My German Log

Discussion in 'Language Learning Logs & Super Challenges' started by Bryan, Oct 6, 2014.

  1. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Guten Abend!

    This log is to follow my progress with learning German. I'm starting from scratch and my goal is to make it to B2. I'm still debating on how to measure this but possibly by taking a placement test or official exam.

    To complicate things, a little, I will also be maintaining my Spanish through reading. I'm not planning on learning anything new in that language while studying German.

    Tools I'm using:

    - Memrise Basic German course: A short course to jump start things and get familiar.
    - Pimsleur German: Mostly for pronunciation and speaking practice during commutes.
    - Deutsch Warum nicht? I'm planning on trying the first level to see if I like it. If not, I will switch to Assimil.
    - Anki

    What have I done so far?

    Pimsluer lessons 1,2 and 3.
    First 3 levels of the Memrise course.
    Serie 1, Chapter 1 of DWN.

    This log is mostly to track my progress but feedback, comments and suggestions are most welcome.
    Big_Dog likes this.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Wilkommen zu polydog! Schön das Sie hier sind.

    I was about to update my own German log and saw this. As you can see there, I too started with DW's Deutsch Warum Nicht along with Living Language Ultimate German and Advanced. DWN is a nice if goofy and slightly outdated course. I downloaded each audio lesson and then opened it up in Audacity (discontinued but findable and other audio tools out there as well) and listened to the lesson with the exception of the classical music. I then went through again and chopped out all the English and saved it with a slightly different file name. These revised files are what I later used on my phone to play over and over and over. I never completed the Deutsch Interaktiv course, but did suck up its vocabulary into Anki.

    You can use the DW site materials all the way to C level, though after the B's, you will have to mostly look up words for yourself (Firefox has a handy popup addon for double-clicking and getting a translation). It would take a long time indeed to exhaust the DW materials and it is free. As you can discover in other threads, I am an Anki obsessive, and now am at a little over 13K words learned or partially learned (I try for 30-60 per day new words) since June of last year. Anki has made all the difference for my own learning progress.

    I don't concentrate on speaking/writing at all, but rather for now on listening and reading, and I have listened to German radio every day from the beginning to accustom myself to the sounds and slowly over time was able to understand more and more of it. You can look in the German Resources thread for plenty of other resources to use.

    Viel Glück und Erfolg!
    Last edited: Oct 6, 2014
  3. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Welcome to the forum Bryan. Good luck with your German!
  4. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    @Peregrinus Glad to hear you like the DW material. I'm hoping that I will too and will be able to use a lot of it.

    @Big_Dog Thanks! And thanks for setting up this forum.

    Updates...This morning on the commute to work I re-did lesson 3. I think I sorted out nicht vs kein. On the first listen yesterday afternoon, they seemed to be using it randomly. Of course this wasn't true but this morning I think I caught on to the pattern. That's one thing I don't care for about Pimsleur, the lack of clear explanations. I'm hopeful that the DWN course will fill in those blanks and both courses will reinforce each other. If not, the little German grammar book I ordered should do the trick.

    So, half an hour in today and I will shoot for another hour or so for the rest of the day.
  5. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    A lot of grammar makes better sense later after you have been learning for quite a while. So for example, as long as you understand what is being negated, then being able to apply the rules for when to use either nicht or kein is not as important. However if you insist, kein only negates nouns that have an indefinite article or no article, while nicht is used for other situations. Since you already know one other foreign language, I assume that grammar terms are fairly well know to you, which should help in learning German grammar. Anytime you want a quick grammar explanation, try german.about.com.
  6. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Finished lesson 4 of Pimsleur on the drive home tonight. I will re-listen to it in the morning.

    Did lesson 4 of DWN and the worksheets. Ex is a bit hard to understand in her high pitched voice.

    Added new words/phrases to Anki.

    Somewhere around a total of 2 hours of study time today. I think I will call it a day...
  7. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    The character of Ex is goofy and sometimes hard to make out, and I have read of people stopping the course because of that. But after clipping all the English from the four levels of DWN, there were about 4 solid hours of German comprehensible input, so I was willing to put up with the shortcomings.
  8. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    @Peregrinus Do you have any experience with Assimil German with Ease? Good, bad, indifferent? How does it compare to DWN?
  9. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I have the book for the older version, i.e. German Without Toil, but have not used it since it needs to be used with audio. While the audio for GWT is "findable" on the net, I had already started DWN and Living Language Ultimate and was pleased with them. If you cut out all the English and make revised DWN recordings as I mentioned above, you can use the course "Assimil-style", i.e. according to their instructions, which is what I did. You can search HTLAL if interested in GWE and will see that there are at least two versions of it, so 3 including GWT.
  10. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    Good luck with German it's a great language. We must write more in German on polydog in my opinion.
  11. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Update for today..

    Pimsleur lessons 4 and 5, both went well.
    Chapter 5 of DWN + worksheets.
    New vocab/phrases from DWN added to Anki.
  12. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Still plugging away at this but hadn't updated the log in a couple of days.

    I'm up to lesson 7 of Pimsluer. So far, so good with those. For whatever reason ich weiß and Sie wissen just will not stick. I miss it almost every time. I'm planning on adding both to Anki shortly. Word order in sentences hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be. I'm still afraid of the case system though. I've read that it isn't as bad as it's made out to be. I guess we will see....

    I've also decided to switch over to Assimil German with Ease and not use DWN. The first 4 lessons are all things I've seen before so today, I'm starting at lesson 5.
  13. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Had I not pared down the recordings of DWN to just the German, I probably would have not continued either, since as they are in the original is not conducive to replaying. The Living Language Ultimate course has both "at Home" and "on the Go" recordings for each chapter, which while not 100% identical, still provide a German only audio file for use when driving, etc. Re verbs like wissen, you just have to learn irregular forms by heart. Such verbs tend to be common ones so you will get them down in short order. As to the case system, I find it helpful to focus on one case at a time for all 3 genders, rather than trying to learn all cases for a gender first. Most variations are in the masculine gender, and declension of adjectives is the most difficult aspect of declension, though that too over time can be mastered.

    Edit: I just uploaded a chart with article and adjective declension endings here.
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2014
  14. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    Maybe it would help if you said this:

    Ja, ich weiß....
    Ja, das Weiß ich.

    Wissen Sie ob ...?
    Wissen Sie wo die Schokolade ist?

    then you will remember those I hope :)
  15. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Thanks :) Yes, that is exactly what I've been doing last night/today. Trying to drill those into my head. I think they are just about there....hopefully :)
  16. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Today....

    Did lesson 7 of Pimsleur and feel comfortable with it.

    Did lesson 5 of Assimil. A few things are a little iffy with it and I will re-visit it again later tonight.

    It's interesting that Pimsleur uses "ein bisschen" while Assimil uses "ein wenig". Both uses seems to mean "a little". As in, I speak a little German. My Assimil book also uses the word Fraulein, which I was assured by my Austrian friend, sounds very old fashioned and isn't used any more. My Assimil book is from the late 80's so maybe that is the difference for the two words for "a little". If that is the case, it makes me wonder what else I will run into.

    One of the things I always struggle with when using Assimil are the translations. For instance, Meine Tochter kommt sofort. Which Assimil translates to "my daughter will be there right away". The more exact translation is My daughter is coming immediately. It's always bothered me that Assimil adds words that aren't in the L2 sentence in the translation. I suppose I should just accept it, treat the book as a graded reader and assume I will see the words and structures over and over again. But, it still bothers me. I think my perfectionist side is causing me issues and wants to completely understand everything before moving on to the next lesson.

    I've been thinking the past two days how best to maintain my B1 Spanish level. I've been reading short Spanish books (70-ish pages). They are keeping the language alive (as is texting with my native speaking friends) but I'm concerned about not using it as much as I was prior to taking up German. I'd be interested to hear from others how they study a new language while maintaining the other(s). I had hoped to eventually learn another Romance language (French or Italian) but I'm starting to think maintaining them all might be a full time job. Anyway, I'm rambling. Gym time....
  17. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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  18. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    The terms have always appeared to me to be interchangeable, but only with "ein" preceding them, i.e. "wenig" and "bisschen" by themselves have disparate meanings. You also sometimes hear "ein bisserl" which is found in southern Germany and Austria, i.e. a dialectical use.

    Yeah just "Frau" is used these days, and from what I have read, "Fraulein" might be used with a very young girl, but otherwise would have the connotation of the British term "tart".


    Assimil is not known for good English translations in its English base products, and one often finds in online dictionaries an English translation that is colloquial and not literal. Either would be an acceptable English translation though, and you should just try to focus on the meaning as used in German.


    Are you familiar with Destinos? It is available free online as for the vids, and the textbook can be had cheaply. Probably all you would need to do is just listen to the videos. They contain more English explanations that is desirable, but each episode is relatively short. If you strive to learn just a little bit of new material you will probably end up with a better result for the maintenance of existing knowledge.
  19. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    wenig and bisschen are sometimes interchangeable, but not always, for example you can't say "Heute ist es ein wenig kalt" - it must be bisschen. Also, it's different in this senetnces:

    Ich habe leider wenig Geld
    Ich habe leider nur ein bisschen Geld

    It feels different in the meaning I think. You would say the first if you are poor, and the second in a café and you want champagne but better chose lemonade, but maybe you are very rich, but you havent the money in your bag today or if a person ask you for a donation.

    Or maybe it would be the same if you said "dabei" after the first sentence, I ahve just thought.

    Another word for "little" in some contexts is "etwas"

    Yes, "Fräulein" is obsolete.

    Wenig seems to be from much to low, and bisschen from nothing to some, can you understand this explanation? It's my feeling, it would be better if a German native can tell us.
  20. Arnaud

    Arnaud Member VIP member

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    The "Deutsch - Warum Nicht" program is interesting because it's broadcasted in a lot of languages.
    I've downloaded the audio files in russian, so I'm listening german lessons through russian, it's rather amusing.
    I listen one lesson first in french (my mother tongue) and a second time in russian.
    I had previously studied the first 30 lessons of Assimil German with ease, but I've being stuck and finally gave up.

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