Lesetraining B2 and other tips for getting enough vocabulary for the Goethe Zertifikat B2

Just a quick post  to let you know that rumours of my death have been greatly exagerated. I've had some downtime from new language learning of late and instead have used my time to work on a programming project in my spare time and also to read more of "Das Todeskreuz". I'm now up to page 347 and still really enjoying it, but also starting to get seriously worried about how it's going to end. The total number of pages is 516, so in about 170 odd pages the whole thing has to wrap up. I have to suspect therefore that the story's ending is going to be a little disappointing, but I hold out hope for something special :-) I've also managed to keep up with Anki for my new languages (Chinese and Latin), but not so much for German which requires a much bigger time commitment each day just because I've got a lot more words in the list.

I'll do an update on what's happening with my new languages sometime soon, but for today I'd just like to make sure I put links to the book I used to really bring my bulk of vocabulary up to an acceptable level for the B2 exam. The book is called Lesetraining B2 (link to the publisher's website) and is published in Germany by Hueber. You can also find it on here, which I've included as it might be a more stable link, and also a cheap place to buy it. The latter also seems to include the answer book which didn't come with my edition, but is absolutely VITAL, and can be found here:

http://www.hueber.de/shared/elka/Internet_Muster/Red1/978-3-19-011684-3_Muster_1.pdf

Of course, doing the practice tests available from the Goethe website, is vital:

http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/pba/bes/gb2/mat/enindex.htm

You can find examples of every test they offer there. There are also other B2 level exams from other providers and I used a few of those prior to my test to practice everything, including the speaking components which I had to self-assess, although the Goethe ones were my main ones because that was the exam I was intending to do and knowing the exam format and style of question is vital.

I added EVERY SINGLE WORD which I didn't know from Lesetraining B2 into an Anki list which has since been my one and only list I bother to study on a regular basis. I added words from all sources into it - newspaper reports, articles, etc, as well. It now has almost 3000 cards which is really 1500 double-side cards. However, since I put more than one word on each side of each card, this represents a lot more than 1500 words and phrases. Probably not far off 3000 actually. Using Anki properly was important to my success - I describe my own particular method in detail here.

For other tips, please also see my post-mortem of how I prepared for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2, as well as an earlier article I wrote with more advice specifically for improving listening skills, which helps you ensure you can hear the words you already know :-)

Post your own tips in the comments below!

Chinese with Ease volume 1 FINISHED!

Finally! I've finally made it past the first volume of Chinese with Ease! This is the first 49 lessons out 105 in total. So, what can I do with what I've learnt? Well, probably not a lot. I can understand some of what I hear and have very small fragments of conversation. My experience with the German with Ease course was that at the end of the whole course (100 lessons) plus having lived  in Germany for 6 months (without making much of an effort, to be honest) and done some extra material here and there, I was probably around B1 on the CEFRL, so, if Assimil has been my main source so far and I'm only halfway through, I shouldn't expect too much yet because I've hardly put in an effort like Baron Jon :-)  Anyway, I'm happy enough so far. The material I'm going through seems to be getting absorbed which is a good start!

I am trying to have little conversations here and there, but I don't know much. I seem to be at the stage of just picking up random, but highly useful, sentences, like this:

我没有睡够觉。

Which means "I didn't have enough sleep". The word gou4 够 can be replaced by nothing (="I didn't sleep") or hao3 好 (="I didn't sleep well"). The structure of this sentence surprised me compared to what I've learnt so far which didn't happen with German. I feel like by about halfway through the course the sentence structures themselves were not totally surprising anymore, but then again, I was not really looking at anything more than my Assimil course at that stage.

Just a quick wrapup again:

Mandarin: Up to lesson 50.
Latin: Up to lesson 47. I'll try to bring this up to the same as Mandarin before I proceed with that again. I'm trying to focus on the lessons a bit more and go over them to make sure I understand them well before I move on. This is important for the Assimil method to work I feel, but sometimes I've let my understanding be vague when I move on because my French isn't too top notch. I've decided to start adding the French translations along with then English in my Anki lists to perhaps improve my vocab there as well. Speaking of French, I replied to my Chinese friend in French the other day when I wasn't sure what to say. Funny.
German: Up to page 229 in Das Todeskreuz. Apart from that, I've just been trying to catch up on correspondence with my German speaking friends.

I have actually kept up reasonably well with Anki lately which hasn't really happened ever since Anki became completely gay on my phone's browser (with the latest version). I can't study Chinese because my phone's browser doesn't support the required fonts, but I can do the others at least.

Bis später!
在见！
Valeo!

Update: 09/04/2013

Been a bit short on time lately, trying to work on some home projects, some of which may also have a linguistic bent, so I'll just jump in with my updates for now:

Mandarin: Just finished lesson 47 today. I also write a few phrases to a Chinese friend I used to work with.
Latin: Working on lesson 45.
German: Up to page 218 in Das Todeskreuz. Same old story - I spent more time on this recently and my Mandarin and Latin stalled as a result. My Stammtisch at work has been called off for 2 weeks, but I'll try to make up for this by using the time to write to my friends and keep up to date with them better.

And for anyone who's interested in the aboriginal language I mentioned earlier, the Bininj Gunwok website has a new post - a transcription exercise. Enjoy!

That's all for today: short and sweet. Keep up the hard work everyone!

zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen?

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

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

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

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

What an idiot I am!

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

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

So here are our contrasting pairs for the day:

abnehmen vs zunehmen
abmelden vs anmelden.

Don't say I never tell you anything useful!

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

Mandarin Chinese Resources

Just like I did for Latin a short while ago, I'd like to give an overview of what resources I've been using so far for my very early stages of Mandarin. However, I need to expand the list with some decent content which I have yet to find. My goal is mainly spoken Mandarin, so learning the characters will have to take a back seat. The disadvantage is that I'll need to convert everything to pinyin which isn't always reliable because sometimes the exact same character is pronounced in different ways and with different meanings (of course!). However, this is just something I'll have to deal with.

THE BIG ONE: Assimil's Chinese with Ease (vol. 1 & 2)

I'm using the edition from 2005 which is the latest I believe - check it out at Assimil's site. You might find them cheaper to order from here and here if you decide to get them. Although the book says it was printed in 2005, it feels a little dated, as though the content had just been revised and brought up to date rather than being completely rewritten in 2005. I could be wrong about that, of course. In any case, although from just looking at the book one might get the impression that the book is somehow of a lower quality, that would be wrong. I've enjoyed the lessons so far, the audio quality is excellent and consistent (unlike the Latin edition!) and I feel like the pace is quite good. I can imagine being able to get through it at a pace of one lesson per day if I had just a little more time and focus. I see no reason why it was split into 2 volumes, except to either make more money or keep the book size more manageable like they used to. I got a good deal on them both when I bought them about 3 years ago, so I can't complain. I do appreciate the older style books precisely because they are smaller I can pop them into my pocket more easily and they have the built-in red cloth bookmark which I think is great. Of course, once I start doing the active phase (if I do it the way you're supposed to) it means I'll need to carry around both books with me all the time anyway!

There are some negatives with the audio, some of which were shared with Le Latin actually - no one seems to have bothered to tell the producer or the voice actors who is supposed to say what lines so if someone in a dialogue gets two numbered lines in a row, things can go haywire. I just did lesson 44 in this book which is a dialogue between a butcher and a shopper. It's all going smoothly until the butcher is supposed to say 2 numbered sentences in a row but the voice actors inexplicably swap on the second line and for the rest of the dialogue the shopper becomes the butcher and vice versa. Bizarre! I believe there's some of this somewhere in Le Latin, although it's hard to tell because sometimes it feels as though no matter what all of the voice actors are crammed into every dialogue. It's great to have a variety of speakers (well, four in both cases), but all in every dialogue? It overloads my primitive foreign language speech recognition circuitry!

Another comment that applies to both is that they are lacking in humour. However, the "humour" that was in New German with Ease was often so wide of the mark as to be utterly perplexing and certainly not funny, so I can live without out it in these books and don't count it as a criticism.

As for the text of the book, it doesn't aim to teach you the characters but it does show them with pinyin underneath throughout the whole book which has been allowing me to learn a few without trying too hard, which is great as learning the characters is currently not a goal for me. One review I read did comment that the Chinese text contains a lot of exclamation marks for no apparent reason, which I hadn't noticed so much before but now I can't help but notice. It's not really a big deal, though it'd be good to remove from a future edition. The typesetting and editing are both very good. I've only noticed the occasional error on a tone mark, etc. This is in stark contrast to New German with Ease which was riddled with type-setting errors and the inclusion of random bits of the original French version of the text splattered throughout the English version. Lucky the course itself was so good!

I'm almost halfway through the two books now, and although I haven't made the big effort I should be to talk (although I have had a few short chats), I feel like it is starting to sink in a bit, at least to recognise words that I know, which is an important attribute!

Verdict (based on only being half done and not having done any official test): RECOMMENDED!

Web Dictionaries

I haven't checked out heaps, but http://www.nciku.com has been good so far and has a nice interface. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Call in the next 20 seconds and you get a free set of steak-knives! No, wait, that's not true, but if you are looking at a Chinese character somewhere away from your computer (let's call it "the real world") and you want to know the meaning, you can scrawl an approximation of the character into the box on Nciku's homepage and it will show you a list of possible characters that match your scrawl. It's been really good whenever I've needed to use it (which hasn't been very often so far) and my drawings were terrible, so it's very robust! I've also used ChineseTools.eu for measure words, although Nciku gives you these too. There are usually a few and I don't know enough to pick the best ones always so this is still a confusing aspect for me, but I try not to worry about it too much for now.

Understanding Radicals

Until a few days ago I still had my anki list for mandarin set to "recognise" as well as produce. This really, really slowed down my anki reviews. Since learning to recognise the characters is not part of my initial plan, I have dropped this for now. However, while I was trying to do this I decided that I needed to breakdown the characters into their components to improve my chances of remembering them. To do this, I used the excellent tool at Hanzicraft. See an example here. You can enter the component parts separately and see if that helps you make sense of the characters any better. There are some books on this topic and other resources which I'll look into in more detail whenever (if ever?) I get round to focusing more on the characters.

Online Radio and Podcasts

I don't have anything here yet. Something the equivalent quality of, and with equally interesting material, as DRadio, SWR2 or even DeutscheWelle, would be greatly appreciated if anyone wants to let me know in the comments below! I'm still in the early stages so I'll worry more about this later.

Past and Present Workmates

Mandarin speakers are really out and about in the world these days, and especially so in Sydney. In fact, as I've mentioned before, especially so in my current team which has two native Mandarin speakers out of five people (including me!) and one of the others understands it a little (he's a native Cantonese speaker). I also made good friends with a Mandarin speaker while I worked in Germany and I plan on practising on him a bit. I just recently sent him a short email which had 2 simple sentences in Mandarin. Sure, one of them was based heavily on the dialogue from Chinese with Ease which I had been reading most recently, but what better way to practise what you know! My two Mandarin workmates are most helpful - teaching me new words, correcting my tones, providing me with Chinese movies with English subtitles and not laughing at me too much. I tried out my first "original" sentence just two days ago on one of them, via instant message:

请来吧

I thought it just said "please come", which it does, but he laughed at me and said "I suppose you mean you want me to come and help you". Nice :-) He suggested instead:

有空来一下吗?

which means something like "have you got a moment?". It's literally more like "are [you] free to come a little?". When I told my other Mandarin colleague this story, she said that what I said originally makes sense and that she thought the second would be too long to remember. So, she's just being nice I guess.

I think as I learn more and more words and phrases, conversations with my colleagues will start to form more and more part of how I learn. They're very keen to teach their language and share their culture, which is awesome.

That's all for now. I'll post more (useful) resources as I find them. I'll also try to come up with a more testable goal than just finishing the Assimil course, but I haven't figured out for now just what that will be. Any suggestions will be welcome. My next post will probably be on a topic in German, just to mix things up.

Update: 25/03/2013

Hey readers!

There are a few things I've been looking to post recently but time has conspired against me getting any of them out yet. However, I don't want to go too long without a progress update so here it is.

Mandarin

I finished lesson 42 in Chinese with Ease a few days ago. I haven't done more since because I wanted to bring my latin studies up to par with my Chinese ones and also because I don't do as much on the weekends normally because I don't spend as much time in the car, and when I do, it's with my family, so listening intently is right out. I find some lessons much much harder than others. I think this is a combination of just certain features causing me problems and the way I approach particular lessons. My "ideal" day in the early stages of German when using "German with Ease" was to listen several times to my new lesson in the morning while making breakfast, then reading the dialogue a couple of times so that I had some idea of all the new words and to then spend the rest of the day re-listening and trying to shadow, and reading more where necessary. However, these days I make my breakfast the night before work to speed up my departure in the morning and eat it at my desk at work, which takes away that opportunity. I try to do as much reading as I can before leaving for work and the rest I do while stuck in traffic, but still, it's not as "ideal".

Anyway, I managed to get the last few words from the first 14 lessons into my Anki list (this process is a long way behind for both Latin and Chinese because it is SOOOO slow) and have reviewed them a bit. In general, since it's become harder to do Anki reviews on my phone thanks to the new version not working well on my phone's browser anymore.

As for conversations, I've started trying to say a few sentences in the morning to one of my co-workers. We had a short one recently where I learnt how to say that I hadn't slept enough, or that I had slept well, or at all. Pretty useful! Obviously, I need to work on tones and vocab to make these conversations stretch out 

somehow beyond a few seconds!

By the way, I still don't have any good sources for chinese podcasts for either various levels of stuff or the news, so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!

Latin

I just today finished lesson 42 of Assimil's "Le Latin". Lesson 41 was actually a reasonably close quote from a work by Cicero. Pretty exciting day! It's going OK, although I don't have all the tenses clear in my head. The forms as well as the actual usages. I need to work on this more. I am at least getting to know the noun declensions a little "by assimilation", so that's a good start. Although I've only done 42 lessons in each language, I just worked out that today is the 84th day of the year which means that I've managed to average one lesson per day across the two languages which is an effort I'm pretty pleased with. I'm starting to give them both better focus when I do them which is helping. The year started out pretty horribly for me in other ways, so I like to think that at least I'm making some progress in some sort of goal this year. I also listened to a recent news podcast from Radio Bremen. I didn't really understand any of it except for the name of the previous pope, so it was a bit of a waste of time, but I enjoyed it anyway.

German

No real formal study, but I have found a tiny bit more time to read "Das Todeskreuz" and am now up to page 195. Also, without really trying, I managed to pretty much memorise Hitler's rant from that famous scene in Der Untergang. I think it might come in handy as a party trick some day. I did feel a lot more relaxed and flowing in my last Stammtisch which might have been a result of listening to the above rant and the spilt coffee scene from Mädchen Mädchen 2. Or I might have just felt relaxed that day and tomorrow I'll go backwards again. Who knows! If anyone else has an experience of using the above mentioned parallel translations, let us know in the comments.

Bininj Kunwok

No, I haven't officially added this one to my learning list for the year, but it keeps calling me all the same. I'm talking to the guy running the site for learning it that I mentioned before and hoping that I can help out in some way because I really believe in it, and I actually hope that I can help spread the word and make it used beyond its original target audience of people working in the areas of the northern territory where the language groups are spoken. WHY AREN'T AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLKIDS LEARNING SOME ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE? I just don't get it. I love european languages and I'm learning Mandarin myself, but we could really do with learning some more about our homeland's cultural heritage and making its original inhabitants feel that what they have is valued more widely. But like I said, I haven't added this language for now. I did however learn their word for goodbye: bobo. It's often been pointed out that Australians have at least a very basic knowledge of a variety of european languages but can't even say hello or goodbye in a single Aboriginal one. Let's change that now, hey?

bobo.

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

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

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

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

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

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

Mädchen Mädchen 2 - Spilt coffee scene: a parallel translation

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

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

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

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