How many minutes until you're muttering in German?

Now that summer has arrived, I've been frequently wondering how many minutes I have to dedicate to my studies in order to get something to stick in my head. The most important thing is the number of days a week I do it, which should be about 5 or more. The continuity is essential. Lately I have done about five days a week and also managed to spend one-and-a-half to two hours studying each morning. I find that afterward I spend the day blurting out a couple of the words I learned. It's not that this is necessarily useful to my studies, but it is a good indicator that I'm studying enough for words to stick in my head (even if I don't remember what they mean.) I'm guessing that this muttering will start occurring with as little as a half-hour of intense study, but it probably helps to do more. How many times have you done an activity all day only to go to bed at night and see yourself doing it as soon as you close your eyes. Back when I was a kid and was a life guard, I would go to sleep and have to wake myself up to tell myself that I didn't have to watch the stupid pool that I kept dreaming about. I certainly don't need visions of German when I close my eyes or dream, but there must be some critical threshold of study that allows you to penetrate your subconscious and let something permanent in. I probably should just consult some books on the subject, but for now I'll leave it to rumination. Moo.

Words that won't lock in

As I complete the 16th lesson of the FSI German books, I am intently integrating sentence writing into the process. As I said in my previous post, my hope is that the practice will commit words to my memory and reinforce my comfort with the sentence structure. Already certain advantages are emerging--I spend a great deal of time struggling with the same nouns and verbs each day that I practice the lesson. They are mostly words that are new for that chapter, and occasionally words from previous chapters that I forgot over time. I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten the English meaning or German translation of the same words in the last few days.

Some verbs are:  

• eintreten - to occur, to arise;
• aufschieben - to delay, to put off
• sich etwas ansehen - to take a look at something
• sich lassen etwas entgehen - miss something, fail to do something

 Some nouns are:  

• die Einladung - invitation
• die Bescprechung - the conference
• die Bedeutung - the meaning, significance

Notice that all of the meanings of the words are fairly basic--not remedial--but basic. I believe it's important to be able commit them all to memory and summon them whenever I need them in speaking or writing. They challenge me, though, for various reasons. Some are rather long words with a few syllables but are similar to other words (e.g. Besprechung, Bedeutung). Some verbs are variations of common words but add reflection (sich etwas ansehen - literally, for oneself something at look.) The fact that ansehen is a variation of sehen - to see, tends to give me difficulties because I don't remember if it's ansehen, or aufsehen, or perhaps aussehen. The second turns out to mean stir, which I haven't yet encountered, and the third means to appear, to seem. This might all be perfectly logical if I had a better sense of what the prepositions mean. Of course, prepositions are often one of the hardest things to master in a foreign language because so many don't translate directly to and from English. Finally, there are some verb constructions, like sich lassen etwas entgehen, where I have to remember the reflection (sich), the helper verb (lassen - to let/leave), and the main verb entgehen (literally ent - away, gehen - go). So the whole clause might translate literally to on oneself let something away get, or simply, to miss, fail to do.

As you would imagine, it helps to write about these trouble words here and break apart their components. I would like a way to commit the words to memory after only forgetting them two or three times. I don't want to look something up 10 times and have to write a sentence with it 10 times because I've keep forgetting. I'm wondering if there is something sort of shortcut I could slip into the process, such as drawing a picture, that would commit it to my memory in fewer attempts. Given that I already have the sentence mnemonic devices for each word, it seems ill advised to also draw a picture that might confuse me further. I need to give this more thought, maybe in Chapter 17 :)

Sentences

I've been incorporating more writing into my German lessons now. Though I'm not quite writing free form sentences, I am writing down vocabulary words that I need to learn and making sentences out of them. To review, when I do the chapter dialogs I write down all the new vocabulary after I go though the dialog for learning. I now immediately write mnemonic devices for all of them (I used to wait until they came up in the drills.) Then I do the dialog for comprehension and fluency to reinforce the words I put to flash cards. At that point I haven't actually learned many of the words, unfortunately. When I do the variation and translation drills, if I can't remember one of the vocabulary words that show up (or one of the vocabulary words from previous lessons,) I'll look up the flash card to review it, then I'll write it down in a text file. So by the end of one study session I'll probably have 10 or so words written down. At the end of my study session I'll go through those words, splitting them into groups of three, and come up with sentences for each group.

The nice thing about writing sentences is not only do I reinforce the new vocabulary, but I also go back to my flash cards to look up other words that I want to use in the sentences. If I want to use a word that I haven't learned yet, I'll generally try to find a substitute, or look it up in the dictionary if it's a word worth learning. I then copy the groups of words and sentences to flash cards, putting the words on the "front" side of the card and the sentence on the "back" side. This way, if I look up a word I don't know in the future I'll see that I've already written it n number of times in the sentences. This satisfies my constant desire to know how many times I've looked up a word in the dictionary, which most electronic and Internet dictionaries sadly don't keep track of for you.

When I write the sentences I also get a lot of practice with grammatical constructs. I know some of my sentences are constructed incorrectly, but they are close to correct, and I know I have them recorded in my flash cards so I can go back and correct them as I better learn the language.

This process is slowly improving my ability to really learn the vocabulary and practice my writing. I'm still struggling with comprehension and fluency, but I have a couple techniques to improve that. First, I always try to listen to the German on the audio files without looking at the text first, unless it's the first time I'm hearing the dialog. I usually don't understand what they say, so I then read it in the book and possibly replay it a couple times. When I speak the variation drills I never look at the base sentence in the book, because I want to practice saying memorizing the structure of the sentence as I repeat them. Usually this isn't very hard. On the translation drills I only look at the English, of course, and make sure to construct a full sentence in German before looking at the book's translation.

So things are still evolving, which is no surprise. By the end of this second German book I think I'll have a very powerful learning technique. I hope I can share this technique in a comprehensible way with other users of the FSI book.