3 Weeks or Bust

All right. I'm ten days into my Germanic language joy and things are humming right along. Despite Thanksgiving traveling I've managed to make it through the first four units of the FSI course. (Twelve-hour train rides are great for studying.) Being half-way through three weeks of learning reminds me of my three week rule, which is that you have to keep doing a new activity for three weeks in order to stick with it. This has no scientific backing, it's based on personal experience. I'd love to find a study that supports me though.

So what does it mean to be through four intense lessons of German? According to each lesson's Finder List, which I normally call glossary, I've been exposed to about 350 words. I admit that I don't recognize all of them and I certainly couldn't summon many to mind if I were forced to. It's fair to say that I recognize about 80% of the words and could probably come up with around 50% if translating from English. Take that Rosetta Stone! I've also been exposed to 50 or so pages of relevant grammatical information. I now know the subject, object, and possessive pronouns, which is no small feat with the variations of three genders (plus the plural) and the four cases. Additionally I've picked up the variations of this, dieser and which, whelcher. I've been thoroughly exposed as well to most of the common prepositions--an, aus, von, zu, etc. though I'm having a bugger of a time remember which means what since they frequently don't correspond well to English prepositions. To give you an idea of the sentence complexity that I'm practicing, I'll copy a couple examples from the tranlation drills:

I'd like most to have a glass of beer.
Ich möchte am liebsten ein Glas Bier trinken.
-Here I'm practicing the am liebsten adverbial phrase and a two-verb phrase.

She offers him a glass of beer.
Sie bietet ihm ein Glas Bier an.
-Accusative pronoun and a split verb. anbieten -> bietet + an (prepositions like an are commonly attached to verbs. I don't know if bieten can stand alone or not as an infinitive.)

(Yes there are lot of references to alcohol and tobacco--better than the civilian uprisings in the Spanish course!)

Is that your hotel or ours?
Ist das Ihr Hotel oder unseres?
-Tricky possessive pronoun rules. Ihr is a basic stem with no ending whereas unseres is unser + es since possessive pronouns add endings when they don't normally have one and aren't accompanied by their noun (the gender and case here are neuter and subject, which applies this rule.) Switching pronouns around means changing which one gets an ending:
Is that our hotel or yours?
Ist das unser Hotel oder Ihres?

He can't get used to the climate.
Er kann sich nicht an das Klima gewöhnen.
-Litterally: He can (himself) not to the climage get used to. sich is apparently reflexive, thought the text hasn't talked about it yet (I don't like unexplained phenomena.) Sometimes the examples add in a few extra adverbs, like today (heute) or actually (eigentlich) so that translating from English to German means figuring out which one comes first and where they go relative to the object pronouns.

Other notes of progress:

Flashcards
I have a flashcard list of about 30 words, mostly fundamental adverbs like already (schon) and still (noch) and a few key adjectives like excellent (ausgezeichnet.) These are among the hardest and most important words to learn, because they are often short words and abstract concepts, so it's hard to create a mnenomic device. I haven't done a good job of practicing these, so I'm going to take some time to try to make mnemonic devices and learn them thoroughly.

Speaking
I speak plenty during my lessons, but it's time to start putting together simple sentences with my German-speaking peeps. I wish the course would teach me the informal pronouns!

Comprehension and writing
I'm avoiding comprehension outside of my course for now, because I'm not at all acclimatized to the rhythm of the language. That's changing quickly though, and I'll probably turn on a childrens' radio program soon. I'm not writing at all yet either. I should start that soon but I'm pondering fun activities for the activity.