Sunday, March 3, 2013
Learning an Australian Aboriginal Language - some tips
I've mentioned earlier that I considered learning an Aboriginal language (take it as read from now on that I'm referring to an indigenous Australian language when I say "Aboriginal"). I have made a good start for the year on Latin and Chinese so I don't want to divert my attention too much just yet, but I have recently found a very good site for learning a group of related dialects which I would like to share with you.
The site is called "Bininj Gunwok". The name is an umbrella term for a collection of mutually intelligible dialects in western Arnhem Land. Some preliminary description of the language group can be found on wikipedia.
I'm really attracted to the idea of learning a native Australian language; a language that was born in my home country! However, the available material is often very old, and native speakers are hard to come by, living as I do in Sydney which, as the sight of first white colonisation in Australia, has seen pretty much the complete destruction of all its native languages. There's really not even much recorded in them, which is a real shame.
The larger aboriginal languages do have some material for learners (as opposed to linguists) available for them, although I don't know much about its quality. Languages like Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri spring to mind. However, when you look into what's available for free online, you don't see much. There aren't even many youtube videos in Aboriginal languages. What I have found several times over is websites which have been started and promise to produce a lot of material for learning some particular Aboriginal language, but then that's about it. I suspect that a lot of what happens is that an enthusiastic community elder or new teacher comes up with an idea, they get funding, things get started and then either the funding isn't renewed due to extremely frequent changes of government policy at all levels (Australian governments like to play political games with indigenous issues, much like renewable energy policy) and/or the enthusiastic outsider moves on.
In any case, the Bininj Gunwok seems different. It has been regularly updated since February last year and they seem to be still actively adding audio content with translations. They also respond quite quickly to comments, as I found out recently, so the site, like the associated language, is definitely not moribund!
Once upon a time, in a lifetime far, far away, I travelled to Kakadu National Park in Australia. I love the Australian bush, but I really fell in love with the unique landscape of the Northern Territory. One of the big highlights for me was the bush tucker tour with Animal Tracks. I really encourage any readers to check out their website and one day visit them if you can. At the end of the day the tour guide jokingly offered me a job with me, and I seriously wanted to accept. Unfortunately, despite my enthusiasm, it really was only a joke, so I went back to my "normal" life of sitting in an air-conditioned box staring at a screen all day, but I've always hoped that one day, somehow, I would be able to do something like those tours as a job, if only for a few months a year. Alas, with a growing family and a mortgage, my priorities have had to change, but perhaps I'll get a chance to go again with the whole family one day :-)
What's my point in all this nostalgia? Well, one of the main language groups still widely spoken in the Kakadu National Park area (and further east into Arnhem Land) is, you guessed it, Bininj Gunwok.
Then, after all these years, I found the Bininj Gunwok website, which appears to be just about the best resource you could find for free to get started in an Aboriginal language. If you've ever had an interest to learn one of the original Australian languages, what better time than now with this amazing website only getting better all the time!
Australians consider learning another language to be such a massive task that they should never start, but learning at least a little of the language of one of the groups of First Australians would go a long way to showing a genuine interest in bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Several years of an Aboriginal language should be compulsory for Australian schoolkids I think. There are already 1+ billion people speaking Mandarin - the world doesn't need more ;-)
To kick off your learning on the website, the site admin pointed me to the following links:
1) Start with the first blog post here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/ma-garri-wokdi-gundjeihmi/
2) Some introductory grammar explanations can be found here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/2012/07/ with detailed related audio here: http://bininjgunwok.org.au/audio/
3) Sign up to the email vocab lesson which sends out a new word and describes it about twice a week.
4) Read the rest of the blog! There's plenty of audio there to get you started.
There's also a free e-book available through scribd and embedded here. I've been unable to download it as a PDF due to not being a premium member of scribd, but I'm trying to find out now if I can get access to the book without this. The book apparently has accompanying cassette tapes, though I don't know if the audio's been digitized yet. It'd be good if it could be made available too, I imagine.
Of course, what would be really awesome would be if someone could produce an Assimil-style course from zero to B2 level, but I don't see that happening any time soon!
One final note on this topic, there's also seems to be some decent material available for the Yolngu languages, including a radio program and, of course, the movie "Ten Canoes", but I don't think there's the same level of introductory material for beginners available for free on the internet.
To finish with a topic change, my own quick update is that my listening practice on Hitler's rant scene from "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") has been going pretty well and I plan on finding another scene soon to stretch myself. Probably from another war movie at first, but then I'll find something new. I haven't read too much more of my current German novel "Das Todeskreuz" - I'm up to about page 160. I have made some OK progress with Chinese with Ease - I just finished lesson 35! - and Le Latin, while slower, is up to lesson 32. I really haven't been adding much from these to my Anki lists of late. In fact, I've been struggling just to keep up with Anki at all ever since the website stopped working so well (due to the big "upgrade" kind of downgrading many features). I can now only do these updates at a computer, which sucks :-) I have also recently watched a movie in Mandarin, but with subtitles of course, but I didn't get a lot out of it because I had to have the volume quite low due to not wanting to wake up my daughters in the next room! But it was fun. And no, no conversations in Mandarin yet. I'll see what I can do soon.
再见！
Vale!
Tschau!
Thursday, February 28, 2013
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!
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!
Monday, February 25, 2013
Latin resources
I've only really been doing my new languages passively at the moment (need to work on that for Chinese for sure!) so my list of resources isn't massive, but I can already offer a few useful pointers. Today I'll start with Latin.
One other note that wasn't in my review - it takes until lesson 62 to start getting much at all from the classical writers that are, after all, the whole point of learning Classical Latin, right? But at least from what I can tell, it's pretty much sections of the classics all the way out from there.[UPDATE: I've since found a few earlier passages which are based on classical authors - lessons 39, 41 and 45 are all I've noticed so far. However, 39 was more "inspired by" than based on. Lesson 41 seems to be a lot closer to the passage it's based on, and I assume they just get progressively closer to the original passage in later lessons, though I can't confirm that yet.]
Oh, wait, one important final note - it's in French. If your French is like mine (maybe, with a month or three of part-time study, I could pass the B2 exam in French, with the ability to read French novels with looking up plenty of words), then it should mostly be smooth sailing. I've only looked up one or two things in the first 28 lessons. Mostly, I can tell what is meant from context as well. It's a shame some of Assimil's catalogue isn't more widely available because their unique format should help disrupt the dumbed down modern book courses we usually find... But I digress...
However, I think people should probably not bother with the audio CDs. You can get the book on its own for a lot cheaper direct from assimil.com or perhaps somewhere else. Obviously, I don't plan on ever speaking Latin or needing to comprehend it in anything other than written form, but I figured that having the audio would just be an extra reinforcement for what I've learnt from the book which I can listen too while driving. However, although the recording quality is high (like all Assimil products) and the speakers seem to do their best most of the time, I find listening to it frustrating rather than reinforcing. The speakers do a pretty good job of putting on a classical latin accent, but they make various mistakes (french-style ones - like not pronouncing the "s" at the end of "klaras" in the phrase "klaras deorum fabulas", although the speaker didn't miss the final one). This means that you need to listen to the audio while reading a couple of times to pick out these mistakes and then to be able to recognise what's being said.
The other problem is that although the speaking speed is usually OK, words are sometimes run together or slightly mumbled, or nasalised where they shouldn't be (one speaker says "ambulant" in a very french way!). I would have thought that the focus for the recording wouldn't really be on trying to make it sound like a real-life conversation but rather on extremely clear and precise enunciation. Each letter should be very easily heard in each word, as learners won't need to get used to classical latin being used in any high-speed real world context, so the audio should just be a way to reinforce the learning through another medium, and to help people make best use of time when they can't read.
This all sounds quite negative, but actually the audio isn't totally useless, just that it's not quite what I expected, or what I think it should really be, and could be improved in a future edition. If you can get it cheap I'd say it's still worth having, but if I had known then what I know now I would just have bought the book on its own without the CDs and saved the extra money.
THE BIG ONE: Assimil's Le Latin
This is currently my primary source. I'm using the 2010 edition by Ducos-Fillipi listed here on Assimil.com. After having used it for a few weeks I felt qualified enough to write a review for a book website, which I've reproduced below the resources section. The short version is: I do recommend it, but just get the book itself. It's 25 euros from Assimil's own website, which isn't bad, but you'll find it cheaper on other websites like bookdepository.co.uk (they also have the older edition which has better support in the Latin learning community) and fishpond.com.au. Maybe even Amazon will have a good price on it. Who knows! Stranger things have happened!One other note that wasn't in my review - it takes until lesson 62 to start getting much at all from the classical writers that are, after all, the whole point of learning Classical Latin, right? But at least from what I can tell, it's pretty much sections of the classics all the way out from there.[UPDATE: I've since found a few earlier passages which are based on classical authors - lessons 39, 41 and 45 are all I've noticed so far. However, 39 was more "inspired by" than based on. Lesson 41 seems to be a lot closer to the passage it's based on, and I assume they just get progressively closer to the original passage in later lessons, though I can't confirm that yet.]
Oh, wait, one important final note - it's in French. If your French is like mine (maybe, with a month or three of part-time study, I could pass the B2 exam in French, with the ability to read French novels with looking up plenty of words), then it should mostly be smooth sailing. I've only looked up one or two things in the first 28 lessons. Mostly, I can tell what is meant from context as well. It's a shame some of Assimil's catalogue isn't more widely available because their unique format should help disrupt the dumbed down modern book courses we usually find... But I digress...
Web Dictionaries
You can find a few of these for Latin->English. This one was sort of OK, but so far they've left me kind of cold. The interfaces are clunky and you need to know the base "dictionary" part of speech, which I'm getting a feel for, but I'd rather just put in the exact part of speech and see some quotes in context. LUCKILY, I learnt German first, because the best online dictionaries I've found so far have been in German. There's Latein.me and the Pons set of dictionaries which has Latin to German as well as a bunch of other language combinations. This one is my favourite, but they both do a neat job of looking up the part of speech and giving you some quotes.Online Radio
This is perhaps the most surprising of all. After all these thousands of years, and in this age of communication that would have seemed almost magical to the Romans, there are still TWO radio broadcasts in Europe in Latin. The one that everyone normally mentions is this one from Finland, but I prefer the one from, you guessed it, Germany, on Radio Bremen's Latin page, which has translations of their articles into German and a proper RSS feed for the podcasts which is convenient for me. There is actually another German radio station which makes this same podcast available, but I found this one to be better. Both radio broadcasts suffer from an influence of the native language on the pronunciation, but, the German one at least (and possibly the Finnish - I haven't listened to theirs much) is spoken slowly and clearly. No, I don't intend to learn to speak and understand spoken Latin, but with probably a bit of initial work to study the news I will be able to listen to these podcasts as I drive to reinforce some of my other learningProgress Update
I can't let a post go by without a status update, so here it is. I've finished lesson 28 in Le Latin and lesson 30 in Chinese with Ease. The latter has really picked up the tempo so it takes more time to shadow the lessons without obvious errors which I really expected, but it's a new challenge. I do need to spend much more time working on pronunciation and getting those tones CONSISTENT because I usually surprise my co-workers in a bad way when I try to say something new :-)
To help with my German I've decided to take audio snippets out of movies and translate them and then memorise them and their translations (roughly - I don't need to be word perfect!) to hopefully improve my understand of movie dialogues in general. I'll add new words along the way, of course. I'm also up to page 155 in "Das Todeskreuz". It's quite slow because reading it is low down on my priority list. I really need to give myself more time each day just to read because I'm really enjoying the story. And, of course, I still listen to a variety of podcasts in German, with the occasional Latin news thrown in just for kicks (but without much comprehension!).
What else? My Anki reviews have suffered for a variety of reasons but the main one is that it doesn't work properly on my Nokia N97's Symbian browser anymore. The Chinese characters don't work at all, but even the German and Latin are all screwed up and slow to use compared to before. I do hope to have an Android phone soon, but I will have to hope that the AnkiDroid version comes out before that!
I would like some suggestions for interesting Chinese language podcasts on a variety of topics (I usually like science, the environment and world history and culture) and would love some with a Chinese perspective, although this isn't a high priority as comprehension is quite a way off. Also, of course, a good Mandarin news broadcast would be great! It should have RSS podcast feeds along with transcripts. Please drop your suggestions in the comments below!
To finish, here's my review of early review of Le Latin as promised. Other people's opinions are most welcome!
My Review of Le Latin
The book itself is excellent and really uses the Assimil method to its full advantage. I would like to see more classical authors being introduced early on in as minimally modified a form as possible to add interest to each lesson, as surely that's the main thing people will want to do after the course, but the lessons themselves are clear, concise and well thought out. The progression feels very natural and you get a feeling for latin word order, etc, early on, which is a great way to speed up your passive understanding for reading speed. It introduces the rules through use, and then later on revises those rules that you will have garnered through the lessons. You are meant, in theory, to do one lesson every day, and every seventh lesson is a revision lesson, which is the standard Assimil format. I am only in the early stages of the book, but I'm confident that I'll reach my goal of being able to read the more straightforward classics by the end of the course (with the help of a dictionary if necessary) which is exactly what I want.However, I think people should probably not bother with the audio CDs. You can get the book on its own for a lot cheaper direct from assimil.com or perhaps somewhere else. Obviously, I don't plan on ever speaking Latin or needing to comprehend it in anything other than written form, but I figured that having the audio would just be an extra reinforcement for what I've learnt from the book which I can listen too while driving. However, although the recording quality is high (like all Assimil products) and the speakers seem to do their best most of the time, I find listening to it frustrating rather than reinforcing. The speakers do a pretty good job of putting on a classical latin accent, but they make various mistakes (french-style ones - like not pronouncing the "s" at the end of "klaras" in the phrase "klaras deorum fabulas", although the speaker didn't miss the final one). This means that you need to listen to the audio while reading a couple of times to pick out these mistakes and then to be able to recognise what's being said.
The other problem is that although the speaking speed is usually OK, words are sometimes run together or slightly mumbled, or nasalised where they shouldn't be (one speaker says "ambulant" in a very french way!). I would have thought that the focus for the recording wouldn't really be on trying to make it sound like a real-life conversation but rather on extremely clear and precise enunciation. Each letter should be very easily heard in each word, as learners won't need to get used to classical latin being used in any high-speed real world context, so the audio should just be a way to reinforce the learning through another medium, and to help people make best use of time when they can't read.
This all sounds quite negative, but actually the audio isn't totally useless, just that it's not quite what I expected, or what I think it should really be, and could be improved in a future edition. If you can get it cheap I'd say it's still worth having, but if I had known then what I know now I would just have bought the book on its own without the CDs and saved the extra money.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Where to from here? Plans for 2013!
At about the same time as I got my results for the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I also got some horrible news when my mother was diagnosed with cancer which I mentioned in an earlier post. My wife and I also had our second baby in November of last year, and sadly in mid-January of this year my mother lost her long battle with cancer.
As a result, my time and focus for language study has been diminished. After passing my exam, I wanted to just enjoy using the language. I have continued to do so mainly by reading German novels (I'm currently reading Das Todeskreuz, up to page 154 out of 500+, and which I picked up for free while on holidays at a free book exchange), listening to the amazing array of high quality and informative German-language podcasts, and speaking once per week with my Austrian friend at work. Of course, this isn't enough to advance in the language. Actually, because my Anki reviews have suffered greatly, I probably haven't been maintaining my level. I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm being harsh.
Anyway, what's important in my view is the future, and what it holds. My family issues haven't stopped me from thinking about the future, and coming up with some plans. They've just mainly delayed me from writing them up here.
So, what's the plan for 2013?
I wanted to do an experiment to see if I could learn two languages at the same time to any useful extent. I'm not silly enough to pick two closely related languages which have the same endpoint, so that eliminates a few options :-) I have to be interested in them, of course. I have to want to speak/read them, and for those I need to desire to connect more with the culture, and have the opportunity to do so. In order to avoid overlap in goals and language types I decided to pick one ancient language purely for my amusement, and one modern language.
There were several choices I considered. My wife's family speaks Maltese, and I think that I might like to learn it to a lower B2 conversational sort of level someday, but the idea just didn't grip me this year. I have also long had a passion for Serbo-croat, even though I only ever learnt a little really. One of my best friends has a serbian dad and a croatian mum, and one of my work colleagues speaks Serbian, so there was some good opportunity for practice there. However, that work colleague is on maternity leave for most of this year so I figured it wouldn't be the best time to start. And besides, and let's face it, learning a language is a LOT OF WORK. Don't believe the hype you read - it's not a short road in terms of hours of effort. Even getting to a high B2 in German was quite a demanding task for me given my work and family time constraints, along with my other goals. I figured that I would therefore push it down my goal list. As much as I would love to learn it, I figured that some other languages I could choose might possibly lead to some sort of career advancement or opportunities, or just generally be somehow more useful, so I should push them up the list at this stage of my life when I still need to pay off my house and support my family :-)
I thought about the romance languages like Italian and Spanish, or even being sensible and improving my somewhat B2-ish (but as yet not formally tested) French to a proper qualified C1 or even C2. Now that I think about it, this latter was probably the better idea, but I just wasn't drawn to it this year. Probably because I know that starting on a new language and getting to that B1-ish sort of level of a lot less work than pushing a B2 to C1. At the beginning you can do different kinds of practice where you don't expect a really high level of precision from yourself. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but the idea didn't appeal to me. Ditto for my German, which I would like to bring up to an official C1 or C2 level someday, and especially become much more comfortable in terms of understanding a broad range of everyday spoken material very accurately. Italian and Spanish just didn't do it for me. I like their movies, the cultures, the food, the countries. All of that. But for some reason, the spark just isn't there for me right now. Don't ask me why!
I even thought of pursuing my passion for Australian native languages by trying to learn one. The problem is that the speakers are few, remotely located and therefore difficult to access. I'm not sure what the quality of learning materials is like, but I know they don't have any Assimil courses for them :-) Also, apart from the few books I could find and the paucity of speakers, I also can't really find a lot of input material. No real podcasts or movies. There is one movie in a language I'm particularly interested in learning (called Ten Canoes - if you haven't seen it, you should check it out!), and possibly some radio programs, but other than that it's pretty bare. There are some University courses which I could do by distance learning, but these are prohibitively expensive ($440 for each course) when my goal is to spend little to no money on my language learning projects. I still have this thought bubbling away in the back of my mind, however, and plan to figure out how I can push this along in the future. But for now it needs to stay on ice I think...
In terms of ancient languages, there are only really a few standouts - Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Old English. I actually started on Old English at one stage, but just went off the rails and when I thought about it again late last year, I decided that what I would love to be able to do is read Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" in its original language, along with many of the other latin classics. The Greek classics are possibly even more appealing, but for accessing the history of european culture, I think there's nothing like Latin. I would love to be able to read the Latin inscriptions of old monuments around Europe the next time I'm there, for example!
There's also an Assimil course for it (just like Ancient Greek and Egyptian, in case you're interested) so, the choice was made! My goal is to be able to read Caesar's "The Conquest of Goal" in its original, with minimal notes (mainly for cultural items) by the end of the year. Actually, I'm setting my goal for this to be mid-year, but definitely by the end :-) I ordered the Assimil course with audio as a Christmas present from someone who was struggling to find something for me. As a side note, I also got the Assimil album which purports to help young kids speak French (but I would say to just avoid it - it's not really in the Assimil style at all), and this book on swearing in German (which has already helped me understand my current German book mentioned above, Das Todeskreuz).
As for modern language, if you worked in my team, you would see that there's really only one choice. My small team has two fluent Mandarin speakers (also two fluent cantonese speakers) and my company in general has many chinese people. On top of that, my current home town of Sydney is heavily populated with chinese people, many of the older ones being Cantonese speakers, but more and more the mix is dominated by Mandarin speakers. I had also already bought the Assimil course for Mandarin three years ago (although I had never used them), so there were no new costs involved. Also, I love martial arts films, and am interested to get news about China from a chinese perspective rather than the dumbed version of international news we often get from the world's English-speaking press, so finding interesting content won't be a problem.
The good thing about this combination is that they're very different which has meant that, so far, I'm really not suffering any confusion of one on the other. Latin is a highly-inflected Indo-european language, and Chinese is completely the opposite. My goal in Latin is just to read the classics - I'm not really concerned with my own ability to compose into Latin and definitely not with speaking or listening - whereas my goal in Chinese is mainly to become a conversational speaker who can read a little bit of day-to-day stuff, although I have been adding chinese characters to my Anki list and can already identify a small number of these reasonably reliably.
So, there you have it - a seemingly unlikely combination of languages to learn at the same time, but this unlikeliness is what makes them such a good match, especially since they have different goals. As to what the exact goals are, I haven't fully fleshed these out yet, so I'll post more on each of these in the future, along with some of the tools I've already found to help me out along the way. And since we're so far into the year, I need to let you know how far I've got. So, I started at the start of the year with my Assimil lessons for each course and I'm currently up to lesson 28 in Chinese with Ease and lesson 26 in Le Latin (although I want to listen to the audio for lesson 25 again). I'm clearly not keeping up with the 1 lesson per day plan, but it's going OK. I generally don't do any on the weekends, though I should find the time to do a lesson of each somehow. I'll try to fix this going forward. I'll discuss how I tackle them specifically more in a future post. One thing I'm sure about - I'm glad I studied German before Latin, although you'll have to wait for my Latin resources post to find out why!
And what about German itself? Well, I don't have too many specific plans, but I do know that finding a high quality piece of audio, and then translating it and remembering the whole translation while I'm listening to the audio helped me massively, so I think I should find chunks of audio (perhaps from movies as well as podcasts), especially of everyday German and just really focus on one chunk at a time until I feel as though I understand everything that's being said "in real time", and then move on to another chunk. I haven't really started this yet, but I will do it soon and see how it goes. I can't focus massively on studying German this year (although I will happily be enjoying using it), but I feel that if I can manage to do something like this audio study once a month I can make some comprehension progress which has been lacking for a while. Of course, I would need to find time for my Anki reviews, which hasn't happened yet, partially due to some unfortunate changes in the new version of Anki which are steps backwards, if you ask me. Oh well, it is free after all!
As a result, my time and focus for language study has been diminished. After passing my exam, I wanted to just enjoy using the language. I have continued to do so mainly by reading German novels (I'm currently reading Das Todeskreuz, up to page 154 out of 500+, and which I picked up for free while on holidays at a free book exchange), listening to the amazing array of high quality and informative German-language podcasts, and speaking once per week with my Austrian friend at work. Of course, this isn't enough to advance in the language. Actually, because my Anki reviews have suffered greatly, I probably haven't been maintaining my level. I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm being harsh.
Anyway, what's important in my view is the future, and what it holds. My family issues haven't stopped me from thinking about the future, and coming up with some plans. They've just mainly delayed me from writing them up here.
So, what's the plan for 2013?
I wanted to do an experiment to see if I could learn two languages at the same time to any useful extent. I'm not silly enough to pick two closely related languages which have the same endpoint, so that eliminates a few options :-) I have to be interested in them, of course. I have to want to speak/read them, and for those I need to desire to connect more with the culture, and have the opportunity to do so. In order to avoid overlap in goals and language types I decided to pick one ancient language purely for my amusement, and one modern language.
There were several choices I considered. My wife's family speaks Maltese, and I think that I might like to learn it to a lower B2 conversational sort of level someday, but the idea just didn't grip me this year. I have also long had a passion for Serbo-croat, even though I only ever learnt a little really. One of my best friends has a serbian dad and a croatian mum, and one of my work colleagues speaks Serbian, so there was some good opportunity for practice there. However, that work colleague is on maternity leave for most of this year so I figured it wouldn't be the best time to start. And besides, and let's face it, learning a language is a LOT OF WORK. Don't believe the hype you read - it's not a short road in terms of hours of effort. Even getting to a high B2 in German was quite a demanding task for me given my work and family time constraints, along with my other goals. I figured that I would therefore push it down my goal list. As much as I would love to learn it, I figured that some other languages I could choose might possibly lead to some sort of career advancement or opportunities, or just generally be somehow more useful, so I should push them up the list at this stage of my life when I still need to pay off my house and support my family :-)
I thought about the romance languages like Italian and Spanish, or even being sensible and improving my somewhat B2-ish (but as yet not formally tested) French to a proper qualified C1 or even C2. Now that I think about it, this latter was probably the better idea, but I just wasn't drawn to it this year. Probably because I know that starting on a new language and getting to that B1-ish sort of level of a lot less work than pushing a B2 to C1. At the beginning you can do different kinds of practice where you don't expect a really high level of precision from yourself. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but the idea didn't appeal to me. Ditto for my German, which I would like to bring up to an official C1 or C2 level someday, and especially become much more comfortable in terms of understanding a broad range of everyday spoken material very accurately. Italian and Spanish just didn't do it for me. I like their movies, the cultures, the food, the countries. All of that. But for some reason, the spark just isn't there for me right now. Don't ask me why!
I even thought of pursuing my passion for Australian native languages by trying to learn one. The problem is that the speakers are few, remotely located and therefore difficult to access. I'm not sure what the quality of learning materials is like, but I know they don't have any Assimil courses for them :-) Also, apart from the few books I could find and the paucity of speakers, I also can't really find a lot of input material. No real podcasts or movies. There is one movie in a language I'm particularly interested in learning (called Ten Canoes - if you haven't seen it, you should check it out!), and possibly some radio programs, but other than that it's pretty bare. There are some University courses which I could do by distance learning, but these are prohibitively expensive ($440 for each course) when my goal is to spend little to no money on my language learning projects. I still have this thought bubbling away in the back of my mind, however, and plan to figure out how I can push this along in the future. But for now it needs to stay on ice I think...
In terms of ancient languages, there are only really a few standouts - Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Old English. I actually started on Old English at one stage, but just went off the rails and when I thought about it again late last year, I decided that what I would love to be able to do is read Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" in its original language, along with many of the other latin classics. The Greek classics are possibly even more appealing, but for accessing the history of european culture, I think there's nothing like Latin. I would love to be able to read the Latin inscriptions of old monuments around Europe the next time I'm there, for example!
There's also an Assimil course for it (just like Ancient Greek and Egyptian, in case you're interested) so, the choice was made! My goal is to be able to read Caesar's "The Conquest of Goal" in its original, with minimal notes (mainly for cultural items) by the end of the year. Actually, I'm setting my goal for this to be mid-year, but definitely by the end :-) I ordered the Assimil course with audio as a Christmas present from someone who was struggling to find something for me. As a side note, I also got the Assimil album which purports to help young kids speak French (but I would say to just avoid it - it's not really in the Assimil style at all), and this book on swearing in German (which has already helped me understand my current German book mentioned above, Das Todeskreuz).
As for modern language, if you worked in my team, you would see that there's really only one choice. My small team has two fluent Mandarin speakers (also two fluent cantonese speakers) and my company in general has many chinese people. On top of that, my current home town of Sydney is heavily populated with chinese people, many of the older ones being Cantonese speakers, but more and more the mix is dominated by Mandarin speakers. I had also already bought the Assimil course for Mandarin three years ago (although I had never used them), so there were no new costs involved. Also, I love martial arts films, and am interested to get news about China from a chinese perspective rather than the dumbed version of international news we often get from the world's English-speaking press, so finding interesting content won't be a problem.
The good thing about this combination is that they're very different which has meant that, so far, I'm really not suffering any confusion of one on the other. Latin is a highly-inflected Indo-european language, and Chinese is completely the opposite. My goal in Latin is just to read the classics - I'm not really concerned with my own ability to compose into Latin and definitely not with speaking or listening - whereas my goal in Chinese is mainly to become a conversational speaker who can read a little bit of day-to-day stuff, although I have been adding chinese characters to my Anki list and can already identify a small number of these reasonably reliably.
So, there you have it - a seemingly unlikely combination of languages to learn at the same time, but this unlikeliness is what makes them such a good match, especially since they have different goals. As to what the exact goals are, I haven't fully fleshed these out yet, so I'll post more on each of these in the future, along with some of the tools I've already found to help me out along the way. And since we're so far into the year, I need to let you know how far I've got. So, I started at the start of the year with my Assimil lessons for each course and I'm currently up to lesson 28 in Chinese with Ease and lesson 26 in Le Latin (although I want to listen to the audio for lesson 25 again). I'm clearly not keeping up with the 1 lesson per day plan, but it's going OK. I generally don't do any on the weekends, though I should find the time to do a lesson of each somehow. I'll try to fix this going forward. I'll discuss how I tackle them specifically more in a future post. One thing I'm sure about - I'm glad I studied German before Latin, although you'll have to wait for my Latin resources post to find out why!
And what about German itself? Well, I don't have too many specific plans, but I do know that finding a high quality piece of audio, and then translating it and remembering the whole translation while I'm listening to the audio helped me massively, so I think I should find chunks of audio (perhaps from movies as well as podcasts), especially of everyday German and just really focus on one chunk at a time until I feel as though I understand everything that's being said "in real time", and then move on to another chunk. I haven't really started this yet, but I will do it soon and see how it goes. I can't focus massively on studying German this year (although I will happily be enjoying using it), but I feel that if I can manage to do something like this audio study once a month I can make some comprehension progress which has been lacking for a while. Of course, I would need to find time for my Anki reviews, which hasn't happened yet, partially due to some unfortunate changes in the new version of Anki which are steps backwards, if you ask me. Oh well, it is free after all!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Learning any language - a perspective...
I read something recently about teaching and learning australian indigenous languages which discusses techniques that actually have a surprising broad applicability. The link is here:
Grammar rules, OK?
What works when teaching a highly endangered
Aboriginal language versus a stronger language?
It's interesting for its discussion of how to learn a language in the process of being revived, but it also has this overview of how to learn a language with access to good material and native speakers (which the paper terms "strong" languages) and since this is the situation for most languages average people are interested in learning, I figured I would repost an excerpt here:
The following list outlines just some of the sound teaching methods and
techniques that are possible when teaching strong languages:
1. Being an active listener, constantly listening to the language at home on pre-recorded CDs of narratives and language drills.
2. Constructing long texts in class with all the discourse markers and styles of a healthy language that is still spoken fluently.
3. Looking, thinking and listening to the teachers as he/she models natural dialogues.
4. Mimicking the teacher as he/she models natural sentences with fluent speech, using the intonation and pragmatics of the language.
5. Getting the teacher to record long sentences onto student iPhones.
6. Consulting the many sentence examples in the contemporary dictionary which outlines the different senses and uses of words in natural sentences.
7. Putting away the books and pens, on a regular basis, and having longer and more sustained oral language sessions in just the target language, with no English.
8. Seeking out speakers in an effort to develop an ear for the language and gaining a good passive knowledge of the different genres of the language.
9. Being prepared to go outside student comfort zones, and practise regularly speaking the language with fluent speakers, and making mistakes in front of others in an effort to learn the correct usage of the language.
10. Trying to learn idiomatic usage of the language and practise using idioms in one’s speech.
A lot of this list applies at all stages of learning. You will just get different outcomes from each approach depending on your current level, but all should help move you forward.
Pretty straight forward, right? So let's all get on with it :-)
Grammar rules, OK?
What works when teaching a highly endangered
Aboriginal language versus a stronger language?
It's interesting for its discussion of how to learn a language in the process of being revived, but it also has this overview of how to learn a language with access to good material and native speakers (which the paper terms "strong" languages) and since this is the situation for most languages average people are interested in learning, I figured I would repost an excerpt here:
The following list outlines just some of the sound teaching methods and
techniques that are possible when teaching strong languages:
1. Being an active listener, constantly listening to the language at home on pre-recorded CDs of narratives and language drills.
2. Constructing long texts in class with all the discourse markers and styles of a healthy language that is still spoken fluently.
3. Looking, thinking and listening to the teachers as he/she models natural dialogues.
4. Mimicking the teacher as he/she models natural sentences with fluent speech, using the intonation and pragmatics of the language.
5. Getting the teacher to record long sentences onto student iPhones.
6. Consulting the many sentence examples in the contemporary dictionary which outlines the different senses and uses of words in natural sentences.
7. Putting away the books and pens, on a regular basis, and having longer and more sustained oral language sessions in just the target language, with no English.
8. Seeking out speakers in an effort to develop an ear for the language and gaining a good passive knowledge of the different genres of the language.
9. Being prepared to go outside student comfort zones, and practise regularly speaking the language with fluent speakers, and making mistakes in front of others in an effort to learn the correct usage of the language.
10. Trying to learn idiomatic usage of the language and practise using idioms in one’s speech.
A lot of this list applies at all stages of learning. You will just get different outcomes from each approach depending on your current level, but all should help move you forward.
Pretty straight forward, right? So let's all get on with it :-)
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Constructing an Anki list for German
[Edit: I have recently released the Anki deck I created while preparing for the Goethe Zertifikat B2. It's free, so check it out! See my post: http://yetanotherlanguage.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/my-anki-list.html for more details.]
This is a short post on my thoughts on constructing a good Anki list, specifically for German. Some of what is below would be applicable to other languages in general (argument structures, arbitrary grammatical forms, etc), but I haven't put too much effort into distinguishing them at this stage. Perhaps I will sometime in the future.
This is a short post on my thoughts on constructing a good Anki list, specifically for German. Some of what is below would be applicable to other languages in general (argument structures, arbitrary grammatical forms, etc), but I haven't put too much effort into distinguishing them at this stage. Perhaps I will sometime in the future.
1. Add mainly content words
It takes time to add words. Don't bother adding tiny words that you'll see/hear thousands of times per month of normal study. This includes many of the words in the top 500 or so of frequency lists. Instead, add words from your lessons, and from whatever you read or hear that interests you. Sometimes I added every word I didn't know in a text which is quite laborious and involves a significant investment of time. I only did this really for Lesetraining B2 which was ready material at my target level and therefore it was extremely important for me to be very accurate on this. When I started reading Der Beobachter I needed to add a lot of new words, many of which are more specific to murder mysteries in general, as well as other words which felt more informal and everyday to me like "herumtoben" which refers to the noisy way kids play. The translations on Linguee are a bit twee: "to frolic, to romp" or sensible to misleading out of context "to shout and scream", but put them in your Anki list anyway, or come up with a better one from the context. A slightly twee definition is better than none at all. As I progressed through the book, I added less and less words because it became unnecessary in general for my flow and was affecting my enjoyment of the story.
I just realised while writing this that I think the word "herumtoben" appears exactly once in "Der Beobachter". Maybe it's a few times, but it doesn't appear often in a 650 page novel, though it did mean that the sentence it was in meant little to nothing to me, so I added it to my list. Now, all this time later, even without having revised my German Anki list properly in the last couple of months, it's still stuck in there. Some people would think that's a bad thing. I personally will never complain when I remember a word, whatever it means!
I just realised while writing this that I think the word "herumtoben" appears exactly once in "Der Beobachter". Maybe it's a few times, but it doesn't appear often in a 650 page novel, though it did mean that the sentence it was in meant little to nothing to me, so I added it to my list. Now, all this time later, even without having revised my German Anki list properly in the last couple of months, it's still stuck in there. Some people would think that's a bad thing. I personally will never complain when I remember a word, whatever it means!
2. Everything you consume is a source of words
Everything. Your textbooks, the news, your podcasts, conversations you have, everything. This may seem obvious, but I like to just have one list that covers everything I wanted to remember, as much as I could be bothered entering into Anki. This
3. Include the argument structure
I mentioned this point in my last post, but I think it's worth reiterating. The argument structure of a word (usually verbs only, but sometimes the idea is valid for other parts of speech) specifies how it is used in real sentences, not toy sentences. I spent some time learning French at one stage at Alliance Francaise with no real great success (but at great expense!). One problem I found was that although I felt like I had learnt a lot and could probably have passed an appropriate written-only exam on various points of grammar, I just couldn't express normal, everyday thoughts. I could say, for example, "to protect" but not "to protect from" which is the sort of thing you need to put together a really useful sentence. In fact, most sentences will fill in several of the "slots" in the argument structure. These are often the interesting and important parts of a sentence. In German these connections are usually expressed either by the case of the noun (let's face it, usually the dative :-) ) or a preposition. Here are the examples from my last post:
"an einer Veranstaltung teilnehmen, bei/in ... mitmachen, sich an ... beteiligen"
=
"to take part in an event, to participate"
"aus folgendem Grund"
=
"for the following reason"
"im Büro"
=
"at the office"
"sich die Nase putzen"
=
"to blow one's nose"
"auf etwas warten"
=
"to wait for something"
=
"to take part in an event, to participate"
"aus folgendem Grund"
=
"for the following reason"
"im Büro"
=
"at the office"
"sich die Nase putzen"
=
"to blow one's nose"
"auf etwas warten"
=
"to wait for something"
Remember too that some prepositions can take different case depending on the meaning of the sentence, so I recorded that usually as well. I decided in the end that I preferred to show this by writing "etwas" for the accusative or "einer Sache" for the dative. In the examples above I've used "an einer Veranstaltung" because that's what's most appropriate.
4. Include arbitrary grammatical categories with every definition
In many ways I needed to have already studied German a bit to know what to do here, but after you read this article, you'll know what to do from the start - too easy!
So, what do I mean? A concrete example is that every German noun has a gender (i.e., takes the article "der", "die" or "das") and the plurals are highly irregular. While the latter fall into various "standard" categories (standard-ish), you can't always tell for certain which category it will be. There are some hard and fast rules: any feminine noun ending in -in will have plural -innen. Still, I chose not to rely on knowing the rules sometimes, and the exceptions the others. When I add a word to my Anki list, it has the article and the plural form, and I expect myself to be able to produce the plural as well as the article.
I do something similar for irregular verbs. Regular verbs are fine to just enter in the infinitive, but for irregular verbs I give the dictionary forms which are: infinitive, third person indicative singular, simple past and compound past tense. If you don't know what these terms mean, don't worry - just look up a German verb you know well in a dictionary and see the forms it lists. An example from my Anki list is:
"verschwinden (verschwindet, verschwand, hat verschwunden)"
Note that there are some more forms which can be irregular but they are much less commonly used so I didn't overload myself. Also, I don't do this for highly irregular verbs. In fact, they are all such common verbs (like sein, haben, etc) that I would never bother to add them to a word list. Note though that you would have added them if you didn't follow my advice in point 1 above :-)
One important note from the above is that I included the auxiliary verb with the compound past tense ("hat verschwunden" above). My source for verb conjugations, Verbix, does this and I decided that it's a good idea because, even though they are mostly "haben + participle", leaving the 'hat" in there helps me cement the purpose of that form in my brain, and it makes sure that I remember which auxiliary it is (haben or sein). I recommend it.
5. Cut yourself some slack when entering words
Basically, I found that doing all of the above took enough time as it was. Although it was worth it in the end, my time for all this has always been extremely limited, so I had to drop some ideas that I wanted to do. I wanted to add an example sentence for everything, but I found that this is onerously time-consuming and also of limited benefit really. Most of my words were sourced from material I was actively consuming myself, not high frequency lists of words I found on the internet, or that I was spoonfed in class, so I usually have a vague memory of the context associated with each word, or at least have a rough idea where it came from. To continue with the example of herumtoben from above, I roughly remember that it was in a scene where the main character was watching her teenage daughter play some team sport. I remember that I read the word "klirren" (to clink) in a scene where the main character was meeting up with her daughter's sports coach for a drink in a pub at the start of an affair with him.
In brief, spend the time on what's most important. For me that was getting down the random grammatical categories, plurals, irregular verbs and argument structures. I have 1400+ cards currently in my deck, so you can imagine that it's already taken me quite some time. There might only be 1000 if I had tried to do more.
6. A weak translation is better than nothing at all
I found the dictionary at www.linguee.com to be excellent, but dict.leo.org was also very useful. However, I don't know every nuance of the language, and sometimes there doesn't seem to be a perfect fit. Or you're just in a hurry and you choose poorly. Whatever. Get that word in there. As long as it's pretty good it's going to be doing you good. Just try to make sure you don't get it completely wrong, but still don't worry too much. One or two mistakes won't kill you. One day you'll say something wrong and have a good laugh at it, probably. Not the end of the world.
7. Don't be afraid of many-to-many cards
What's a many-to-many card? Well, I'm glad you asked. Look, the world is crazy. Words don't always (ever?) mean an exact, perfect, fixed thing. They can be fuzzy. There are lots of synonyms or near synonyms. And this isn't just one way. Have a look at this card from my deck:
"vorzüglich, ausgezeichnet, hervorragend, exzellent"
=
"excellent, superb"
I expect to be able to produce all the forms on the card in both recognition and production. I think four synonyms should probably be my limit, though I have cards with five this feels like too many. Linguee has a guide to indicate how frequent words are in its corpus, which may not match your own experiences, but it's a guide. It's a quick way to help you pick the most important near synonyms.
I feel that this sort of card, rather than making your life hard, makes it easier because language and words really are a sort of giant semantic web of connections. Keeping these things together can help support the meaning. Note that sometimes the same word appears on multiple cards, grouped with different words. This is because the same word often has multiple meanings depending on context and also smeared out over the semantic space. This kind of card helps you get a feel for which types of words substitute for which kinds of meanings.
It's not pretty, but then, neither is the real world.
That's about all I can think of for now. I might do another one for other languages in the future, but if you've got any tips of your own for making Anki decks for any language, just pop them in the comments!
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam: a post-mortem
Hallo Leute!
Sorry for the long, long delay in posting this. It's been a busy year with family health issues and becoming a father for the second time!
A brief update on what I've been doing with regards to German: I have continued with my weekly German chats, kept up (somewhat infrequently) with my German-speaking pen-pals and have continued to read German books and listen to podcasts on a wide variety of topics. What I haven't done, pretty much since passing my exam, is any concentrated German study. I'll discuss my plans for next year in a post soon! I read "Das Parfüm" which is a great book. My understanding was lower than with "Der Beobachter" because the vocabulary is just much larger and I wanted to enjoy it without stopping to look up words. I did add some words along the way to my Anki list, but I tried not to worry too much about it. I understood the story more than 99% of the time, so my enjoyment was undiminished by whatever words I couldn't figure out on my own. The second book which I just started recently is called "Das Todeskreuz." I picked it up while I was on holidays at a bookswap. I'm finding it to be very well written and easy to read. It's also set in my former hometown (well, for six months at least!) of Frankfurt which is a nice bonus. It's nice to be able to pick up a book by a native author and just to be able enjoy without having to strain!
Anyway, since I achieved my goal in April last year of passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I want to reflect back on what I needed to do to get here, partially for my own benefit in planning for the future, but mainly to hopefully give other people heading towards a similar goal some useful pointers.
Let me start by looking back at the planning I did way back at the start. I wrote the following plan on the 21st of November, 2010:
***
German Learning Plan - 21/11/2010
Goal: To reach B2 and pass either Goethe B2 or ZDfB
Resources:
- Assimil Deutsch Ohne Mühe(German with Ease)
- http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html
- Goethe Institut
Rough Plan:
- Complete Assimil in 5 months (1 month review, 4 months to complete and review all lessons in Phase 2)
- Watch all Jojo episodes and follow them without subtitles
- Listen to the news on DW once or twice a week. This includes translating the text in Google Translator Toolkit to build up news specific vocabulary. Use the original and translations to know what is being said. Use the original + audio (both tempos) to get used to hearing German and understanding it - Assimil style.
- Use the exam preparation material supplied by the Goethe Institut. This will give an idea of what is required to pass the exams.
- Keep up with German penpals. Make new ones.
- Find opportunities to speak with Germans. Don’t worry about mistakes or not knowing much. Use the opportunities. In person might be best.
- Perhaps use the Goethe Fernunterricht courses. This is the beginner’s course.
- Listen to German songs, watch German movies.
***
How did I do on this list? I would say I did most of it in general. I definitely did NOT complete the Assimil course in 5 months! I didn't even end up doing all of the active phase (where you go back to the start and redo the lessons, this time trying to translate from English into German). Basically, I just found the active phase took too much time for me to do at the same time as doing more active lessons for the time I had available. And maybe I didn't feel the same level of benefit as from the passive phase (which, if you insist on shadowing all the speakers in every dialogue until you do each one without tripping up anywhere is actually quite far from passive :-) ).
I listened to German podcasts most days, starting mainly with the news (for which I did my own translations with the help of Google Translate initially and put them into a side-by-side parallel translation format) which helped enormously in improving my listening speed and my confidence. I eventually branched out into a bunch of different types of podcasts. There is a really wide variety of excellent podcasts in German. In fact, listening to them made me wonder why no australian radio is able to get close to the consistently high quality, wide ranging reporting that I found so easily in German radio (for example, dradio and SWR2, just to name two).
I did listen to German songs and watch movies without subtitles. This is a kind of passive confidence building exercise that I don't think had many direct benefits in terms of progress, but still, it's important to enjoy the fruits of your labours sometime! During 2012 I watched Das Parfüm, Das Boot, Der Untergang (aka Downfall with that famous scene!) and Nirgendwo in Afrika to name a few. I most definitely did not end up watching the whole "Jojo sucht das Glück" series. Basically, because it was awful :-) I still want to be able to understand more of the dialogue - that Mark guy, especially. He's a real mumbler! But I figured that if I can understand more of the dialogue from high-quality feature films, why struggle with bad acting, boring scripts, muffled sound and scruffy mumblers!
(a) Assimil's German with Ease, for sure. If you're a beginner, start with Assimil. I can't really comment on the usefulness of the advanced courses because I didn't get very far through my own for reasons I mention above, but the ones that claim to get you up to B2 (which I think they almost do in terms of fundamentals, but you'll need to do other work to pass the exam) are brilliant to get started. Check out the reviews on Amazon though because I've heard that some of the courses are not so good. Oh, and get used to minor typos. "New German With Ease" was full of them, but they didn't cause me any trouble.
(b) I made my own Anki list (as well as using one other big list). I added every single word I didn't recognise in "Lesetraining B2" to it and also many others that I found just reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, etc. IMPORTANT: You should know enough of the grammar to be able to look up the word and write down its basic form plus enough other information to cover most of the basic irregularities which can occur. Don't bother doing this for regular forms, of course, and don't put in every irregular form because that might be a lot! And, perhaps even more important: Include the "argument structure". What do I mean by this? See the example below.
(c) meeting up with native speakers. I managed to organise a regular weekly meeting at my work of just half an hour, and I also made a pair of awesome Austrian friends through the Couchsurfing website. I just got really lucky there because they both thought it was cool that someone in Australia would be bothering to learn German!
(d) I did as much exam prep material as I could squeeze in time for. When I was a long way out from the exam I did some B1 level material and then had a go at B2 level which showed up my weaknesses for the exam format. This lead me to buy "Lesetraining B2" which I've mentioned in many previous posts, and I did this whole book before the exam. Doing this work also really improved my B2 level vocab.
(d) only applies if you're actually doing the exam - although I think that the reading practice with comprehension exercises from "Lesetraining B2" really helped a lot just with my general reading because I added a lot of words into my Anki list at this stage. Also, it's nice to read books, but sometimes it's important to test your comprehension to really focus your mind on getting a clear understanding of what the text is saying. This helped push me past that phase of fuzzy, general understanding to having a really precise understanding of much more of what I read.
For conversation practice, Skype would be fine, but I never used it for language exchange in German. I will use it in the future to keep in touch with my good friends from Austria who've headed home now.
"an einer Veranstaltung teilnehmen, bei/in ... mitmachen, sich an ... beteiligen"
=
"to take part in an event, to participate"
"aus folgendem Grund"
=
"for the following reason"
"im Büro"
=
"at the office"
"sich die Nase putzen"
=
"to blow one's nose"
"auf etwas warten"
=
"to wait for something"
As you can see, the idea is mainly for verbs, but it doesn't only apply to them. When I tried to learn languages when I was younger I would try to memorise all the prepositions and what they "mean" in English, and then try to apply what I had memorised following the rules in English. For anything other than the really basic examples that your beginners' textbook will give you, this will fail most of the time. This is one major reason why I don't believe it's useful to download wordlists like "the most frequent 2000 words" to start with in learning a language because the most common words are this little words that carry a lot of functions and don't have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. Even the really basic words like "der, die, das" = "the", because there will be times when English uses them where German doesn't and vice-versa. It's nice to know basically what they mean, but you will see them so often that there's no real point in making a special effort to memorise them. Just look at the phrase above for "to blow one's nose" and you'll see what I'm talking about. The other reason against "high frequency" word lists is that many of even the top 100 words will be very low on actual "content", like all these little grammatical words. The words I want to study are the ones which carry the actual content and meaning of the phrase. I'm not sure how many people out there are going to be familiar with Information Theory, but one of the results of it as applied to natural languages is that often the less frequent words carry the most actual information in a sentence.
You might know this feeling when you're learning a language. You understand all the little grammatical words, and the forms of the verbs and all that in a sentence, but sometimes there is just one word that is the real key to understanding. Yes, sometimes you can figure the meaning (if only vaguely) from the rest of the context, so it's important not to get too hung up on it, but sometimes you will just have no real idea. Words. You can't get away from learning words. Real content words are the best of all. It's great knowing that the word "die" means "the", and that "er" means "he", and that "zurück" means back, but it doesn't help much with a sentence you'll hear all the time on the news like "Er wies die Vorwürfe zurück". "He somethings the something back" would be your translation after learning the more frequent 500 words or whatever (I'm just guessing), but it's not particularly helpful in figuring out that it actually means "He rejected the accusations". My point is not that the most frequent words aren't useful, just that you will encounter them so often that one quick initial search should cover you for these permanently. The lower frequency content words are the ones that you need to add to your Anki list.
* Not starting with Anki early enough.
* Trying to pick up too many pre-made Anki decks.
* Trying to put every Assimil lesson into Anki (I seriously started doing this at one stage!)
* Not having good enough french to understand the more advanced nuances being expressed in "Perfectionnement Allemand".
* Spending too much time seeking out more beginner level audio when I wasn't understanding every word perfectly. Understanding takes a LOT of practice, so it's best to seek out interesting content because you will have to listen to it a lot!
* Not spending enough time with my parallel translations. After putting the effort into producing these I should have then been listening to them and reading them until I knew them cold. Each time I did actually do this I felt my understanding jump a little step up, so I really should have found the time to focus on this more.
There's so much more I could write about my experiences so far, but rather than look back any more I'll focus on the future and where I can go from here. I've already started on my plans for this year which I'll discuss in my next post, along with plans for how to reach my goals.
Got plans for the new year? Tell us all in the comments!
Sorry for the long, long delay in posting this. It's been a busy year with family health issues and becoming a father for the second time!
A brief update on what I've been doing with regards to German: I have continued with my weekly German chats, kept up (somewhat infrequently) with my German-speaking pen-pals and have continued to read German books and listen to podcasts on a wide variety of topics. What I haven't done, pretty much since passing my exam, is any concentrated German study. I'll discuss my plans for next year in a post soon! I read "Das Parfüm" which is a great book. My understanding was lower than with "Der Beobachter" because the vocabulary is just much larger and I wanted to enjoy it without stopping to look up words. I did add some words along the way to my Anki list, but I tried not to worry too much about it. I understood the story more than 99% of the time, so my enjoyment was undiminished by whatever words I couldn't figure out on my own. The second book which I just started recently is called "Das Todeskreuz." I picked it up while I was on holidays at a bookswap. I'm finding it to be very well written and easy to read. It's also set in my former hometown (well, for six months at least!) of Frankfurt which is a nice bonus. It's nice to be able to pick up a book by a native author and just to be able enjoy without having to strain!
Anyway, since I achieved my goal in April last year of passing the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I want to reflect back on what I needed to do to get here, partially for my own benefit in planning for the future, but mainly to hopefully give other people heading towards a similar goal some useful pointers.
Let me start by looking back at the planning I did way back at the start. I wrote the following plan on the 21st of November, 2010:
***
German Learning Plan - 21/11/2010
Goal: To reach B2 and pass either Goethe B2 or ZDfB
Resources:
- Assimil Deutsch Ohne Mühe(German with Ease)
- http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html
- Goethe Institut
Rough Plan:
- Complete Assimil in 5 months (1 month review, 4 months to complete and review all lessons in Phase 2)
- Watch all Jojo episodes and follow them without subtitles
- Listen to the news on DW once or twice a week. This includes translating the text in Google Translator Toolkit to build up news specific vocabulary. Use the original and translations to know what is being said. Use the original + audio (both tempos) to get used to hearing German and understanding it - Assimil style.
- Use the exam preparation material supplied by the Goethe Institut. This will give an idea of what is required to pass the exams.
- Keep up with German penpals. Make new ones.
- Find opportunities to speak with Germans. Don’t worry about mistakes or not knowing much. Use the opportunities. In person might be best.
- Perhaps use the Goethe Fernunterricht courses. This is the beginner’s course.
- Listen to German songs, watch German movies.
***
How did I do on this list? I would say I did most of it in general. I definitely did NOT complete the Assimil course in 5 months! I didn't even end up doing all of the active phase (where you go back to the start and redo the lessons, this time trying to translate from English into German). Basically, I just found the active phase took too much time for me to do at the same time as doing more active lessons for the time I had available. And maybe I didn't feel the same level of benefit as from the passive phase (which, if you insist on shadowing all the speakers in every dialogue until you do each one without tripping up anywhere is actually quite far from passive :-) ).
I listened to German podcasts most days, starting mainly with the news (for which I did my own translations with the help of Google Translate initially and put them into a side-by-side parallel translation format) which helped enormously in improving my listening speed and my confidence. I eventually branched out into a bunch of different types of podcasts. There is a really wide variety of excellent podcasts in German. In fact, listening to them made me wonder why no australian radio is able to get close to the consistently high quality, wide ranging reporting that I found so easily in German radio (for example, dradio and SWR2, just to name two).
I did listen to German songs and watch movies without subtitles. This is a kind of passive confidence building exercise that I don't think had many direct benefits in terms of progress, but still, it's important to enjoy the fruits of your labours sometime! During 2012 I watched Das Parfüm, Das Boot, Der Untergang (aka Downfall with that famous scene!) and Nirgendwo in Afrika to name a few. I most definitely did not end up watching the whole "Jojo sucht das Glück" series. Basically, because it was awful :-) I still want to be able to understand more of the dialogue - that Mark guy, especially. He's a real mumbler! But I figured that if I can understand more of the dialogue from high-quality feature films, why struggle with bad acting, boring scripts, muffled sound and scruffy mumblers!
The Most Important Resources
By far and away the most important things I did were:(a) Assimil's German with Ease, for sure. If you're a beginner, start with Assimil. I can't really comment on the usefulness of the advanced courses because I didn't get very far through my own for reasons I mention above, but the ones that claim to get you up to B2 (which I think they almost do in terms of fundamentals, but you'll need to do other work to pass the exam) are brilliant to get started. Check out the reviews on Amazon though because I've heard that some of the courses are not so good. Oh, and get used to minor typos. "New German With Ease" was full of them, but they didn't cause me any trouble.
(b) I made my own Anki list (as well as using one other big list). I added every single word I didn't recognise in "Lesetraining B2" to it and also many others that I found just reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, etc. IMPORTANT: You should know enough of the grammar to be able to look up the word and write down its basic form plus enough other information to cover most of the basic irregularities which can occur. Don't bother doing this for regular forms, of course, and don't put in every irregular form because that might be a lot! And, perhaps even more important: Include the "argument structure". What do I mean by this? See the example below.
(c) meeting up with native speakers. I managed to organise a regular weekly meeting at my work of just half an hour, and I also made a pair of awesome Austrian friends through the Couchsurfing website. I just got really lucky there because they both thought it was cool that someone in Australia would be bothering to learn German!
(d) I did as much exam prep material as I could squeeze in time for. When I was a long way out from the exam I did some B1 level material and then had a go at B2 level which showed up my weaknesses for the exam format. This lead me to buy "Lesetraining B2" which I've mentioned in many previous posts, and I did this whole book before the exam. Doing this work also really improved my B2 level vocab.
(d) only applies if you're actually doing the exam - although I think that the reading practice with comprehension exercises from "Lesetraining B2" really helped a lot just with my general reading because I added a lot of words into my Anki list at this stage. Also, it's nice to read books, but sometimes it's important to test your comprehension to really focus your mind on getting a clear understanding of what the text is saying. This helped push me past that phase of fuzzy, general understanding to having a really precise understanding of much more of what I read.
For conversation practice, Skype would be fine, but I never used it for language exchange in German. I will use it in the future to keep in touch with my good friends from Austria who've headed home now.
Argument Structure
Here are some examples of what I mean by "argument structure" for Anki cards."an einer Veranstaltung teilnehmen, bei/in ... mitmachen, sich an ... beteiligen"
=
"to take part in an event, to participate"
"aus folgendem Grund"
=
"for the following reason"
"im Büro"
=
"at the office"
"sich die Nase putzen"
=
"to blow one's nose"
"auf etwas warten"
=
"to wait for something"
As you can see, the idea is mainly for verbs, but it doesn't only apply to them. When I tried to learn languages when I was younger I would try to memorise all the prepositions and what they "mean" in English, and then try to apply what I had memorised following the rules in English. For anything other than the really basic examples that your beginners' textbook will give you, this will fail most of the time. This is one major reason why I don't believe it's useful to download wordlists like "the most frequent 2000 words" to start with in learning a language because the most common words are this little words that carry a lot of functions and don't have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. Even the really basic words like "der, die, das" = "the", because there will be times when English uses them where German doesn't and vice-versa. It's nice to know basically what they mean, but you will see them so often that there's no real point in making a special effort to memorise them. Just look at the phrase above for "to blow one's nose" and you'll see what I'm talking about. The other reason against "high frequency" word lists is that many of even the top 100 words will be very low on actual "content", like all these little grammatical words. The words I want to study are the ones which carry the actual content and meaning of the phrase. I'm not sure how many people out there are going to be familiar with Information Theory, but one of the results of it as applied to natural languages is that often the less frequent words carry the most actual information in a sentence.
You might know this feeling when you're learning a language. You understand all the little grammatical words, and the forms of the verbs and all that in a sentence, but sometimes there is just one word that is the real key to understanding. Yes, sometimes you can figure the meaning (if only vaguely) from the rest of the context, so it's important not to get too hung up on it, but sometimes you will just have no real idea. Words. You can't get away from learning words. Real content words are the best of all. It's great knowing that the word "die" means "the", and that "er" means "he", and that "zurück" means back, but it doesn't help much with a sentence you'll hear all the time on the news like "Er wies die Vorwürfe zurück". "He somethings the something back" would be your translation after learning the more frequent 500 words or whatever (I'm just guessing), but it's not particularly helpful in figuring out that it actually means "He rejected the accusations". My point is not that the most frequent words aren't useful, just that you will encounter them so often that one quick initial search should cover you for these permanently. The lower frequency content words are the ones that you need to add to your Anki list.
Some Mistakes
* Not speaking early enough: http://yetanotherlanguage.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/enemy-at-home-exhibition-in-museum-of.html* Not starting with Anki early enough.
* Trying to pick up too many pre-made Anki decks.
* Trying to put every Assimil lesson into Anki (I seriously started doing this at one stage!)
* Not having good enough french to understand the more advanced nuances being expressed in "Perfectionnement Allemand".
* Spending too much time seeking out more beginner level audio when I wasn't understanding every word perfectly. Understanding takes a LOT of practice, so it's best to seek out interesting content because you will have to listen to it a lot!
* Not spending enough time with my parallel translations. After putting the effort into producing these I should have then been listening to them and reading them until I knew them cold. Each time I did actually do this I felt my understanding jump a little step up, so I really should have found the time to focus on this more.
The Big Question: How the hell do you have time?
I have a full time family, with my first daughter being born just before I started studying German in ernest in Australia. I have a full time job. And I mean a normal, proper, full time job. I don't make a living out of a self-help blog. I drive 1.5-2 hours every day to a specific location and give my whole day to an employer in exchange for a fixed income. You know, a normal, everyday, full time job. I also like to keep reasonably fit which means regular exercise with the odd bout of training for an event. I hope to make this even more frequent in the future, while still learning languages.
You might think that I had an incredibly supportive wife or something. No, we're not the Kennedys here, just a normal family. My wife expects me to do housework and look after the kids when I get home from work and on the weekends, to do house repairs and gardening on the weekends, and then spend time talking to her and watching TV with her in the evenings. Any other time on the weekends that's not taken up by family commitments (and there are plenty of these) is usually filled with an activity just of our own family. In other words, a normal, busy, everyday family. I didn't get special time off to study. In fact, on the weekend before my exam I did some big jobs in the garden which left me exhausted and with little time to study even though I really wanted to. The only "time off" I got was when I took annual leave to do the actual exam itself! And the night before the exam was almost a total write-off!
So, when does it all happen? Well, it does vary a lot, but the short answer is "whenever I can". When I go to the toilet in the morning (regular as clockwork ;-) ) my current reading material comes with me. When I drive to work I'm listening to an Assimil lesson (and shadow it) or podcasts in German (interesting material works much better than learner material, though this is only realistic after some initial study of course). And almost all of my exam preparation was done during my lunch breaks! I would just print out the exam material and the answers and go find a quiet spot to practice. For a long time my direct exam preparation was to go through the book Lesetraining B2 which I can certainly recommend as it was a great source for appropriate vocabulary and also as a way to practice the format of the reading section of the exam which started out feeling very, very weak and ended up as an area I had every confidence in. I also did some preparation at nights once the exam got closer, but not very often for the reasons listed above.
I met people to chat with at my work (it's a very multicultural place) and we still meet up once per week for our "Stammtisch". I made friends with an Austrian couple on a working holiday in Australia for a year and met up with them irregularly - mostly once a week on Thursday for probably only a total of about 15 times, though those 15 times were often more than 2 hours, and extremely helpful and fun!
I met people to chat with at my work (it's a very multicultural place) and we still meet up once per week for our "Stammtisch". I made friends with an Austrian couple on a working holiday in Australia for a year and met up with them irregularly - mostly once a week on Thursday for probably only a total of about 15 times, though those 15 times were often more than 2 hours, and extremely helpful and fun!
Things I tried that didn't really work out
There were a few things that I spent some time on which may have been useful from some other aspects, but which weren't necessary to pass the exam, or which just probably aren't very useful:
* Gathering lots of different sources of learning material, especially beginner and intermediate podcasts. This was all just a distraction and a waste of time. Assimil was my "beginner to intermediate" springboard material. Everything else needed to just be proper podcasts on topics that I enjoyed. That was by far the best way to progress past the late beginner to early intermediate stage.
* Just listening endlessly to German radio at work. The problem is that I couldn't really focus on the content while working in English (programming). I wasn't absorbing anything, I was just ignoring it. Understanding spoken German still requires concentration and it's actually very easy for me to completely zone out while listening to it and effectively hear nothing. This was especially true early on when even the noise of the traffic while driving in summer would mean that I couldn't really follow much of what was going on in my podcasts. This has improved somewhat, but I still need a relatively lower noise environment to understand German as compared to English. Trying to listen to German audio a lot also caused some tension at home which was unnecessary considering it probably didn't provide much benefit.
* Gathering lots of different sources of learning material, especially beginner and intermediate podcasts. This was all just a distraction and a waste of time. Assimil was my "beginner to intermediate" springboard material. Everything else needed to just be proper podcasts on topics that I enjoyed. That was by far the best way to progress past the late beginner to early intermediate stage.
* Just listening endlessly to German radio at work. The problem is that I couldn't really focus on the content while working in English (programming). I wasn't absorbing anything, I was just ignoring it. Understanding spoken German still requires concentration and it's actually very easy for me to completely zone out while listening to it and effectively hear nothing. This was especially true early on when even the noise of the traffic while driving in summer would mean that I couldn't really follow much of what was going on in my podcasts. This has improved somewhat, but I still need a relatively lower noise environment to understand German as compared to English. Trying to listen to German audio a lot also caused some tension at home which was unnecessary considering it probably didn't provide much benefit.
There's so much more I could write about my experiences so far, but rather than look back any more I'll focus on the future and where I can go from here. I've already started on my plans for this year which I'll discuss in my next post, along with plans for how to reach my goals.
Got plans for the new year? Tell us all in the comments!
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