Occasional notes on learning German

I am finally finished with this novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues. Had a predictable sad ending with the protagonist, having almost made it through the war while the rest of his group of 7 classmates did not, finally is killed one month shy of the armistice. The final total for words added from this novel is 1375, thus contributing more than 10% of the words I have learned or partially learned through Anki. I am about 1/3 of the way through on a rereading.

So I am ready to start on Tannöd. I have also ordered another novel, Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit.

So I have started on Tannöd and am presently on p. 20 of 125. Compared to the last novel, this is both shorter and also seems to carry far less of a vocabulary load. So far in 20 pages I have added 39 words to Anki, which were not already included in the 12,200 I have already learned or partially learned, or the additional 3,000 in my learning queue. The novel is a fictionalized account of a famous unsolved murder in Bavaria in the 1920s, that took place on the Hinterkaifeck farmstead. It includes scores of accounts of various victims, witnesses, neighbors and investigators, all written in the first person. So far I enjoy it.

A lot of the vocabulary being added looks to be upper register or dialectical/regional. Here is the first group of words:

abgekommen - angebunden - anketten - arbeitsam - bahnen - befüllt - Dämmerlicht - Fangerles - Ami - Anbruch - Barren - Erdapfel - Kaugummi - Schlitten - Stadel - Trog - Verschlag - Dreifaltigkeit - Erdnuss - Gleichförmigkeit - Kapuze - dämmrig - einförmig - garen - herzaubern - hinlagen - hüllen - johlen - melken - mitziehen - pieseln - quieken - sacht(e) - verfinstern - verlottern - vorsichthalber - winseln - zaghaft - zerschunden

I am still in the process of rereading Im Westen Nichts Neues and will probably reread this novel as well to help cement the vocabulary I learn from it. I have kind of surprised myself in being willing to read some more fiction, and I have already received the other novel mentioned in the previous post that will follow this one. I'm still not interested in reading authors like Goethe and such though.

I've been enjoying looking over your shoulder at the words you're encountering so much, I did an experiment of my own:
Read 20 pages of "Eine deutsche Leidenschaft namens Nudelsalat" (a collection of mostly humorous short observations/stories by the Syrian-German writer Rafik Schami, a relatively easy read), pulled out any unknown vocabulary words I came across, translated them to English, then looked up the frequency and any usage notes on the monolingual Duden dictionary site. Duden.de
The frequency rating Duden uses is from 1 (least frequent) to 4 (most frequent). Lastly, I noted if I ever recalled seeing the word before, but couldn't remember its meaning. Not sure this idea would be at all useful to you to reduce the number of words you'd have to put into Anki since it did take a bit of time. If I were going to commit these words to memory, I'd pick the ones I remember seeing before, and "einbüßen"( the one rated a 3), maybe one or two others if I were interested in physics or ethnology or one of them struck my fancy for some reason. I probably wouldn't need to actively learn "iahen", assuming it would stick without any work, since it sounds like a donkey's bray.

Wort/ Übersetzung/ Duden frequency/ Usage /Remember seeing?
- means nothing special or no memory of seeing
schrullig quirky 2 slang -
jedweder any 2 obsolete -
Unkenruf prophecy of doom 2 - -
sperrig bulky 2 - Y
verbleichen to fade 2 - -
einbüßen to forfeit 3 - -
Fliehkraft, -e centrifugal force 2 physics -
Windeseile, -e lightning speed 1 - -
flechten to braid 2 - -
Lendenschurz, -r loincloth 2 ethnology -
anzüglich suggestive 2 - -
Stachel, -r thorn 2 - Y
Ehrfurcht, -e awe 2 - -
Schuppe, -e scale, flake 2 - Y
geschmeidig supple 2 - -
einfältig simple-minded 2 - Y
Ernteertrag, -r crop yield 2 - -
darbringen to offer up 2 elevated Y
Vergeltung, -e retribution 2 - -
iahen to bray 1 - -
zürnen to be cross 2 elevated -

Banna, thanks for the reply and interesting post. Regarding those 21 words there, I know 9 of them. Of course it varies depending on what we read or the other sources for our vocabulary. As to the other 12, I personally would put all of them into Anki as I have been doing for the novels mentioned above. Since after some threshold, maybe 9-10K words, the remaining words are all relatively infrequent outside specialist terms, I don't think it matters much which I learn or don't. Since my objective is to learn enough to hit the lexical threshold discussed in other threads, i.e. 15K+ in general and by my personal adjustment for German 20K+, then I need to learn a lot of words and those are as good as any given that I like to read science and history, and so far, some literature. If I just browse a dictionary, then I would throw out a lot of words unless I remembered seeing them, but as to stuff I actually read I want to learn those words so that I can read the text a second time to help cement the vocabulary and also for pleasure.

While a lot of words are used only once or twice in novels, some of them do tend to come up in other contexts. I don't know if you read FAZ or not, but their writers will constantly keep you doing lookups. They will use every synonym and upper register word possible in the course of a year of writing. I would like to cut down the number of lookups which means I need a lot of relatively infrequent words as well as more frequent ones. The lexical threshold (98% coverage) is based on the level at which one can more likely infer the meaning of unknown words from the context, and also be comfortable in not having to do too much guesswork or look up too many words.

My only real concern is not learning the mid-frequency day-to-day vocabulary between 2000 and 9000 word families (times 1.7 for words), which are hard to come by in reading. With my current novel I am pretty close to the lexical threshold already, but for the first one it was not close, which is to be expected with literary fiction. Modern fiction however seems to be better for that mid-frequency vocab re everyday household and work and leisure time vocabulary.

I've read Im Westen nichts Neues as well. I have cried so much. mostly, the music make me cry not the books because I don't read books normally, and I listen music all the time, but this book was so sad.

from where I come (Wallonia) were many horrible things in the first (and second) world war, and generally the country was destroyed, but to read the other side's book is important I think.

98% coverage seems like a reasonable goal. In my little experiment, those 21 words were found in 20 pages of reading, so I'd guess a 99+% to read really comfortably, and only maybe 5(?) were essential to understand the point of the sentence. Weirdly, sometimes news stories or nonfiction pieces are easier to read because of international words, though particularly with German there are a lot of verb variations with the prefixes and suffixes that can be tricky, not to mention the compound words.
Ah yes, reading FAZ is a lofty and admirable goal. You definitely do need to master a lot of vocabulary for that. I do occasionally read their articles, but tend to get my news from more middle-brow sources such as Zeit or Süddeutsche or listen to Deutschlandfunk programs (they often have transcripts, too). Or when I'm really in a hurry,
Tagesschau in 100 Sekunden

So now I am up to p. 37 of 125 of Tannöd and have harvested an additional 49 words, for a total of 88 not already included in my Anki deck of 15K+words (learned, partially learned or waiting to be learned).

abschätzend - rummäkeln - arbeitsschau - bergab - bleischwer - brocken - böig - Einmachglas - Email (false friend!) - Kanapee - Radeln - Scheit - Wirtshaus - Eigenbrötler - Einsiedler - Gram - Grantler - Handschlag - Krämer - Luftzug - Muttersatz - Schmuser - Betrübnis - Empfängnis - Ermahnung - Liederlichkeit - Schwindsucht - Wehklage - Zichorie - einräumen - fesch - gesogen - hingeben - holprig - läutern - nagend - schauerlich - schweifen - schüren - siedend - staunend - unentschuldigt - vergilbt - verhärmt - zusammenkoppeln - zusammenpacken - zögerlich - übergangsweise

The book continues to give perspectives of different parties before and after the events that are the focus of the book, i.e. the famous unsolved murder on a remote Bavarian farm in the 1920s. Many of the words are dialectical or deal with the religious milieu of the area where the novel is set. The book is written in a simple style and easy to read as far as grammar constructions.

I think that for anyone reading literary fiction in learning a language, that they would do well to alternate with more modern and easy to understand books. Reading easy stuff helps to consolidate one's learning and allows a focus on other aspects of the language that get pushed aside when a lot of the vocabulary or grammatical constructions are also new.

15K+ Anki deck, that is impressive. However I do not envy you all the work with it. Good luck !

Now up to p. 58 of 125 of Tannöd and another 59 words for a total of 147 new ones. Although I could deduce a few of the words below, most of them I could not. And while in general their meaning might not be particularly important if I just went on without looking them up, especially for descriptive adjectives, this is a mystery, so one never knows what detail is important. While 147 new words on 58 pages is only an average of a little less than 3 per page, they are not distributed evenly, and sometimes it might be 6 or 7 on a page, which is definitely too many to just pass over.

abmontieren - auswechseln - bücken sich - Häusel - deponieren - Bissen - Geizhals - Pfennigfuchser - Speichel - Rotzglocke - Schraubenmutter - entriegeln - festgetreten - gang und gäbe sein - schweige - herumschrauben - herumzigeunern - lockern - milchig - moldrig - pressant - runterkriegen - schmierig - seinerzeit - verschwitzt - vertrödeln - ausbaldowern - aushorchen - Gesäß - Schlitzohr - Seil - Firmpate - Handlanger - Hauer - Hausierer - Sparstrumpf - Tröster - Geißelung - Griffschale - Krönung - Mühseligkeit - Oberleitung - Rücklage - Verspottung - Walz - durchfüttern - dämmen - einsehbar - erhören - herumgefuchtelt - kappen - stapfen - verdingen - verhökern - verschachern - verschmitzt - verschnüren - versilbern - zugeknöpft

I know about 1/3 of this words. It is sich bücken, i think, not bücken sich, always the sich is before the infinitive in the reflexive verbs.

Yes in dictionaries or glossaries they put "sich" first, the same way one uses it, but I copied the way I do it in Anki so that the base word comes first in listings alphabetically.

ok, sorry I didn't know.

I've only been slowly reading my current novel, Tannöd, and and am now up to p. 99. So far I have harvested 268 new words from the novel to add to my current total of 13,200 learned/partially learned plus another 2,500 in the queue. I just have not been able to spend a lot of time reading, though it is not by any means a difficult novel. My listening and reading comprehension have continued to improve and I am continuing to study grammar in bits and pieces. I found a new site, mein-deutschbuch.de, that is a nice addition to the other grammar sites I use. I still have some comprehension issues with more recent episodes of Tatort that I watch on youtube, though curiously the older episodes from the 1980s seem a lot easier, and also have more useful casual conversation.

Still going slowly, as in not reading every day the novel, but now up to p. 112 of Tannöd, and only a little bit to finish it. So far there are 314 new words that I have extracted into Anki.

A sampling of today's words: Kuvert (s. Germ/Austria for envelope), Einöde (barren waste/wilderness), Obduktion (autopsy/post-mortem), ruchlos (wicked/contemptible), ungesühnt (unexpiated). One never knows when words like that will come in handy.

I quit rereading Im Westen Nichts Neues some time ago, as I think it better to postpone the second readings of these novels for later after I have more thoroughly learned the vocabulary contain therein. This week I have been studying the finer points of the German passiv voice, despite it not being used as much in German as in English. It seems that in colloquial speech anyway, that substitutions for the passiv like the reflexive, Man, sich lassen and sein + zu constructions are more common.

Meine Erfassung des Deutsches Texts, sowohl mündlich als schriftlich, führt weiter. Mit einen Vokabel nun von ungefähr 13.500 Wörter, brauche ich noch tausends mehr. Nach und nach werde ich mein Ziel anlangen.

Finally I finished Tannöd. It yielded a total of 340 new words that I had not known before. It was an entertaining novel and I would probably enjoy reading more from this author. I have begin reading Die Endeckung der Langsamkeit. From the first chapter I can already tell it will contain a lot of previously unknown words, many of which are upper register /literary type of descriptive words. 29 new words from this first chapter:

anerkennend - anstarren - berühren - Gebelfer - Geweih - Erker - Schiedsrichter - Aussteuer - Bucht - Hobelbank - Inschrift - Kniekehle - Kokarde - Raschheit - Regung - Zacke - emporstrecken - fernlenken - flimmern - fuhrwerken - gesammelt - grasen - haltmachen - hinter sich herschleifen - kichern - regungslos - verdreschen - vorgerückt - zügig

Some of the above were guessable, maybe a third. I was not familiar with the English word for one of them, Kokarde = Cockade. Seems like a British thing.

Normalerweise hab ich nicht viel Lust Romane zu lesen. Vielleicht aber versuche ich jeden Monat einem zu lesen können. Seit gestern, hab ich Funktionsverben und Funktionsvergefüge studiert. Die sind interresant, obwohl es scheint als ob die sind gang und gäbe nur in besonderen Sachgebiete.