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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    Did Pimsleur lesson 8 today. Mostly good. I will probably repeat it on the drive to work in the morning and do lesson 9 in the afternoon. As boring as it is, it does work well for me.

    I couldn't get my head into Assimil today. So, I substituted about 45 minutes of Memrise instead. Better to do something than nothing.

    I read a bit in Spanish tonight too and finished the book I had been reading. I also found another on Amazon for this week. I really like the Kindle Unlimited program.

    Amazon has Living Language German Complete for half price ($26ish) so I ordered it. I will work it into the learning mix.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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  3. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Yes and several over on HTLAL. I really disliked the Assimil Spanish with Ease. So much so that I used several other courses and never looked at the book again. Assimil German, while not that bad so far, may not be for me either.

    I'm starting to think that Assimil might be better for me as a graded reader, after I learn the basics and get to a high A1, low A2 range. At any rate, I've never had much luck with Assimil.
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  4. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    So having read that thread, are you following the official instructions and also replaying the audio multiple times later as you do other things? Whatever course you use, that repetition is very important.
  5. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Yes, I'm of the same opinion. I wasn't impressed with the results I got from the Russian course, although I think it's wishful thinking expecting grammar to soak in the way they say it will. You could study Assimil really intensively, memorizing every dialogue the way Professor Arguelles does, but I think I'd still be better off with a logically structured textbook supplemented by a ton of native material on the side.
  6. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Yeah, I've tried the official directions, the way EMK suggests, the Luca Method. Generally, I do a new lesson in the evening for 20-30 minutes. The next day I would loop the audio in my car while driving to/from work, 5 or 10 minutes during lunch while using the book and the full 45 minutes at the gym. I found I could understand most of the audio during this time but when it came time to do cloze cards in Anki or the fill in the blanks in the Assimil book, I failed at many of them. Generally, it was the same when I saw the same words or phrases repeated in future Assimil lessons. I think the reason I could understand the audio was because I knew the English dialog and I had "mapped" the translation in my head instead of learning the material. If that makes sense.

    Living Language Complete arrives today, so I will try that in combination with Pimsleur for a while and see how that works out. A more traditional course is probably the best for me to get the basics. I learned Spanish with a combination of Pimsleur and Fluenz. Fluenz really is an excellent course but I don't feel it takes one far enough to justify the price they ask for the full course.
  7. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Monday...re-did lesson 8 and did lesson 9 of Pimsleur + some Memrise in the evening. Memrise taught me "Gibt es Bier?" last night. Quite possibly the most important phrase I will need to know ;)

    Plan for today...this morning I listened to lesson 9 again. Lots of new stuff in this one. Especially telling time which was pretty easy. I think I am ok with most of this lesson now. Although, word order trips me up occasionally. Especially placing jetzt, nichts and mit mir/ihnen in the right part of the sentence. I might listen to this a third time this afternoon just to be sure I understand it all. We'll see how I feel about it in the afternoon. If not, I will move on to lesson 10.

    Update: Re-did lesson 9 and did lesson 1 of Living Language German.
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2014
  8. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Pimsleur: repeated lesson 9 and did lesson 10, twice during the commute. Yes, it was a terrible commute today (to and from work). On the plus side, lots of time to practice German. Easily got 1.5 hours in today.

    Living Language Lesson 2 + the online exercises and games. Probably 45 minutes to go through it. Maybe closer to an hour, I didn't keep track.

    After 2 lessons of Living Language, I'm liking this better. The exercises are helping to reinforce what I'm learning, the online games are fun and things seem to stick better. I think this combo of Pimsleur and Living Language will be good for my studies. I'm going to start putting the vocab list in each lesson into Memrise for review (including the lessons I've already done).
  9. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Yesterday:
    A bit of a lazy day. On the morning commute I did Pimsluer lesson 11. I found it a bit difficult. Work was difficult yesterday and my brain decided to shut off at the end of the day :) On the drive home I listened to complete silence. It was glorious.

    Today:
    (1) repeat lesson 11 and have it sink in better. (2) Do lesson 3 in Living Language Essential.

    Goals:
    I've been thinking a lot lately about reading in an L2 (or L3 in the case of my German), how it benefits you and when to start it. I was very guilty of jumping from course to course when I taught myself Spanish. My naive thought was if I did enough of them, eventually things would click and I'd met my goals. Of course that never happened. Although, after I completed Fluenz Spanish, I did feel more comfortable with the language. Anyway, after Fluenz I was burnt out with courses and decided to start reading without much hope that it would work out. Fortunately, I found that I could read easy books without much trouble and I noticed a big jump in my language abilities and comfort level after a while. So much so, I wanted to kick myself for not doing it earlier. Seeing words I learned previously or puzzling out new words in context helped me immensely.

    Because I like to plan, the question is when to start reading in German? My focus is to do Pimsluer 1 and 2 and Living Language to learn enough of the basic structures and vocab to be able to start reading easy books. Probably easy graded reader type books (maybe Assimil??). My plan for now is to make it half way through the LL course and try an easy book. If it's too difficult, then finish the course, and try again afterwards.

    And finally, on a fun note....last night wasn't a total loss. I found a YouTube channel called Get Germanized. Besides language learning videos, he has lots of cultural videos about Germany too. Plus, he is just entertaining to watch. I think it will be good for when I want to do something German related but don't feel like focused study.
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  10. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Perhaps you would end up with a better result if you finished the LL course and then moved on to an advanced course or just another beginner's course (you could do both in parallel now). After that start with graded readers and perhaps an overview of German grammar or something like the Practice Makes Perfect series (cheap and decent). For readers, there are several German publishers who publish monolingual readers with audio from A1 to B1, but they are expensive for the length. Alternatively, if you learn to read the old German Fraktur/Gothic script, you can find lots of older material, without audio of course, available via Google books if you search for German readers.

    Have you checked out Deutsche Welle's other beginning course, Deutsch Interaktiv? It is interactive and you can do parts of lessons and track your progress to B1. I find it helpful as well to keep track of various courses as I proceed through them in a spreadsheet, which also helps keep me motivated to actually finish them.
  11. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    For this German experiment I'm not opposed to 1 or 2 courses but I want to avoid course after course after course. To me, they aren't interesting (mostly) and the more of them I force myself to do, the more likely I am to get bored and not finish them. This time around I'm taking the view that beginner courses are a means to an end. That is, to teach me the basic structures and maybe 1000ish words. Then being able to move on to having fun in the language (easy readers, comic books, music, etc) and not have courses be the major source of exposure to the language like I did with Spanish. Worst case it's a total bust and I have to do another course to get my level up a bit. No big deal :)

    I have the Essential German Grammar from Dover. I thumb through it occasionally and as questions come up. It seems about the right size for my purposes. I remember EMK was partial to the French version too.

    PMP workbooks are nice. I have a couple of them for Spanish that I used. At some point I will look at some German ones.

    I haven't looked at Deutsch Interaktiv yet but I will make some time today to check it out, thanks for the suggestion. Being able to track my progress would be nice. It would take the guess work out of where I am.
  12. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I recommend starting as soon as you feel comfortable. Maybe treat it as a fun activity, and not even try to memorize words from it in the beginning. There are benefits to be had from all skills, so I try not to exclude any. More about reading here.
  13. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    @Big_Dog Great post, it seems we are of the same opinion on reading. I also gave lingQ a try. Like you, I don't want to read on the computer. Being a software engineer, I'm on it too much as it is. I tried the LingQ app on my tablet but had a few issues with it. Not being able to highlight multiple words (Spanish past tense haber + verb, especially) and make a lingq in the tablet app was a huge issue for me.

    Eventually, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite. The nice thing about it is you have built in dictionaries (or can buy a L2 -> L1 dictionary), can get translations for single words, multiple words or full sentences. And any words you look up are added to the built-in vocab builder/flashcards.

    You can also highlight words or phrases and the highlights are available on the kindle website in your account page. Every few days to once a week I go in, copy new ones into Anki or Memrise and I'm set.
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  14. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Sounds pretty efficient. I'm looking around for better reading tools now, so thanks for the tips. Seems there has been a lot of development in the past 2 or 3 years :)
  15. Bryan

    Bryan New Member

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    Tough weekend for language learning. Friday I got sick and stayed that way all weekend. I also went out of town to visit my mom for her birthday. But I did get a lot of Pimsleur in during the drive to and from. Probably a solid hour each way.

    Both Pimsleur and LL (lesson 3) are hammering on numbers. I've been giving extra time and attention to getting those, 1-100, memorized and will continue to do so this week.

    This morning I did Pimsleur lesson 13 and heard "Ich habe keiner Euro". The recording stressed the "r" ending so obviously it is important but gave no explanation as to why it is. I hate that. I'll have to google it later.
  16. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Euro is masculine and should be in the accusative case as the direct object, which kein should show as in Ich habe keinen Euro, which means more like you don't have even a single Euro. Otherwise it should be Ich habe kein Geld, as in you have no money. I don't think anyone claims Pimsleur courses to be 100% error free. This is of course if you are hearing it correctly. Did you get transcripts with the course or are they available?

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