Mittwoch 2012/10/17

I haven't posted for a few days but I'm trying to kept at it.  I don't always have something to say.  I should go re-read the section in the Polyglot Project that inspired me to do this, to find out how they discovered this technique.

Anyways I think it is working at some level.  I do think more about the methods I'm using and whether or not they are really working.  It's also nice to see that I have made a lot of progress since I started in the middle of April.  I will continue to journal because I enjoy writing about my language learning adventure.

I went on a podcast blitz yesterday, like I did with books over the weekend.  I got a bunch from Deutsche Welle but not their "Deutsch, warum nicht?," one because its very slow and two its more English than German.  I prefer my input sources to be almost all in German.  However I downloaded their audio trainer podcast and its very nice.  It gives the English word/sentence and the German word/sentence twice.  The episodes are themed and mostly consist of useful phrases.  I've been going through the episodes "shadowing" the German speakers since there isn't enough time after the sentence to repeat it.  The others are just general podcasts put out by DW that are completely in German.  I hope that listening to these will improve both my listen comprehension and pronunciation.

German on the Weekend 2012/10/12-14

I'll just update what I did over the weekend.  I usually watch some dubbed cartoons on the weekend but I didn't get around to doing that this time.  I was busy building up a mt bike and visiting friends who were back from college.

Anyway I never got around to trying to shadow some podcasts.  I'm disappointed but I'm not going to let it get me down.  I did however 'read' a book.  I got a kindle last spring and I love it!  One the best things about it is finding free books in German!  I had downloaded a bunch a free 'kids' books a while back but I wasn't ready for them. So after succeeding in understanding most of this book (Very good book. Murder Mystery. Vocab at the end of every chapter. An ideal book for learning.) two weeks ago, I decided to try to read another one.  Sure I didn't understand everything but I was able to comprehend what was happening and sometimes figure out the words I didn't know through context.  Succeeding in that inspired me to go find some more.  So I did.  All I did was search "German Edition" in Amazon under Kindle books and then filtered the results since there are a ton!  Even though they are 'kids' books, they are still going to be a challenge for me.  I've been really thinking about how I'm going to build my vocab and I think reading is really going to help me.

At this point I'm not much of a speaker.  I've been in my silent period for awhile! I tend to agree more with Steve Kaufmann on this subject.  I think someone should begin speaking when they feel comfortable rather than right away.  Although for some that may be right away.  I would recommend however that one learns how the language is pronounced and listen to it a lot so that you get familiar with it and are not pronouncing incorrect in your mind when you read.

German - 2012/10/12

Played some more Pokemon (I'll most likely do this almost everyday.)  It's going well.  I like said before the conversations I have in the towns are harder for me to understand since I don't know the vocab.  Sometimes I just read through the text and don't try to figure out the meaning.  Other times I'll look up the words.  One thing that is different is that it's really hard to figure out things through context you would while watching a TV show or reading a book.  It's 2d game and most of the conversations with the NPCs are not that relevant to the game.

I also found some new music to listen to.  I enjoy electro-pop/electro-punk/eletro-swing so I looked around on teh youtubez to find some more German music to listen to, besides my staple Nena.  Found a couple bands that I'll have to check out and see if I really want to be listening to their music.

German Progress 2012/10/11

I have to remember to update this everyday.  Anyway, I'm gotten into this routine where I listen to Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten or Slow German while I eat breakfast.  I'm not reading along during this time, I'm just trying to listen to how words are pronounced.

I'm also playing through Pokemon Red in German.  It was confusing in the beginning when there was a lot of text I didn't know.  Since the sentences are short it doesn't take long to clear up the meaning by using my dictionary.  It's a really great way to help with vocab and reading.  Granted the vocab will be centered on using items, fighting/battle, etc.  I now have to trouble understand the battle text since I have seen it so many times.  I have to slow down and look up more when I get into a new town and talk to EVERYBODY!!  It's really nice though since, like I said before, the sentences are really short.

I mentioned that I was doing this to one of my friends and he said that playing Pokemon back in elementary school really helped him improve his reading skills.  I'm hoping to get the same benefit.

I'm looking forward to playing other games that are a little more text heavy and understanding the text is vital to playing the game.  Some I have in mind are Legend of Zelda, Professor Layton, various DS/GBA rpgs. 

German Progress 2012/10/9

I am working more on my listen comprehension skills by listening to Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten from Deutsche Welle while reading the transcripts.  I am also doing this with the Slow German podcast.  Do this helps me by seeing the word and listening the pronunciation.  This way I can associate what I hear with the word and helps me hear how the word is pronounced.  I will move on to the Shadowing Technique soon.    You are reading and saying the text while you are listening to it being spoken.  You try copy what the speaker is saying almost immediately. Little kids do this a lot to be annoying.  By doing this you can hear your version and the speakers version at same time and make adjustments to your pronunciation.  You have to do this with a good speaker in order to learn correct pronunciation.  Shadowing improves almost all the areas one needs to be proficient in to understand a language; reading, listening and speaking.  I guess you could combine this with writing some how to get the last area.

That's my plan!

My 'hit' list

I'm currently learning German.  However once I get to a high level I would like to take up another language(s).  The languages that I am interested in learning are (in no particular order):

• Swedish
• Hebrew
• Japanese
• ????

I'll periodically update this.

A little background part 1

Back in high school I wasn't really interested in language learning.  I took spanish and passed fine.  I really don't remember what happened my second year nor anything that I learned in the first year besides a stupid sketch about arroz con arroz con pollo.

Fast forward to college.  I had a couple German guys in one of my classes.  I studied with them a couple times.  Fast forward again.  I was looking for a summer class to fulfill a GE requirement and I found an intensive German class that met the requirement. I decided to take it, one because it was 2 weeks long and two I thought it would be cool to learn German because of the exchange students I met.  Anyway the class was pretty fun.  It was the standard classroom approach of working through a textbook, memorizing vocab and taking tests.  After I finished the classes I didn't really do anything more with what I had learned.  Well I looked for cartoons dubbed in German to watch.  That was fun and found a lot of good cartoons.  I watched them but with the wrong mindset.  I'll talk about that later.

So basically a year later I got interested again and picked up a book from the library and started to try to work through it.  Needless to say it didn't go well.  I didn't put to much time into it and got confused by the German cases.  Anyway I bought two cheap workbooks(German Made Simple and German Grammar Drills) from amazon, thinking that they would be better that the 30 year old book I was using.  I started with GMS and made it through a few chapters.  I wasn't really trying and didn't really try to learn the vocab in each chapter.  I made to about chapter 10 but couldn't understand a lot of the sentences.  I wasn't really dedicated and would do a part of chapter every once and a while.  I still watched cartoons hoping somehow I would pick up the language.  I also tried listening the Deutsche Welle Warum nicht series but it was boring and slow.

Let's fast forward a little more (about five months).  We did a lot of fast forwarding.  Anyway I saw a post on Lifehacker about learning languages which really inspired me to refocus and try again.  I started to look more into how people learn languages and discovered that there is not one correct way.  It really depends on your own learning style.  In this search I discovered Steve Kaufman and some other youtube polyglots.  I really liked Steve's input based method and started practicing my own version of it, with cartoons of course but with a different mind set this time.  I also found some Steven Krashen's papers on second language acquisition.  His ideas were very fascinating to me.  He basically says the keys to language acquisition are constant comprehensible input at an n+1 level in a low stress/anxiety environment.  Everything that I was reading had me very excited about language learning.  

Hallo

I'm starting this blog to journal my adventures and progress in learning languages.  The idea to do this came from one of the stories I read in the Polyglot Project book.  The purpose behind the journaling is to kept track of what you've accomplish so that you know that you are making improvement.  Also you can kept track of what methods you are using to learn languages.  You can then use your progress to determine whether or not the method you are using works.  If works for you then you can continue using it but if it doesn't then you can stop. 

I think this will be a good exercise for me and should hopefully help me improve my learning skills.  So like I said up there, I'll be documenting my progress and methods but I'll also post snippets in my target language to help me with my writing, videos/audio for pronunciation, and any other cool things I do with languages.