I was on the phone with my friend today. We were talking about German and he asked me "Carm, when are we going to have a full conversation in German"? I professed that I had not been studying much over the summer. We started talking about new study methods, and he gave a great suggestion I tried out today.
Find a podcast, music video, movie, or show in the language you are trying to learn, something you haven't seen before. Start writing out what you're hearing (in the language you are hearing it in), then write a summery of what you have heard. He said that this was an important skill because your incorporating passive and active listening skills.
When I do try to speak German to someone I often get flustered. It becomes hard for me to express my wants, feelings, thoughts and opinions clearly and effectively. When practicing, I'm usually talking to people online, and that gives me time to go back, make corrections and even spell check what I am about to say. I may be communicating, but I'm not doing as much thinking as I probably should.
The method he suggested worked well for me. I listened to one of the news stations that is streamed on Itunes. Incidentally the report was on the American government, but I still wrote everything out in German on a scrap piece of paper. I am going to stick to this for a few days and see what comes of it.
Interesting post, I love your blog!
ReplyDeleteI watched Hot Tub Timemachine in French with English subtitles, taught me more French than I learned in high school. Great idea!
ReplyDeleteI used to learn german back in school, the key to learning it was getting your head around the tenses, cause the prefixes were overly annoying haha
ReplyDeletewould be perfect for me, if it works!
ReplyDelete+1 and following
Yep, I have the exact same problem. Deutsch is my third language. Gut post!
ReplyDeleteI don't have to worry about this at all as I can only speak english :$
ReplyDeleteHm, may try this method, I studied german for 2 years in highschool and I'm almost fluent enough to carry on some sort of conversation.
ReplyDeleteGerman is tough language for learning ,i had some lessons but i learn litle .
ReplyDeleteThe study method I used to learn spanish was pretty close to this. I concentrated more on reading books though, I found I would have to look up words every three sentences or so but it added to my vocabulary really quickly.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who wants to learn other languages but can't tolerate the classroom experience, I may have to give this a shot. Thanks for the tip.
ReplyDeleteReading foreign newspapers online works very well for me, this is how I'm improving my French and Spanish at the moment (I've got French as subject, but didn't learn very much though).. The thing is that while reading online, you are able to look up every missing word with just a few key strokes and thus increase your vocabulary very rapidly. On top of that, there is a very good online-dictionary for translations of single words from and to German for English and various other languages called leo.org that hardly does know 99% of the connotations of a word, what is like, fucking the Google-translator from behind. Don't believe it? Give it a try! ^^
ReplyDelete@VOoiJe Leo.de really is an interesting tool. I seems that it does not necessarily give the most common description of the word. It can make things a little hectic, but sometimes I wonder if that's what the creators intended. ^^
ReplyDeleteYou're right, at this point it's a bit unfunctional. But it's still a very good supplement to whatsoever. ^^
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