recently re-did a couple of the "level checking" tests I had done last year. Here's one of them:
http://www.goethe.de/cgi-bin/einstufungstest/einstufungstest.pl
I got 20 out of 30. I'm actually pretty sure this is close to what I got when I did it ages ago. What's going on there? In the meantime, my vocabulary has increased significantly. I know that for sure. My reading ability is up to the stage where I can comfortably and enjoyably read a significant novel (not that I understand every single word or phrase!), and I feel reasonably comfortable (not fluent) in conversations with native speakers. Both of these facets have definitely improved.
What hasn't really changed is that I still haven't gone to any structured classes. Although I've read some of a really good German grammar book (without trying to memorise it), I haven't spent much time on learning the sorts of minutia which seem to fill most courses - is it "wenn" or "ob", for example. I'm not saying this isn't important, I'm not saying that I don't care about making this sort of mistake (I do!) but I don't think they're as important as improving conversational fluency and vocabulary, and I haven't spent much time on them. Anyway, I'll check back this level in a few months and see if anything's changed!
One last bit of exam practice to mention - I did one of the "correct the mistakes" questions in the Schriftlicher Ausdruck section of the B2 Modelssatz mentioned above and got 8 out of 10. On of the two mistakes I missed was "wenn" being used instead of "ob/wann" :-) You get 15 minutes to do this section in the exam, and I did it in 8 minutes. I think that for one lunchtime soon I'll print out a few of these questions and do them all at once, because I can probably knock over a bunch really quickly.
Other than that, the focus will remain, for the next week or two, on listening test practice (at a higher level next).
By the way, all of the above have been squeezed into the few lunchtimes I've had free lately. If it weren't for lunchtime, I don't know when I would get this stuff done at all!
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Leseverstehen B2 finished!
So, finally, I've finished all the practice reading tests in Leseverstehen B2. It took me 2 weeks to find the time to finish the last few tests. So much other stuff always comes up to fill my lunchtimes, which is my main free time to do this kind of study. Anyway, phew, I did it. I ordered the book on the 16th of March last year, and got it a few weeks later, so I finished it in under a year. It wasn't the only thing I did in that time, of course, and I did it in fits and starts. When I first attempted it I immediately discovered, on the first "easy" practice test, that my vocabulary was woefully inadequate. I immediately started a new Anki list just to contain the words that came up from this book. Since that time it has become my general list with words from everywhere going into it. It has grown to 2,600 "facts" (1,300 cards, which probably represent at least 2,600 words and phrases). And I haven't even added all the words from the last 3 or 4 practice tests yet! Studying this list, and adding to it on a semi-regular basis, have proved to be vital so far.
Speaking of my Anki list, I've been a little slack with it lately. I don't know why, but for a few days there I couldn't find the time and/or enthusiasm to do my daily study, even though I kept up my other activities. After a bit of a burst yesterday, I should be able to catch up today.
As for other activities, I recently passed the halfway mark in Der Beobachter. I'm up to about page 330, and the story's really starting to get interesting. I still don't think we've met the murderer yet, but who knows. I could be totally wrong. Time will tell. I've also kept up my weekly Stammtisch at work, though I really don't feel like my fluency is improving enough - probably because I haven't been able to meet up with my other German-speaking friends very much lately. I really get a lot of opportunities to talk in the time that I'm with them, and they make me feel very comfortable. I feel like I'm at the stage where, in order to progress, I really need to be doing more. At a lower level, you can make good progress with an hour a week, but as you get better, the time requirement goes up. Sure, if you've got the time and the opportunity, do as much as you can from the start. But when time is limited, and you can only really focus on one thing in your life at a time without letting everything else fall by the wayside, then, like me, you can probably only do a lot of interaction in your target language in concentrated bursts. That's what I feel like I need to do now. I also need to take a leaf out of Keith over at Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning and watch a lot more German TV and movies with no subtitles. The main problem I have is that I need the volume turned up, and since I can only watch them once my daughter has gone to sleep, that really means watching them on my phone. And since that doesn't support a lot of resolutions and formats, that means a slow conversion process for each one, often with a loss of audio sync or some other annoyance. Maybe I should get some remote headphones and just watch stuff on the TV!
As a final note to sign off, I've pretty much decided that I should just do the B2 exam now to get it out of the way, and think about aiming to do the C2 in the future as I discussed before. I wasn't sure when I found out that the next exam date will be the 18th of April and I thought that that maybe gave me enough time to prepare for the C1 instead. Perhaps it does in everything except that my speaking probably won't be up to the required level in time. Even if I could do it, the chances are that I would be looking at somewhere between a low pass and a fail. Since this has always just been a goal to help encourage and push me on, I think it would be better to get a good pass at the lower level for now. Still, I plan on studying for the C1 exam in terms of listening practice, etc, as I'd rather be over-prepared than under!
I haven't sent in the form yet, but at least I know the date for my exam now: the 18th of April. I'm looking forward to it!
Speaking of my Anki list, I've been a little slack with it lately. I don't know why, but for a few days there I couldn't find the time and/or enthusiasm to do my daily study, even though I kept up my other activities. After a bit of a burst yesterday, I should be able to catch up today.
As for other activities, I recently passed the halfway mark in Der Beobachter. I'm up to about page 330, and the story's really starting to get interesting. I still don't think we've met the murderer yet, but who knows. I could be totally wrong. Time will tell. I've also kept up my weekly Stammtisch at work, though I really don't feel like my fluency is improving enough - probably because I haven't been able to meet up with my other German-speaking friends very much lately. I really get a lot of opportunities to talk in the time that I'm with them, and they make me feel very comfortable. I feel like I'm at the stage where, in order to progress, I really need to be doing more. At a lower level, you can make good progress with an hour a week, but as you get better, the time requirement goes up. Sure, if you've got the time and the opportunity, do as much as you can from the start. But when time is limited, and you can only really focus on one thing in your life at a time without letting everything else fall by the wayside, then, like me, you can probably only do a lot of interaction in your target language in concentrated bursts. That's what I feel like I need to do now. I also need to take a leaf out of Keith over at Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning and watch a lot more German TV and movies with no subtitles. The main problem I have is that I need the volume turned up, and since I can only watch them once my daughter has gone to sleep, that really means watching them on my phone. And since that doesn't support a lot of resolutions and formats, that means a slow conversion process for each one, often with a loss of audio sync or some other annoyance. Maybe I should get some remote headphones and just watch stuff on the TV!
As a final note to sign off, I've pretty much decided that I should just do the B2 exam now to get it out of the way, and think about aiming to do the C2 in the future as I discussed before. I wasn't sure when I found out that the next exam date will be the 18th of April and I thought that that maybe gave me enough time to prepare for the C1 instead. Perhaps it does in everything except that my speaking probably won't be up to the required level in time. Even if I could do it, the chances are that I would be looking at somewhere between a low pass and a fail. Since this has always just been a goal to help encourage and push me on, I think it would be better to get a good pass at the lower level for now. Still, I plan on studying for the C1 exam in terms of listening practice, etc, as I'd rather be over-prepared than under!
I haven't sent in the form yet, but at least I know the date for my exam now: the 18th of April. I'm looking forward to it!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Almost finished Leseverstehen B2!
Good times! I've done the first test from test 14, and there are only 15 in the book. I've been doing them all in 40-60 minutes, and usually 20-22 out of 25. Generally I got 15 out of 15 in the first few questions (with exceptions in those stupid "positiv or negativ+skeptisch" type questions) and generally lose points in the fill in the blanks exercises. When I first started with easier exercises I thought I would just never be able to do them, and now I consistently get about 7, which I'm quite pleased about. I plan on trying to come up with a few tips for this type of question. I'll go back through and sort them out, but one I've noticed (which I keep missing myself) is that there's often one blank that's for a "sich". There's are easy to find because they'll occur early in a sentence or a relative clause, and may have an adverb next to them (which should hint that you don't want to try to think of another adverb!). Something to look out for...
I've also continued reading "Der Beobachter" and just got up to page 190. Another old lady just got whacked in a horrible way, and the main female character just cheated on her husband, for no real apparent reason. I'm not really enjoying the story about the main female character's family, to be honest, but I'm getting a feeling that she is somehow linked to the murderer. At the moment, they are completely disconnected from the murders, so it's a bit weird.
I've also been reading, very occasionally and in very short bursts, "Das Parfüm" at work sometimes. I'm only up to page 32, and I haven't been adding its vocabulary. Given that it's only 250 pages long, I probably wouldn't have been better off to just read it in the first place to give me that boost of having at least one full German-lanaguage novel under my belt. Der Beobachter is 650 pages long! But really, it's pretty easy reading. Lots of conversations, not complicated, a fair bit of day-to-day vocab, so it's a good choice really, and my progress has been OK.
Hopefully by my next update I'll be finished Leseverstehen B2 and can figure out what "study" type material I should focus on next. I'll probably start to focus on doing C1 level listening tests because that's an area where I would really like to bring up my comfort. I mean, I listen to a lot of German audio podcasts, and understand most of it in broad terms, and some of it perfectly, but I still think I have some work to do here to feel fully comfortable all the time. However, I think I'm close to being ready for the listening section of the B2 exam, which is why I've been thinking I'll do it sometime soon, and set a more distant goal of doing the C2 exam in another year or so perhaps.
More updates on this later...
I've also continued reading "Der Beobachter" and just got up to page 190. Another old lady just got whacked in a horrible way, and the main female character just cheated on her husband, for no real apparent reason. I'm not really enjoying the story about the main female character's family, to be honest, but I'm getting a feeling that she is somehow linked to the murderer. At the moment, they are completely disconnected from the murders, so it's a bit weird.
I've also been reading, very occasionally and in very short bursts, "Das Parfüm" at work sometimes. I'm only up to page 32, and I haven't been adding its vocabulary. Given that it's only 250 pages long, I probably wouldn't have been better off to just read it in the first place to give me that boost of having at least one full German-lanaguage novel under my belt. Der Beobachter is 650 pages long! But really, it's pretty easy reading. Lots of conversations, not complicated, a fair bit of day-to-day vocab, so it's a good choice really, and my progress has been OK.
Hopefully by my next update I'll be finished Leseverstehen B2 and can figure out what "study" type material I should focus on next. I'll probably start to focus on doing C1 level listening tests because that's an area where I would really like to bring up my comfort. I mean, I listen to a lot of German audio podcasts, and understand most of it in broad terms, and some of it perfectly, but I still think I have some work to do here to feel fully comfortable all the time. However, I think I'm close to being ready for the listening section of the B2 exam, which is why I've been thinking I'll do it sometime soon, and set a more distant goal of doing the C2 exam in another year or so perhaps.
More updates on this later...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Recent Leseverstehen B2 results
This is one of those "checkpoint" posts really. Apart from the last few days being spent sick as a dog in bed, I've finally been working through the sample exam section of Lesetraining B2 (as opposed to the practice section!) and my results have been encouraging so far, both in terms of time taken and results, so I'm pretty happy right now. It's made me think that I need to focus on listening skills again as much as possible. Here are the results I got recently:
Part B, Test 8: 22/25 including 7/10 in the part I always found the hardest before (filling in the blanks).
Part B, Test 9: 19/25 - a couple of rushed mistakes. Done at lunchtime at work while eating lunch in 34 mins (80 mins allowed for the real exam).
Part B, Test 10: 22/25 done in about 54 mins, spread out over a few days.
I still need to add the words I didn't know or was unsure about to my Anki list. I only just got to the stage of not having any new words introduced to me from the last time I added a tonne of vocab. Fun times ahead!
I've also done one of the practice writing questions from the online version of the B2 exam. My time was broken up into two chunks, with the second being quite a distracted chunk indeed. However, I managed to keep within the time limit (60 minutes I think?) and produced a 280 word answer where 180 are required, which means that if I had kept myself to the topic better, I could have easily finished with plenty of time to spare to check for mistakes. I've sent it to my Austrian friend for corrections whenever she gets time. I'm not in a rush at the moment, though I plan to do more of this as I really feel that just this one piece of written composition helped.
Practice makes less imperfect, I guess...
Part B, Test 8: 22/25 including 7/10 in the part I always found the hardest before (filling in the blanks).
Part B, Test 9: 19/25 - a couple of rushed mistakes. Done at lunchtime at work while eating lunch in 34 mins (80 mins allowed for the real exam).
Part B, Test 10: 22/25 done in about 54 mins, spread out over a few days.
I still need to add the words I didn't know or was unsure about to my Anki list. I only just got to the stage of not having any new words introduced to me from the last time I added a tonne of vocab. Fun times ahead!
I've also done one of the practice writing questions from the online version of the B2 exam. My time was broken up into two chunks, with the second being quite a distracted chunk indeed. However, I managed to keep within the time limit (60 minutes I think?) and produced a 280 word answer where 180 are required, which means that if I had kept myself to the topic better, I could have easily finished with plenty of time to spare to check for mistakes. I've sent it to my Austrian friend for corrections whenever she gets time. I'm not in a rush at the moment, though I plan to do more of this as I really feel that just this one piece of written composition helped.
Practice makes less imperfect, I guess...
Adding up the costs...
Just for the sake of it, I've decided to try to do a brief rundown of how much money I've spent on learning German so far. I'm very conscious of price in my studies. The question is not "how much do I need to spend?" but rather "why spend anything at all?"
The biggest cost for a lot of people in language learning could be their language courses, or private tutors. I've used both of these in the past for languages other than German and I was much less successful, despite as much calendar time passing, as well as a not insignificant amount of money passing out of my bank account! I felt as though I just needed to go to the class, put in the time there and with *assigned* homework, and one day I would know when I was ready. The secrets would be revealed to me, and I'd magically be able to read, write and speak with confidence.
Well, the magic never happened.
Now that I don't go to classes, I do something most days. Anki reviewing and listening to German podcasts being the two main daily activities. I get to speak about once a week at the moment, and I find the odd moment here or there to do some study-type activities. I've also met up with my new German-speaking friends both in and out of work, whenever that's been possible. But what I've done very little of is spend my hard-earned cash :-)
I've been lucky too to receive gifts from friends and family, and to get a few items on loan from my sister. I've listed these below as well. Which of them would I have bought myself? Probably none of them, though I appreciate all of them immensely. I do think that one of the books I received as a present is a really good confidence boost, if only in the sense of achievement I get from easily following the story (but still not understanding every single word!). I don't know what I would do about this in the future. Probably check out my local library to see what they have. I might try to buy some books second-hand as well wherever possible, though this can be quite hit and miss. Maybe I can just wait till I receive some more presents!
So, the tally. First the items I have bought (note that none of the links below are affiliate links):
And that's it so far. AU$70. The textbooks for a couple of levels of German at the Goethe Institute probably cost something like that.
I've been given the following as various kinds of presents or loans:
Of course, much of my reading and listening comes from online - Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, etc. In fact, without the internet, I don't think I could make anywhere near the progress I've been able to without spending some more money on content. In the old days, it just wasn't that easy to get foreign language material for free. Possible yes, but not easy!
There might be something I've actually spent money on that's missing from this list, but I can't think of it at the moment. I'm going to try to keep my total expenditure (excluding the cost of the exam) to be below $100, which means I can't spend more than another $30. I'd really rather not even spend that :-)
The biggest cost for a lot of people in language learning could be their language courses, or private tutors. I've used both of these in the past for languages other than German and I was much less successful, despite as much calendar time passing, as well as a not insignificant amount of money passing out of my bank account! I felt as though I just needed to go to the class, put in the time there and with *assigned* homework, and one day I would know when I was ready. The secrets would be revealed to me, and I'd magically be able to read, write and speak with confidence.
Well, the magic never happened.
Now that I don't go to classes, I do something most days. Anki reviewing and listening to German podcasts being the two main daily activities. I get to speak about once a week at the moment, and I find the odd moment here or there to do some study-type activities. I've also met up with my new German-speaking friends both in and out of work, whenever that's been possible. But what I've done very little of is spend my hard-earned cash :-)
I've been lucky too to receive gifts from friends and family, and to get a few items on loan from my sister. I've listed these below as well. Which of them would I have bought myself? Probably none of them, though I appreciate all of them immensely. I do think that one of the books I received as a present is a really good confidence boost, if only in the sense of achievement I get from easily following the story (but still not understanding every single word!). I don't know what I would do about this in the future. Probably check out my local library to see what they have. I might try to buy some books second-hand as well wherever possible, though this can be quite hit and miss. Maybe I can just wait till I receive some more presents!
So, the tally. First the items I have bought (note that none of the links below are affiliate links):
- Lesetraining B2 - AU$25 delivered from The Book Depository.
- Perfectionnement Allemand ("Using German") by Assimil - AU$25 also from the Book Depository. This is without audio - with audio it's about $100. Unfortunately I couldn't stretch to this, but I was lucky enough to later find it second-hand.
- Das Parfum - the movie. Can't remember but it was pretty cheap (bought while in Germany). AU$10 at the most.
- Das Parfum - the book. Got it second-hand online (bought while in Germany) for about AU$10 as well.
And that's it so far. AU$70. The textbooks for a couple of levels of German at the Goethe Institute probably cost something like that.
I've been given the following as various kinds of presents or loans:
- Assimil's German with Ease, which I received as a going-away gift before I left for Germany. This was the start of it all for me really. Without this book, I don't think I would have lasted on this path for so long. I learnt reading, pronunciation, listening comprehension and grammar all at the same time in a way I could apply immediately through lots and lots of examples of native speakers. Just perfect!
- Grimm's Fairy Tales - actually a gift from our Austrian friends for my daughter's first birthday, but she needs some help reading it :-)
- Der Beobachter by Charlotte Linke, an author from where I lived in Germany (Frankfurt-am-Main). It's not the sort of thing that I would read in English (maybe I should start?), but then I think that can be a good thing some times. I decided not to be daunted by the enormous size of this book (600+ pages of story!) and just get started on it, and I'm now about page 107 or so. I think this is faster than I read the Lord of the Rings (in English!) the first time I tried, because I just hated Hobbits so much. Please, LOTR fans - don't kill me!
- Two other 600+ page novels. Haven't touched either of these yet.
- Two other children's books to read to my daughter. Have read these to my daughter already a couple of times. One of them is all about the noises animals make, which is pretty cool to know, really :-)
- Duden's Bildwörterbuch + some grammar books on loan from my sister. I've only ever really flicked through these.
Of course, much of my reading and listening comes from online - Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, etc. In fact, without the internet, I don't think I could make anywhere near the progress I've been able to without spending some more money on content. In the old days, it just wasn't that easy to get foreign language material for free. Possible yes, but not easy!
There might be something I've actually spent money on that's missing from this list, but I can't think of it at the moment. I'm going to try to keep my total expenditure (excluding the cost of the exam) to be below $100, which means I can't spend more than another $30. I'd really rather not even spend that :-)
Friday, January 13, 2012
Weichnachtsgeschenke...
Before two weeks pass into the New Year, I should do a bit of an update!
I scored at Christmas! My Austrian friends were getting a visit from their parents and so they had them bring over a couple of books for me - just some normal Bestseller, sold-in-airports types of books, but they're just what I've been looking for. The one I started on was from a German author from my old hometown (or rather, where I lived for 6 months) - Frankfurt am Main. It's called "Der Beobachter" by Charlotte Link. At 650 pages all, I have to admit that I found the prospect daunting. To be honest, I rarely read fiction books in English, and I'm hardly a super-fast reader as it is, but I've got through 60 odd pages already and I'm really enjoying it. There have only been one or two passages where the meaning was a little unclear to me. This is not to say there haven't been many words I haven't understood. There've been plenty! I intended to add unknown words to my Anki list, but so far I only managed to add those from the back and inside covers and the first couple of pages. It just takes a lot of time, and it's time I could be spending actually reading the book. Still, I should do it every now and then because words do pop up multiple times. Perhaps I'll make that my rule - if it pops up twice, and I don't know it, I'll write it down somewhere so I can add it to Anki later.
I also got another fat novel and two children's books in German as gifts from my parents for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading the children's books to my daughter!
I did manage to keep studying German throughout the break too, despite working between Christmas and New Year's and the rest of the time mostly being about family things. I made sure I stayed on track with Anki as a minimum. I went to a BBQ with my wife and daughter to my Austrian friends' house and had a chance to talk to their visiting parents and sister. The parents spoke no English, so it was a good opportunity. They were lovely and I really enjoyed talking to them. They took a while to speak to me too much. They probably weren't sure how much I would understand. I had to remember too that Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which is pretty much all I understand, is just about no one's actual first language. If I hadn't been there, they would have been speaking "in dialect" as they put it. My friend's mother was really nice and, for the first hour or so at least, spoke to me really, really slowly :-)
Unfortunately, apart from this language practice, and once at work between Christmas and New Year's, I haven't had much practice lately. It looks like I'll have more of a chance in mid-January but I've been accelerating my efforts in other areas, with the goal, of course, of getting ready for a Goethe exam sometime soonish. This means I need to be intensify this area as well. I've been giving this a little thought and hope to come up with something soon.
Some other news - I finally did another lesson from Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Using German) - lesson 18 complete! I had decided not to do it anymore, but since my speaking practice has dropped off a bit, I figured I may as well do some more as a weak substitute. It's better than nothing! I think now that I've left it for so long I realise that I've been enjoying real world material more and it's probably more useful for building the vocabulary I really want. However, as a source of parallel translations with recordings all already prepared, it's hard to beat for the drive to work.
Oh yeah, and I realised the other day that I bought Lesetraining B2 in mid-March (got it early April I think?) and I hadn't even finished the first half of the book, which contains tests that get progressively harder in order to prepare you for the second half, which is the real practice tests. I'm not sure how much of a difference in difficulty there really is, but anyway, I recently finished all of Part A! That includes adding any vocab I didn't know to my Anki list. When I think back to how hard I found some of the first lessons, I realise that I've come a long way. Today at lunch I also did the first part of the first question in Part B. Got 5 out of 5, did it in 10 minutes (15 would be available in the exam), and added the roughly 10 words I either didn't know or just wasn't 100% sure about to my Anki list. I plan on using my time better to get through the rest of these sample questions before I've had the book for a year!
I suppose that's part of the reason why my posts have become less frequent (if that's possible). And with that, I'll sign off so I can continue to work on the first New Year's Resolution that I've made in a long time - to get to bed earlier. Not to sleep longer, no, but just to get to bed, maybe read for a few minutes first, and just generally live life a bit earlier in the day!
Tschau!
I scored at Christmas! My Austrian friends were getting a visit from their parents and so they had them bring over a couple of books for me - just some normal Bestseller, sold-in-airports types of books, but they're just what I've been looking for. The one I started on was from a German author from my old hometown (or rather, where I lived for 6 months) - Frankfurt am Main. It's called "Der Beobachter" by Charlotte Link. At 650 pages all, I have to admit that I found the prospect daunting. To be honest, I rarely read fiction books in English, and I'm hardly a super-fast reader as it is, but I've got through 60 odd pages already and I'm really enjoying it. There have only been one or two passages where the meaning was a little unclear to me. This is not to say there haven't been many words I haven't understood. There've been plenty! I intended to add unknown words to my Anki list, but so far I only managed to add those from the back and inside covers and the first couple of pages. It just takes a lot of time, and it's time I could be spending actually reading the book. Still, I should do it every now and then because words do pop up multiple times. Perhaps I'll make that my rule - if it pops up twice, and I don't know it, I'll write it down somewhere so I can add it to Anki later.
I also got another fat novel and two children's books in German as gifts from my parents for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading the children's books to my daughter!
I did manage to keep studying German throughout the break too, despite working between Christmas and New Year's and the rest of the time mostly being about family things. I made sure I stayed on track with Anki as a minimum. I went to a BBQ with my wife and daughter to my Austrian friends' house and had a chance to talk to their visiting parents and sister. The parents spoke no English, so it was a good opportunity. They were lovely and I really enjoyed talking to them. They took a while to speak to me too much. They probably weren't sure how much I would understand. I had to remember too that Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which is pretty much all I understand, is just about no one's actual first language. If I hadn't been there, they would have been speaking "in dialect" as they put it. My friend's mother was really nice and, for the first hour or so at least, spoke to me really, really slowly :-)
Unfortunately, apart from this language practice, and once at work between Christmas and New Year's, I haven't had much practice lately. It looks like I'll have more of a chance in mid-January but I've been accelerating my efforts in other areas, with the goal, of course, of getting ready for a Goethe exam sometime soonish. This means I need to be intensify this area as well. I've been giving this a little thought and hope to come up with something soon.
Some other news - I finally did another lesson from Assimil's Perfectionnement Allemand (Using German) - lesson 18 complete! I had decided not to do it anymore, but since my speaking practice has dropped off a bit, I figured I may as well do some more as a weak substitute. It's better than nothing! I think now that I've left it for so long I realise that I've been enjoying real world material more and it's probably more useful for building the vocabulary I really want. However, as a source of parallel translations with recordings all already prepared, it's hard to beat for the drive to work.
Oh yeah, and I realised the other day that I bought Lesetraining B2 in mid-March (got it early April I think?) and I hadn't even finished the first half of the book, which contains tests that get progressively harder in order to prepare you for the second half, which is the real practice tests. I'm not sure how much of a difference in difficulty there really is, but anyway, I recently finished all of Part A! That includes adding any vocab I didn't know to my Anki list. When I think back to how hard I found some of the first lessons, I realise that I've come a long way. Today at lunch I also did the first part of the first question in Part B. Got 5 out of 5, did it in 10 minutes (15 would be available in the exam), and added the roughly 10 words I either didn't know or just wasn't 100% sure about to my Anki list. I plan on using my time better to get through the rest of these sample questions before I've had the book for a year!
I suppose that's part of the reason why my posts have become less frequent (if that's possible). And with that, I'll sign off so I can continue to work on the first New Year's Resolution that I've made in a long time - to get to bed earlier. Not to sleep longer, no, but just to get to bed, maybe read for a few minutes first, and just generally live life a bit earlier in the day!
Tschau!
Thursday, January 5, 2012
How many words does an adult know?
I've been wondering this a little lately, so I thought I'd lay down some thoughts just briefly since it's really not the purpose of this blog.
To be honest, I'm not too hung up on the number of words I know in German, though I must admit I did get a little thrill when my own Anki list passed the 2,000 card mark! That's over 1,000 pairs of mappings from German to English. I say mappings because it's quite rare for my cards to be a 1-to-1 pairing. I map 1 to N words to 1 to N words. N is probably never bigger than four. This means that the number of words represented in these mapping pairs is a lot more than 1,000. Probably at least 2,000. And yet, that's not too important to me really. The most important thing for me is that I am adding new words all the time because then at least I know I'm growing my possible vocabulary. Like I've said before, sure, it's not all about words, but they are a massive part of the task, especially, I feel, at my intermediate stage, but it's probably true at any stage. It's the one thing you will always need to increase to become a fully literate, high-functioning individual in a foreign language.
I read a very interesting article recently:
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
The basic gist of it is that reading substantially enhances your vocabulary (in your own language) and that early differences in reading ability and word recognition are magnified throughout your life. Perhaps the same could be said of reading a foreign language?
It also makes this very interesting point which seems to me to also relate to language learning:
"Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.
Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOME
And compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIAL"
For a brachial specialist, the answer would be different of course, but I agreed somewhat with his assessment. Perhaps "fop" is more familiar to me than to him, but really all that's going on in your brain is some very clever neural network processing (with time sequencing of course). This maps firings to other firings to other firings, and you have meaning. Items that fire frequently are reinforced (hence the name "reinforcement learning") and less frequent items degrade over time to some extent.
I feel this way about German. I can think in German at times, and it feels pretty much like thinking in English except that I get stuck on some concepts. English and German have started to differentiate themselves in my head so that switching between them can be slow. Sometimes I'll get stuck for a word and first have to think of the word in English before it comes to me in German, at which point I switch back. This feeling of switching is probably fairly normal at an intermediate stage. Although I can (sometimes!) hold a relatively long conversation in German, I still have a long way to go. I feel like I have internalised many words and structures so that, normally, I can produce correct sentences at normal speed without thinking *consciously* about them. The same goes for comprehending. However, both, in general, require my full focus. English does not require my full focus, though it is still hard to listen to details if I don't pay attention, of course!
In German, it feels like the main conscious effort is in maintaining that focus, that attention. It's tiring. No, it doesn't often come easy yet, but I feel it slowly changing over time.
I think the interesting point for me from the link above was that people who read have a larger vocabulary than people who don't. This may not be *universally* true, but it sounds pretty reasonable as an assumption. This has two corollaries for language learning: (1) If you want a large vocabulary in the language you're studying, you're going to need to read LOTS and (2) When you read in a language you're learning, you will likely encounter a lot more unknown words than in general conversation. I would say that this is all even more so for literature as opposed to just general websites.
Of course, you don't just want a large vocabulary. You need to comprehend native speech at full-speed and interact. To be able to do that, you need to practice that skill. It won't just appear by magic. You also need to understand incomplete input over noisy channels (telephones, radios, speech partner mumbling, etc). Again, this is an acquired skill through practice.
After all, you wouldn't expect to become a Chess Grandmaster by just watching lots of games being played, would you? And yet, Chess is a purely deterministic, mathematically simple problem (albeit one with a very, very large search space). Chess Grandmasters are made through study, practice, instruction and LOTS and LOTS of progressively harder practice.
Anyway, enough talking about practice - I'll get back to actually doing it :-) I'll give an update on what I've been up to lately in my next post...
To be honest, I'm not too hung up on the number of words I know in German, though I must admit I did get a little thrill when my own Anki list passed the 2,000 card mark! That's over 1,000 pairs of mappings from German to English. I say mappings because it's quite rare for my cards to be a 1-to-1 pairing. I map 1 to N words to 1 to N words. N is probably never bigger than four. This means that the number of words represented in these mapping pairs is a lot more than 1,000. Probably at least 2,000. And yet, that's not too important to me really. The most important thing for me is that I am adding new words all the time because then at least I know I'm growing my possible vocabulary. Like I've said before, sure, it's not all about words, but they are a massive part of the task, especially, I feel, at my intermediate stage, but it's probably true at any stage. It's the one thing you will always need to increase to become a fully literate, high-functioning individual in a foreign language.
I read a very interesting article recently:
http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
The basic gist of it is that reading substantially enhances your vocabulary (in your own language) and that early differences in reading ability and word recognition are magnified throughout your life. Perhaps the same could be said of reading a foreign language?
It also makes this very interesting point which seems to me to also relate to language learning:
"Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.
Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOME
And compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIAL"
For a brachial specialist, the answer would be different of course, but I agreed somewhat with his assessment. Perhaps "fop" is more familiar to me than to him, but really all that's going on in your brain is some very clever neural network processing (with time sequencing of course). This maps firings to other firings to other firings, and you have meaning. Items that fire frequently are reinforced (hence the name "reinforcement learning") and less frequent items degrade over time to some extent.
I feel this way about German. I can think in German at times, and it feels pretty much like thinking in English except that I get stuck on some concepts. English and German have started to differentiate themselves in my head so that switching between them can be slow. Sometimes I'll get stuck for a word and first have to think of the word in English before it comes to me in German, at which point I switch back. This feeling of switching is probably fairly normal at an intermediate stage. Although I can (sometimes!) hold a relatively long conversation in German, I still have a long way to go. I feel like I have internalised many words and structures so that, normally, I can produce correct sentences at normal speed without thinking *consciously* about them. The same goes for comprehending. However, both, in general, require my full focus. English does not require my full focus, though it is still hard to listen to details if I don't pay attention, of course!
In German, it feels like the main conscious effort is in maintaining that focus, that attention. It's tiring. No, it doesn't often come easy yet, but I feel it slowly changing over time.
I think the interesting point for me from the link above was that people who read have a larger vocabulary than people who don't. This may not be *universally* true, but it sounds pretty reasonable as an assumption. This has two corollaries for language learning: (1) If you want a large vocabulary in the language you're studying, you're going to need to read LOTS and (2) When you read in a language you're learning, you will likely encounter a lot more unknown words than in general conversation. I would say that this is all even more so for literature as opposed to just general websites.
Of course, you don't just want a large vocabulary. You need to comprehend native speech at full-speed and interact. To be able to do that, you need to practice that skill. It won't just appear by magic. You also need to understand incomplete input over noisy channels (telephones, radios, speech partner mumbling, etc). Again, this is an acquired skill through practice.
After all, you wouldn't expect to become a Chess Grandmaster by just watching lots of games being played, would you? And yet, Chess is a purely deterministic, mathematically simple problem (albeit one with a very, very large search space). Chess Grandmasters are made through study, practice, instruction and LOTS and LOTS of progressively harder practice.
Anyway, enough talking about practice - I'll get back to actually doing it :-) I'll give an update on what I've been up to lately in my next post...
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