Normally people wait until the New Year to make resolutions, but not me. Any time is a good time for a new plan.
Since I successfully completed the Goethe Zertifikat B2, I've been essentially cruising with my German. I did a few parallel translations to help tune my ear more for movie dialogues and although I had fun with those sections of dialogue (from Der Untergang and Mädchen Mädchen 2 in particular), I haven't done much focused work in this area. I've read several books since passing: Das Todeskreuz and Das Parfüm. I've watched some German movies, listened to and watched the German news, and very, very recently discovered that you can get high-quality video from ZDF TV in Germany! Haven't had much of a chance to watch this yet, but I've seen a cop show and Abernteur Forschung already and I'm really glad this is out there and available to watch from outside Germany. The last time I revealed such a source of German TV on this blog the station quickly disabled traffic from outside Germany so I'm really hoping they don't do that again this time!
And of course, I've chatted with my German-speaking friends about once a week which is as fun as ever.
This level of study was really on purpose. For starters, I passed my B2 exam just before learning that my mother had incurable lung cancer. Over the next year from that devastating news there was a lot of stress and personal stuff to deal with. My second daughter was born in that same year, just a few short months before my mother finally passed. That was almost a year ago now and, to be honest, I don't think I've even recovered from the shock of first hearing the news of the illness, let alone everything since.
For this year I initially decided to try something new - learning Chinese (but mainly as a spoken language) and Latin (but mainly as a written language). I thought that because of their different focuses I would be able to work on both just fine, but I actually found it reasonably hard to feel like I was making progress. I got halfway through both books in about 4 months which is actually quite a good effort, but I didn't keep up with making an anki deck like I had wanted to with both. It was just too time consuming, especially for Latin because I had to look up the conjugations. During this time I took on a spare-time programming project and, with 2 small children and a full-time job, this was just all too much. I hadn't planned on the programming project when I started the two languages, so who knows how the year would have turned out without this change of plans.
On the topic of Chinese, I recently borrowed a very old book from a library which shows in pictures along with descriptions the actual physical mechanics of tongue positions, breath force, etc, for every single Chinese sound. Although it may seem strange, there were a few Chinese sounds that I just wasn't able to really distinguish. I couldn't make the sounds distinct, and I couldn't hear the difference consistently. This was most clearly shown to me by the fact that pretty much every Chinese person I tried some phrases out on would look perplexed. I realise now that I was actually pronouncing a bunch of the sounds in the in-between position of English where I actually need to move my tongue to two different extremes to produce them. Since this has been a significant weakness whenever I've tried to speak Chinese, it feels good to finally be able to say something (though I've forgotten much of what I learnt!) and see that Chinese people are now able to understand me. Although I don't plan on actively taking up Chinese again at this stage, I will try to keep working on my pronunciation so that whenever I come back to it more intensively, I can at least start with being able to say the words somewhat properly!
So, with all that other stuff happening, I haven't really thought much again about the future, but recently I came to an important decision - to push on with German and to really try hard to get to a much more comfortable level. I'm currently holding steady at B2, and "advanced" starts at the next CEFR level in theory, so C1, but I've decided to just go the whole hog and aim for the C2 exam. This is to force me to over-prepare but when I get closer to the exam date (sometime in early 2015), I can decide whether I'm risking my money for nothing and choose the C1 exam. Of course, exams are all well and good, but the exam is just a goal to push me to work harder. What I would really like is that German becomes a part of my psyche and that I understand almost everything I hear of movies and the TV and, especially, that I speak German much better and much more frequently. I want to speak it comfortably.
How will I do that? Well, I'm open to suggestions! I'll go over my own ideas in future posts, but for now I want to end with a quick discussion on some possible materials to help me prepare. I would really like some help to pick good stuff because, as a solo learner, I will be relying on the materials I use to help cover those gaps of knowledge that a teacher in a class would probably focus on like crazy.
My first idea is to subscribe to the magazine "Deutsch Perfekt"(electronic version). At the moment the 12 month subscription comes with 6 1-hr audio downloads + workbooks. I have a sample of each (the magazine and the audio) and they seem pretty good. I like reading about Mitteleuropa and the articles come with glossaries which are very helpful. The audio seems reasonable too. Neither is "real" content, but they're both something which I feel helps cover the gaps in my book knowledge. They cover a lot of grammatical concepts entirely in German which is something I've been looking for (surprising though that may sound :-) ).
Speaking of which, there are lots of gaps, I'm sure! That's why I've been looking at a few books, but I'm not yet certain which to get (if any). The two main ones I'm considering are "Mit Erfolg Zum Goethe-Zertifikat C2" and "Fit Furs Goethe Zertifikat C2". I find it hard to pick between them, but I only want to choose one. If I collect too many, I'll start to feel like I'll never get through them all! If you've had any experience of either of these books (or ones in the same series) then please let us all know in the comments below! I'm also considering an extra grammar book because I feel that getting confident in this area will not only score me some easy points in any exam, but bring up my level of grammatical correctness in general conversations as I practice what I learn. That's the theory at least! I've found one call "C-Grammatik" that seems to have some positive reviews, but I'd like to know what the other options are.
Of course, I'll need to have fun too. Youtube and ZDF are great sources of German-language entertainment. I'll read the news on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung more often because it definitely requires a high level of German knowledge, as well as easier German news sites. But some of this isn't all that relaxing. Just recently I read the first Harry Potter book in English. I know, I'm a bit late to the party! I actually really enjoyed it, so I'll read some of the others too, but in order to expose myself to more German for the next year it will obviously have to be in German! So, I'll order "Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens" (the German title for the second book in the series: "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets") sometime soon.
However, after picking a few of these purchases, I probably won't be buying anything else for the rest of the year. I'll have enough to focus on with these materials. And besides, I'm a cheapskate who hates spending money :-) In particular, I want to avoid getting a professional German teacher at any stage because, whether here in Australia, or online, German teachers are very expensive. I may break this rule later on next year as I near the target date and I think I could push on to C2 with just a bit of professional help, but I would want to have put in a very big effort myself first before even considering that.
The thing is, I'm entering uncharted territory here a bit. I mean, how many people living outside the country try to learn a language to C2 from B2 in their "spare" time? There's lots of information to get started in any language but I guess that once you get to B2 level you should know how to proceed from there, or you have some sort of teacher helping you. I have some ideas of how to proceed, but they are as yet untested. If you follow along for the next year or so you'll get to see the result at the other end and the process of getting there!
Monday, December 16, 2013
Friday, December 13, 2013
Lernen to Talk's Mickey Mangan blogging about German learning
Just a quick one - in a previous post I pointed out the Lernen to Talk show as a source of inspiration. Mickey from the show has started blogging about learning German and where you can find some good German media (which, for a language learner, equals input). Check it out and read his advice as he rolls it out. He's only just started and I really hope he finds the time to continue it:
http://blogs.transparent.com/german/
http://blogs.transparent.com/german/
Monday, December 9, 2013
The Seven Keys to Language Learning
Recently I've had/made a few opportunities to use my rusty French abilities. I toyed with the idea of setting a goal to get my French up to C1 in a year (from probably a high B1 to a low B2). I like the French language, I really do, and I already have French-speaking friends. I know my weaknesses already, and getting it to a good level might give me more ammunition to say to my wife that we should move to France for a few years (a nice spot somewhere in the south would do me for a while :-) ). But for some reason which I don't fully understand, I just don't want to. I can't get motivated by the idea just now. Perhaps it's because I did a lot of study in it at Alliance Francaise (not the best use of my time or money however!) and didn't find it as enjoyable as I have with German. If I were to improve my French vocabulary I could make better use of the Assimil courses that have no English equivalent. All very sensible stuff.
Who knows. Maybe I'll get the idea into my head :-)
One of the opportunities I've made to use it recently was to answer an ad looking for a French/English exchange partner in my local area. I met up with a nice bloke called Jerome who really needs some help with his English in order to be able to improve his job chances in Australia. However, currently his English level needs a fair bit of work and so the vast bulk of the conversation, especially when it was important to be understood, was in French. Good for me though! I found that I could handle this kind of one-on-one conversation fairly easily and wasn't too tied for words, although I kept it simple. It felt really positive to be speaking it again after all this time. I really wish I had more time to meet more French speakers. Unfortunately, I am very time poor (which is why I spend time writing this blog!) so it's hard to imagine how to fit it in. I think Skype conversations would work out the best for me. We'll see.
Anyway, another opportunity I made was to read this article on Le Point, where the author opines vigorously about the outrage of a new law in France that allows French universities to offer courses in languages other than French, ostensibly to attract more foreign students. The author goes on to say that learning a new language isn't that hard and that people wanting to study in France should just get on with it and learn the language of Hugo now! Maybe I exaggerate, but the author does describe "Seven Keys to Learning". However, if your French isn't quite good enough yet, don't worry, below you'll find my (heavily abbreviated) summary of the points:
Who knows. Maybe I'll get the idea into my head :-)
One of the opportunities I've made to use it recently was to answer an ad looking for a French/English exchange partner in my local area. I met up with a nice bloke called Jerome who really needs some help with his English in order to be able to improve his job chances in Australia. However, currently his English level needs a fair bit of work and so the vast bulk of the conversation, especially when it was important to be understood, was in French. Good for me though! I found that I could handle this kind of one-on-one conversation fairly easily and wasn't too tied for words, although I kept it simple. It felt really positive to be speaking it again after all this time. I really wish I had more time to meet more French speakers. Unfortunately, I am very time poor (which is why I spend time writing this blog!) so it's hard to imagine how to fit it in. I think Skype conversations would work out the best for me. We'll see.
Anyway, another opportunity I made was to read this article on Le Point, where the author opines vigorously about the outrage of a new law in France that allows French universities to offer courses in languages other than French, ostensibly to attract more foreign students. The author goes on to say that learning a new language isn't that hard and that people wanting to study in France should just get on with it and learn the language of Hugo now! Maybe I exaggerate, but the author does describe "Seven Keys to Learning". However, if your French isn't quite good enough yet, don't worry, below you'll find my (heavily abbreviated) summary of the points:
Francois Kersaudy's Seven Keys to Language Learning
Remember that the following points are taking from the article I mentioned above. I have roughly summarised them as closely as possible without interjecting my own thoughts. I add my own comments further down.
- Mastering a language is easier than mastering Bridge or Chess because rather than relying as heavily on the intellect you get to rely on passive memory and the unconscious reflex of imitation (more on this below).
- Motivation is THE key element to success.
- Language learning is a personal process. It can't really be "taught" to you, you can only really be guided in how to learn it yourself. This has to be done outside the hustle and bustle of the classes themselves. Naturally, there's nothing like perfecting it in a country where it's a native language.
- Regular, focused study for at least 20 minutes per day, every single day.
- Repetition, repetition, repetition. But not just any old rote learning repetition - meeting the same words or phrases in different contexts within a short space of time (over a matter of a few weeks at most) will engrave those words or phrases into your memory.
- Quoting Ferdinand de Saussaure: "You have to learn the grammar through the language, not the language through its grammar." In other words, don't start with a grammar book, start with the above techniques of listening, repeating and trying to use it yourself. Grammar books can come later when/if you really need to refine your abilities.
- Choice of method is important. Here Kersaudy declares (perhaps unsurprisingly given the above points) that the best method is Assimil. It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I largely agree with this :-)
I have to say that I largely agree with all his points, although perhaps I think it takes a little more than just passive memory and unconscious reflex to get to a really good level (especially if you have exams to pass!) but definitely what he describes are the foundations of good language learning. There are surely other methods, but the key tenets of frequent exposure, focused attention and practice are absolutely fundamental.
The great thing about language learning is that if you are motivated (point 2 :-) ) then these fundamentals are easy to achieve. All of them can come about by practicing speaking whatever you know with new friends, or old friends in a new language.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
The Lernen to Talk Show: Wie es aussieht, wenn man innerhalb eines Jahres Deutsch lernt
I seriously can't believe that I had never seen this before, but just a few days ago I learnt about the "Lernen to Talk" show. It's a Youtube video project where a young guy documents his quest to learn German in Germany within a year (plus a couple of months of preparation with an audio course in the US). The guy does a great job of explaining what he's done himself, so I'll let him do exactly that:
The Lernen to Talk show
Seriously, check it out. I've watched a few of the episodes (he's completed the year) and he's pretty good at making conversation of some description with people regardless of his level. I think this might be one of his most important skills. Also notice that he tries hard to not make mistakes, but he doesn't let the fear of mistakes inhibit him. Well, that's my opinion as an observer. His own internal experience may have been different. He doesn't talk too much about his "method", but I'll distill the basics here:
1) Studied an audio course for a few months. Got up to an A1+ or A2 sort of level I think.
2) Went to Germany.
3) 8-10 weeks (I think?) doing frequent German classes and group excursions.
4) Filmed himself once per week for a 5 minute conversation.
5) Lived with a German family for much of the rest of the time.
6) Immersed himself and got involved.
He doesn't waste time talking about his method or whatever, although perhaps an overview post will pop up in the future. He's a multi-talented guy with a bunch of interests that go beyond the usual limited "polyglot" vocabulary of talking about language-learning techniques, so it's fun to watch his videos beyond just the entertainment value of watching his struggles.
He seems to be looking for other people who want to do something similar - learning a language for a year in-country and filming it - via the website Lernen to Talk, but I'm not sure how active that project is.
The longest example of his level is from almost a year after he returned from Germany, and it makes a very interesting podcast to boot, can be found in the interview DRadio's Wissen program did with him. You can see that he still makes mistakes, but he is very comfortable speaking in German and does a very entertaining job as a guest! There's also an appearance by an expert in the field who basically says you'll always be crap at another language unless you learn it definitely before the age of 30 and possibly while you're still a small child. I basically got the sense from her that being anything other than an accent-free, native level speaker is a failure. That may not have been her intention, but she seemed quite disparaging in general, including to Mickey's own level. I wish they provided a transcript because then I might have put together a parallel translation for some sections of it, I'll probably never do any of it because I doubt I'll be transcribing it anytime soon :-) But the abbreviated version is: if you're over 30, you're over the language learning hill. Stupid me for starting German when I was already mid-30s :-)
Anyway, check out his videos and share them. I think they're very inspirational for language learners, even if you can't visit the country yourself. Watch someone else's mistakes, have a laugh, see that it's not the end of the world and that they make you better with each attempt, and then go out and make your own mistakes!
The Lernen to Talk show
Seriously, check it out. I've watched a few of the episodes (he's completed the year) and he's pretty good at making conversation of some description with people regardless of his level. I think this might be one of his most important skills. Also notice that he tries hard to not make mistakes, but he doesn't let the fear of mistakes inhibit him. Well, that's my opinion as an observer. His own internal experience may have been different. He doesn't talk too much about his "method", but I'll distill the basics here:
1) Studied an audio course for a few months. Got up to an A1+ or A2 sort of level I think.
2) Went to Germany.
3) 8-10 weeks (I think?) doing frequent German classes and group excursions.
4) Filmed himself once per week for a 5 minute conversation.
5) Lived with a German family for much of the rest of the time.
6) Immersed himself and got involved.
He doesn't waste time talking about his method or whatever, although perhaps an overview post will pop up in the future. He's a multi-talented guy with a bunch of interests that go beyond the usual limited "polyglot" vocabulary of talking about language-learning techniques, so it's fun to watch his videos beyond just the entertainment value of watching his struggles.
He seems to be looking for other people who want to do something similar - learning a language for a year in-country and filming it - via the website Lernen to Talk, but I'm not sure how active that project is.
The longest example of his level is from almost a year after he returned from Germany, and it makes a very interesting podcast to boot, can be found in the interview DRadio's Wissen program did with him. You can see that he still makes mistakes, but he is very comfortable speaking in German and does a very entertaining job as a guest! There's also an appearance by an expert in the field who basically says you'll always be crap at another language unless you learn it definitely before the age of 30 and possibly while you're still a small child. I basically got the sense from her that being anything other than an accent-free, native level speaker is a failure. That may not have been her intention, but she seemed quite disparaging in general, including to Mickey's own level. I wish they provided a transcript because then I might have put together a parallel translation for some sections of it, I'll probably never do any of it because I doubt I'll be transcribing it anytime soon :-) But the abbreviated version is: if you're over 30, you're over the language learning hill. Stupid me for starting German when I was already mid-30s :-)
Anyway, check out his videos and share them. I think they're very inspirational for language learners, even if you can't visit the country yourself. Watch someone else's mistakes, have a laugh, see that it's not the end of the world and that they make you better with each attempt, and then go out and make your own mistakes!
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
A1 level German: Passing the Goethe Zertifikat A1 quickly and cheaply!
When I did my Goethe Zertifikat B2 exam, most of the people in the room were there for the A1 exam. The next biggest group was the A2-ers. There was one girl for the B1 exam and then little old me. No higher exams that day. The reason is that many/most language learners learn it out of necessity or for the opportunities it might bring them and not just for fun. They might even downright hate learning a language. If you are the spouse or partner of someone who is moving to Germany on a work visa, then you will most likely need to pass the A1 exam to be able to join them. So, although you might not like language learning, or not particularly the German language, culture, or country, you have to learn it to join your loved one. So, it might be a pretty mixed bag in terms of motivation!
First of all, let me say that A1 is not a doddle. For me, it seems pretty easy, but I can recognise where they try to trip up beginners and I also remember what it is like to listen to a language in the early stages without the right type of practice. This will require some work. However, it is not a particularly high hurdle and I believe that if you start off in the right direction you'll be able to prepare in quite a short period of time.
Now, it is certainly possible to do it for free because the internet is an amazing resource. A great place to get started is on the BBC's website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/, which also links through to Deutsche Welle's German learning site, amongst others. In particular, the A1 level material can be found here: http://www.dw.de/learn-german/level-a1/s-13227. However, as helpful as some of this can be, I personally found many of the beginner's programs somewhat, ahhh... twee, at best.
But don't just take my word for it - have a listen to some of "Radio D"!
It's really great that this stuff's out there for free, but I think it's just too slow and contains way too much English. The pace is also treacle slow compared to what you can achieve. It seems to be mainly for school teachers. If you're a solo learner, you can do much better.
I personally don't have a lot of experience with a wide variety of packages, but I personally credit Assimil's New German with Ease with much of my success in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2 exam. I don't think it takes you all the way to the B2 level as claimed, but if you're looking to pass the A1, all the grammar and listening comprehension you need can be found in this book. Even better, you definitely won't need to do 100 lessons to cover all you need. If I were starting from scratch, I would definitely just get this book + audio and get cracking. I haven't done a scientific experiment or anything, but since the difference in difficulty between each level of the CEFR is not constant (in other words, it takes longer to progress between levels the more advanced you are), I would guess that the second half of the book takes you from low A2-ish to B1-B2. B1 in terms of vocabulary and real world listening practice, but B2 in terms of familiarity with the grammar and probably not far off the level required in terms of listening ability for actually passing the exam (with extra exam-specific practice, of course).
VERY IMPORTANT! Don't forget to SHADOW! If you don't know what shadowing is, this will change your world :-) You can skip the bit about walking briskly (I certainly never did, since I mostly did this in the car on the way to work) - just read the section entitled "Using shadowing to master your coursebook, accompanied by other techniques". I never considered that I had finished a lesson until I could "blind shadow" it without any noticeable errors (in my own opinion, of course!) which was sometimes frustrating, and definitely tiring exercise for the mouth, but important all the same. It will help you become comfortable with making the new sounds at a decent speed. The essence of shadowing is simple, really - first, know the meaning of the dialogue. This usually means you've read through the translation and notes at least once. Then just listen to the audio for that day's lesson pretty much continuously until you can repeat the audio just after the speaker has spoken for the whole dialogue. I set myself a benchmark of being error free because it's a specific and measurable goal, but I suspect that doing a 100% perfect run on the whole dialogue from start to finish is not really necessary!
Given all that, you probably don't need to go past lesson 50 to be able to start confidently studying directly for the exam. Even better, the first 50 lessons are a bit shorter and easier than the last 50, so you should be able to manage one per day for at least 5 days per week over a total of 10 weeks, right? If not, you might ask yourself how committed you are the passing the test, because this isn't much to ask, really! If you find yourself struggling to continue, re-check your motivation. That's actually the most fundamental part of the problem for most people.
This will fill up your listening needs for those 10 weeks. What else should you do? You'll want to start practicing speaking as soon as possible, but before doing that I would suggest getting a basic vocabulary list into an SRS based learning system right from the start. If you've read anything else on this site, you'll realise that I highly recommend Anki. Make your own word list (here is a good tip for building one up from your basic course), or download one. The biggest hurdle to passing that A1 exam after using a good quality basic course for a few months is going to be vocabulary. Anki can help a lot with this, but it's not everything. For example, I personally have found that after leaving my Anki list for a long time and then coming back to it that I'm quite rusty on that particular list of words. If you're not doing it every day, your command of your lists of words will definitely diminish.
Some possible ways to avoid this loss is through making up little stories, or using analogies (See some examples at Memrise to get an idea, and also possibly just use it :-) ), breaking long words into component parts and adding those to your Anki list, visualising actions, etc. Also, of course, if you're using and hearing/reading the words as often as possible, they will become firmly implanted in your memory.
This brings me to another point - if you don't want to spend the money on the Assimil course, you can always try Duolingo. I haven't really gone through all the course material for German but I think it might be able to get you to an A1-ish level eventually. You will need to supplement this with a good grammar book/website (after a month or so of the Duolingo course, probably) and the aforementioned vocab training.
Following the Assimil course plan, after about 10 weeks of regular (but not super-stressful) work, you should be able to get into practicing the exam format. You might easily be ready earlier than after 10 weeks, but I think you should be fairly certain before doing the practice exams because there aren't that many available. You can find the Goethe Institute's own practice exams here.
I recommend trying the first one when you think you are ready and then assessing your results. What was your weak spot? For me, the first time I did a practice exam I found that my vocabulary for the required reading was really lacking and I worked hard on improving this. I personally used Lesetraining B2 but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for A1. I suspect that's because the required vocabulary is so much smaller. I suspect that if you've done 50 lessons of Assimil then you will just need to get used to the sorts of audio content in the exams to improve your results in this area. Also, practicing speaking will be important. Find someone to chat to! The cheapest way to do this is a language exchange, so give it a go! Or even just make new friends who will be kind enough to help you with their language like I did. I found a German-speaker at my work who was willing to help, and made two very good friends through Couch Surfing. Or find a Meetup group. I've yet to go to one, but I know that the group in Sydney is quite active and regular, so I suspect they are in any major city around the world.
Phew! That's all I can think of for now, so off you go and get cracking. Report back in 3 or 4 months when you've sat and passed the A1 exam! Viel Spaß!
(NOTE: Most book links in the blog are now affiliate links with BookDepository to help me continue providing resources for language learners on this site. I chose Book Depository because they're quick and cheap, but you can also check other sites for cheap deals. For Australians, I recommend checking out booko.com.au which compares prices including delivery from a number of suppliers.)
First of all, let me say that A1 is not a doddle. For me, it seems pretty easy, but I can recognise where they try to trip up beginners and I also remember what it is like to listen to a language in the early stages without the right type of practice. This will require some work. However, it is not a particularly high hurdle and I believe that if you start off in the right direction you'll be able to prepare in quite a short period of time.
Now, it is certainly possible to do it for free because the internet is an amazing resource. A great place to get started is on the BBC's website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/, which also links through to Deutsche Welle's German learning site, amongst others. In particular, the A1 level material can be found here: http://www.dw.de/learn-german/level-a1/s-13227. However, as helpful as some of this can be, I personally found many of the beginner's programs somewhat, ahhh... twee, at best.
But don't just take my word for it - have a listen to some of "Radio D"!
It's really great that this stuff's out there for free, but I think it's just too slow and contains way too much English. The pace is also treacle slow compared to what you can achieve. It seems to be mainly for school teachers. If you're a solo learner, you can do much better.
I personally don't have a lot of experience with a wide variety of packages, but I personally credit Assimil's New German with Ease with much of my success in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2 exam. I don't think it takes you all the way to the B2 level as claimed, but if you're looking to pass the A1, all the grammar and listening comprehension you need can be found in this book. Even better, you definitely won't need to do 100 lessons to cover all you need. If I were starting from scratch, I would definitely just get this book + audio and get cracking. I haven't done a scientific experiment or anything, but since the difference in difficulty between each level of the CEFR is not constant (in other words, it takes longer to progress between levels the more advanced you are), I would guess that the second half of the book takes you from low A2-ish to B1-B2. B1 in terms of vocabulary and real world listening practice, but B2 in terms of familiarity with the grammar and probably not far off the level required in terms of listening ability for actually passing the exam (with extra exam-specific practice, of course).
VERY IMPORTANT! Don't forget to SHADOW! If you don't know what shadowing is, this will change your world :-) You can skip the bit about walking briskly (I certainly never did, since I mostly did this in the car on the way to work) - just read the section entitled "Using shadowing to master your coursebook, accompanied by other techniques". I never considered that I had finished a lesson until I could "blind shadow" it without any noticeable errors (in my own opinion, of course!) which was sometimes frustrating, and definitely tiring exercise for the mouth, but important all the same. It will help you become comfortable with making the new sounds at a decent speed. The essence of shadowing is simple, really - first, know the meaning of the dialogue. This usually means you've read through the translation and notes at least once. Then just listen to the audio for that day's lesson pretty much continuously until you can repeat the audio just after the speaker has spoken for the whole dialogue. I set myself a benchmark of being error free because it's a specific and measurable goal, but I suspect that doing a 100% perfect run on the whole dialogue from start to finish is not really necessary!
Given all that, you probably don't need to go past lesson 50 to be able to start confidently studying directly for the exam. Even better, the first 50 lessons are a bit shorter and easier than the last 50, so you should be able to manage one per day for at least 5 days per week over a total of 10 weeks, right? If not, you might ask yourself how committed you are the passing the test, because this isn't much to ask, really! If you find yourself struggling to continue, re-check your motivation. That's actually the most fundamental part of the problem for most people.
This will fill up your listening needs for those 10 weeks. What else should you do? You'll want to start practicing speaking as soon as possible, but before doing that I would suggest getting a basic vocabulary list into an SRS based learning system right from the start. If you've read anything else on this site, you'll realise that I highly recommend Anki. Make your own word list (here is a good tip for building one up from your basic course), or download one. The biggest hurdle to passing that A1 exam after using a good quality basic course for a few months is going to be vocabulary. Anki can help a lot with this, but it's not everything. For example, I personally have found that after leaving my Anki list for a long time and then coming back to it that I'm quite rusty on that particular list of words. If you're not doing it every day, your command of your lists of words will definitely diminish.
Some possible ways to avoid this loss is through making up little stories, or using analogies (See some examples at Memrise to get an idea, and also possibly just use it :-) ), breaking long words into component parts and adding those to your Anki list, visualising actions, etc. Also, of course, if you're using and hearing/reading the words as often as possible, they will become firmly implanted in your memory.
This brings me to another point - if you don't want to spend the money on the Assimil course, you can always try Duolingo. I haven't really gone through all the course material for German but I think it might be able to get you to an A1-ish level eventually. You will need to supplement this with a good grammar book/website (after a month or so of the Duolingo course, probably) and the aforementioned vocab training.
Following the Assimil course plan, after about 10 weeks of regular (but not super-stressful) work, you should be able to get into practicing the exam format. You might easily be ready earlier than after 10 weeks, but I think you should be fairly certain before doing the practice exams because there aren't that many available. You can find the Goethe Institute's own practice exams here.
I recommend trying the first one when you think you are ready and then assessing your results. What was your weak spot? For me, the first time I did a practice exam I found that my vocabulary for the required reading was really lacking and I worked hard on improving this. I personally used Lesetraining B2 but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for A1. I suspect that's because the required vocabulary is so much smaller. I suspect that if you've done 50 lessons of Assimil then you will just need to get used to the sorts of audio content in the exams to improve your results in this area. Also, practicing speaking will be important. Find someone to chat to! The cheapest way to do this is a language exchange, so give it a go! Or even just make new friends who will be kind enough to help you with their language like I did. I found a German-speaker at my work who was willing to help, and made two very good friends through Couch Surfing. Or find a Meetup group. I've yet to go to one, but I know that the group in Sydney is quite active and regular, so I suspect they are in any major city around the world.
Phew! That's all I can think of for now, so off you go and get cracking. Report back in 3 or 4 months when you've sat and passed the A1 exam! Viel Spaß!
(NOTE: Most book links in the blog are now affiliate links with BookDepository to help me continue providing resources for language learners on this site. I chose Book Depository because they're quick and cheap, but you can also check other sites for cheap deals. For Australians, I recommend checking out booko.com.au which compares prices including delivery from a number of suppliers.)
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Website experiment finished
Just a really brief post to announce the end of my brief experimemt with Google Ads. I can tell they'll never generate much revenue but they makethe site permamemtly ugly, so they're getting the chop. Been busy but more proper updates soon, I promise, including some news about my French!
Saturday, November 16, 2013
To Esperanto or Not Esperanto? And a look at memory techniques for learning vocabulary
I had a funny idea recently. And I mean funny as in "komisch", not funny as in "lustig". Since I'm still quite busy in my very limited spare time developing an app, I wondered if there's anything I could do with the rest of the year to satisfy my yearning for language learning but without adding too much work to my workload.
I got an idea after I released my Anki list, as I was looking through the lists of available Anki lists. Anki is a great tool with a great community around it releasing wordlists on all kinds of topics. I personally used it extensively in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2. I happened across a wordlist for German speakers wanting to learn Esperanto and checked it out. And while looking through the list I had a crazy idea - it seemed pretty easy to learn the words in the list I tried out, so what if I try to learn some basic level of Esperanto for the rest of the year, through German as much as possible. That way I could use my German a little and satisfy that urge to learn languages.
Sure, I'm aware of the arguments against Esperanto. Some of the most obvious ones are discussed in the Justin Rye's ageless Ranto. He actually describes lots of the posited benefits of the language too, but I'll link to one alternative point of view anyway. I'd looked at learning it before and hit some annoyances. Back in those days I wasn't used to pushing through the many weirdnesses of natural languages, so I didn't progress past a certain point. I thought I could give it a good crack this time. I found that, with my French and German knowledge, I could pick up on a lot of the basic words pretty easily.
So, I downloaded a few lists and started giving it a crack. I also read some web descriptions (including the Ranto above!) to give me an overview again of the word-building and grammar. I found that I could learn all the words from 3 lists (2 of basic vocab -1 German, 1 English - and a German based one for the book "Gerda Malaperis") and review them every day at a pace of 20 new words each. In addition, I did a list of Esperanto affixes. This was all pretty easy to do every day and didn't take too long. I didn't do any special visualisation techniques on these lists and it was still pretty easy and reliable most of the time.
How long did I last doing this?
Just a few days!
Look, I'm used to ignoring the differences between other natural languages and my own now. I've done it with German and French, but when it's a constructed language that is supposed to be an alternative to natural languages, maybe I just had a lower threshold. The end really came for me today when I started paying attention to the example sentences in one of the decks and I just despaired. I had already looked past "infanajxo" being, apparently, the "concrete manifestation of the abstract idea of infano" and therefore meaning "childhood", and the nonsense of malvarmumi meaning "to catch a cold" (seriously - "opposite-of-warm-indefinite-verb" Why semi-copy such an idiomatic expression involving being "cold" anyway?), and the idiomatic way of expressing "I like" being something like "it is pleasing to me", but when I saw yet another pointless use of the indefinite preposition "je" I decided I was truly wasting my time. Probably looking up the website of the Sydney Esperanto Association didn't help. So, that was the last straw.
It may be easier to learn than other languages (I definitely feel I know the basics reasonably well for such a short exposure), but it still requires some effort - acquiring a few thousand words, acquiring a few hundred common constructs and practicing speaking to some reasonable level of fluency. I just cannot justify the effort for a constructed language that probably has fewer fluent speakers in Australia than Swahili or even Bininj Gunwok.
So, I dropped it. Now that I have I will have a little more time for reading my current book (called "Scheisse" which teaches you how to swear in German) and a lot more headspace for one other Anki list which I downloaded at the same time and I've started working on. This one has all the words from the lessons (or exercises - can't remember which one!) in the well-known Latin textbook "Wheelock's Latin" which I also checked out. I do not own a copy of Wheelock's Latin yet - I'm hoping to find one cheap somewhere. I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up at a second-hand store sometime. While I decided earlier in the year that I didn't have the time or headspace for both Chinese and Latin, I've since been thinking that I could find time for Latin on its own somehow because it should be slightly less demanding as there will be no requirement to speak it, nor any real requirement to understand it when it's spoken. I had to finish a few books first - "Das Todeskreuz" which I've mentioned previously and an interesting new book from Jared Diamond called "The World Until Yesterday". After that I managed to get my app development back on track a bit again, and maybe now I can restart my Latin studies.
I don't have an exact plan really, but I've started by just learning some Latin words for the hell of it. The really interesting thing for me is that I've started trying to use some of those memory techniques you hear people talk about. I've never bothered to read up on them specifically, or practice them properly, so this is all just one large experiment. However, I think it's an incredibly important experiment for my future language learning. You see, I have noticed that, although my recall on my Anki lists was reasonably good while I was actively reviewing it every day, once I stop the recall drops very fast for a lot of the words. Because of that, it's hard to imagine how I can maintain multiple languages at any decent level and add new ones. Of course, I need to read, listen and speak each one as often as possible, but I find that an Anki list provides a density of time that's hard to beat just to keep my level of easily recalled words up.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway. But the burden of doing the lists everyday just proved too much. I should almost certainly reduce the maximum number of reviews each day (currently 100) but it would be even better if I just didn't need to review so many words at all! In particular, there are some words and expressions that I find just don't stick reliably with straight repetition.
So, now I'm experimenting with a new list of words. For each word I try to develop some small mnemonic phrase or visualise some short scene plus dialogue. They are always pretty silly, and I'm still working on it. The particular list I'm looking that only tests recall of the meaning of Latin words, not vice-versa, so it's perhaps a simpler start. I'm still learning via Anki with its implementation of Spaced-Repetition Learning and I think it's a good combination. I'm at a stage where some of my mnemonics don't work very well, or I just don't recall them at all (actually, this has been quite rare so far) so it's good for the mnemonics to be backed up by SRS.
The first day I did it it took me THE ENTIRE DAY (spread over the course of the day, of course) to come up with the memes for my 20 new words and whatever number of reviews I needed (maybe twenty). I was pretty tired at the end of the day, but also pretty satisfied with my efforts. That night was one of extremely interrupted sleep - and the start of one of the longest days of my life - when my daughter woke up at 2:30am vomitting in bed. I didn't get back to sleep myself till 4am and then I was up every 20 mins with my poor daughter retching. Terrible! So, I was kind of on edge and unable to sleep much until she slept for an hour between 6 and 7. At some stage I was lying in bed and the words I had studied were just flying through my head in a very orderly fashion. I found myself doing things like recalling all the verbs that had a final verb form ending in "latum", or trying to recall all the adjectives I had learnt. It was quite an experience - like looking up words in a dictionary! I don't remember it ever having happened before, even with German, so it was quite exciting!
Was it because I had just furnished so much attention on each word as I tried to come up with a mnemonic, or was it the mnemonics themselves? Only more experimenting could tell, which I'm doing now. I need to practice to make the production of mnemonics faster. In addition, I use the SRS and let it go through its early frequencies of "1 minute" and "10 minutes" before decideding that I remember the mnemonic well enough at which stage I decide on a repeat interval of either 1 day or 4 days. I also need to make sure the mnemonic captures enough of the meanings on one side and the forms on the other to be useful, but to make sure that the form I will be given (i.e., the Latin words) comes early in my mnemonic so it can kick off the whole recall. These are all things I need to practice. I think I've got a little faster already. I don't always remember my mnemonic, and if I don't I decide that the original wasn't good enough, come up with something new, and start again.
So far I've been impressed and hope it continues like this. Very early days though, so I'll keep you posted! I hope to learn a lot of Latin vocabulary as a semi-separate task to the grammar because I already know enough of the basic grammar to understand the forms that I'm seeing to some extent, so later I can focus on improving the grammar specifically.
To wrap-up my other news - I made contact with a couple of local people who want to practice English in exchange for German and French (one of each). The French guy got back to me so I'll meet up with him and we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to convince one of them to become my running buddy so I can double the usefulness of my very limited time!
I've also read about half of the book "Scheisse" which I mentioned above. It's only very light reading, and I don't spend much time on it in total really. It's just for a laugh, although I must admit that I read the meaning of a couple of words in there which then appeared in "Das Todeskreuz" which was pretty cool :-) So, not totally useless after all!
My last update is site related - since I turned on Google Ads I've got approximately 2/5ths of nothing. I'm not sure I'm supposed to say it exactly, but I think Google estimates that for every 1,000 page visits I will earn a few cents. Since I get about 1,000 per month, I can't see myself continuing with it for very long. At least I've turned off the ads for "dating" sites which are a pretty tacky look on any website. If it doesn't look like it's going to be much use by the end of the year, I'll flick it off again. I got no comments about it and the traffic to the site is fairly unchanged, so I guess most of you out there have "AdBlocker" turned on :-)
Anyone want to share their experiences with using mnemonics for memorising, or even mixed with SRS, please feel free to do so in the comments below. Coming up in my next post, some advice on how to pass the Goethe Zertifikat A1 - Start Deutsch 1 exam as quickly, painlessly and cheaply as possible!
I got an idea after I released my Anki list, as I was looking through the lists of available Anki lists. Anki is a great tool with a great community around it releasing wordlists on all kinds of topics. I personally used it extensively in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2. I happened across a wordlist for German speakers wanting to learn Esperanto and checked it out. And while looking through the list I had a crazy idea - it seemed pretty easy to learn the words in the list I tried out, so what if I try to learn some basic level of Esperanto for the rest of the year, through German as much as possible. That way I could use my German a little and satisfy that urge to learn languages.
Sure, I'm aware of the arguments against Esperanto. Some of the most obvious ones are discussed in the Justin Rye's ageless Ranto. He actually describes lots of the posited benefits of the language too, but I'll link to one alternative point of view anyway. I'd looked at learning it before and hit some annoyances. Back in those days I wasn't used to pushing through the many weirdnesses of natural languages, so I didn't progress past a certain point. I thought I could give it a good crack this time. I found that, with my French and German knowledge, I could pick up on a lot of the basic words pretty easily.
So, I downloaded a few lists and started giving it a crack. I also read some web descriptions (including the Ranto above!) to give me an overview again of the word-building and grammar. I found that I could learn all the words from 3 lists (2 of basic vocab -1 German, 1 English - and a German based one for the book "Gerda Malaperis") and review them every day at a pace of 20 new words each. In addition, I did a list of Esperanto affixes. This was all pretty easy to do every day and didn't take too long. I didn't do any special visualisation techniques on these lists and it was still pretty easy and reliable most of the time.
How long did I last doing this?
Just a few days!
Look, I'm used to ignoring the differences between other natural languages and my own now. I've done it with German and French, but when it's a constructed language that is supposed to be an alternative to natural languages, maybe I just had a lower threshold. The end really came for me today when I started paying attention to the example sentences in one of the decks and I just despaired. I had already looked past "infanajxo" being, apparently, the "concrete manifestation of the abstract idea of infano" and therefore meaning "childhood", and the nonsense of malvarmumi meaning "to catch a cold" (seriously - "opposite-of-warm-indefinite-verb" Why semi-copy such an idiomatic expression involving being "cold" anyway?), and the idiomatic way of expressing "I like" being something like "it is pleasing to me", but when I saw yet another pointless use of the indefinite preposition "je" I decided I was truly wasting my time. Probably looking up the website of the Sydney Esperanto Association didn't help. So, that was the last straw.
It may be easier to learn than other languages (I definitely feel I know the basics reasonably well for such a short exposure), but it still requires some effort - acquiring a few thousand words, acquiring a few hundred common constructs and practicing speaking to some reasonable level of fluency. I just cannot justify the effort for a constructed language that probably has fewer fluent speakers in Australia than Swahili or even Bininj Gunwok.
So, I dropped it. Now that I have I will have a little more time for reading my current book (called "Scheisse" which teaches you how to swear in German) and a lot more headspace for one other Anki list which I downloaded at the same time and I've started working on. This one has all the words from the lessons (or exercises - can't remember which one!) in the well-known Latin textbook "Wheelock's Latin" which I also checked out. I do not own a copy of Wheelock's Latin yet - I'm hoping to find one cheap somewhere. I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up at a second-hand store sometime. While I decided earlier in the year that I didn't have the time or headspace for both Chinese and Latin, I've since been thinking that I could find time for Latin on its own somehow because it should be slightly less demanding as there will be no requirement to speak it, nor any real requirement to understand it when it's spoken. I had to finish a few books first - "Das Todeskreuz" which I've mentioned previously and an interesting new book from Jared Diamond called "The World Until Yesterday". After that I managed to get my app development back on track a bit again, and maybe now I can restart my Latin studies.
I don't have an exact plan really, but I've started by just learning some Latin words for the hell of it. The really interesting thing for me is that I've started trying to use some of those memory techniques you hear people talk about. I've never bothered to read up on them specifically, or practice them properly, so this is all just one large experiment. However, I think it's an incredibly important experiment for my future language learning. You see, I have noticed that, although my recall on my Anki lists was reasonably good while I was actively reviewing it every day, once I stop the recall drops very fast for a lot of the words. Because of that, it's hard to imagine how I can maintain multiple languages at any decent level and add new ones. Of course, I need to read, listen and speak each one as often as possible, but I find that an Anki list provides a density of time that's hard to beat just to keep my level of easily recalled words up.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway. But the burden of doing the lists everyday just proved too much. I should almost certainly reduce the maximum number of reviews each day (currently 100) but it would be even better if I just didn't need to review so many words at all! In particular, there are some words and expressions that I find just don't stick reliably with straight repetition.
So, now I'm experimenting with a new list of words. For each word I try to develop some small mnemonic phrase or visualise some short scene plus dialogue. They are always pretty silly, and I'm still working on it. The particular list I'm looking that only tests recall of the meaning of Latin words, not vice-versa, so it's perhaps a simpler start. I'm still learning via Anki with its implementation of Spaced-Repetition Learning and I think it's a good combination. I'm at a stage where some of my mnemonics don't work very well, or I just don't recall them at all (actually, this has been quite rare so far) so it's good for the mnemonics to be backed up by SRS.
The first day I did it it took me THE ENTIRE DAY (spread over the course of the day, of course) to come up with the memes for my 20 new words and whatever number of reviews I needed (maybe twenty). I was pretty tired at the end of the day, but also pretty satisfied with my efforts. That night was one of extremely interrupted sleep - and the start of one of the longest days of my life - when my daughter woke up at 2:30am vomitting in bed. I didn't get back to sleep myself till 4am and then I was up every 20 mins with my poor daughter retching. Terrible! So, I was kind of on edge and unable to sleep much until she slept for an hour between 6 and 7. At some stage I was lying in bed and the words I had studied were just flying through my head in a very orderly fashion. I found myself doing things like recalling all the verbs that had a final verb form ending in "latum", or trying to recall all the adjectives I had learnt. It was quite an experience - like looking up words in a dictionary! I don't remember it ever having happened before, even with German, so it was quite exciting!
Was it because I had just furnished so much attention on each word as I tried to come up with a mnemonic, or was it the mnemonics themselves? Only more experimenting could tell, which I'm doing now. I need to practice to make the production of mnemonics faster. In addition, I use the SRS and let it go through its early frequencies of "1 minute" and "10 minutes" before decideding that I remember the mnemonic well enough at which stage I decide on a repeat interval of either 1 day or 4 days. I also need to make sure the mnemonic captures enough of the meanings on one side and the forms on the other to be useful, but to make sure that the form I will be given (i.e., the Latin words) comes early in my mnemonic so it can kick off the whole recall. These are all things I need to practice. I think I've got a little faster already. I don't always remember my mnemonic, and if I don't I decide that the original wasn't good enough, come up with something new, and start again.
So far I've been impressed and hope it continues like this. Very early days though, so I'll keep you posted! I hope to learn a lot of Latin vocabulary as a semi-separate task to the grammar because I already know enough of the basic grammar to understand the forms that I'm seeing to some extent, so later I can focus on improving the grammar specifically.
To wrap-up my other news - I made contact with a couple of local people who want to practice English in exchange for German and French (one of each). The French guy got back to me so I'll meet up with him and we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to convince one of them to become my running buddy so I can double the usefulness of my very limited time!
I've also read about half of the book "Scheisse" which I mentioned above. It's only very light reading, and I don't spend much time on it in total really. It's just for a laugh, although I must admit that I read the meaning of a couple of words in there which then appeared in "Das Todeskreuz" which was pretty cool :-) So, not totally useless after all!
My last update is site related - since I turned on Google Ads I've got approximately 2/5ths of nothing. I'm not sure I'm supposed to say it exactly, but I think Google estimates that for every 1,000 page visits I will earn a few cents. Since I get about 1,000 per month, I can't see myself continuing with it for very long. At least I've turned off the ads for "dating" sites which are a pretty tacky look on any website. If it doesn't look like it's going to be much use by the end of the year, I'll flick it off again. I got no comments about it and the traffic to the site is fairly unchanged, so I guess most of you out there have "AdBlocker" turned on :-)
Anyone want to share their experiences with using mnemonics for memorising, or even mixed with SRS, please feel free to do so in the comments below. Coming up in my next post, some advice on how to pass the Goethe Zertifikat A1 - Start Deutsch 1 exam as quickly, painlessly and cheaply as possible!
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