Months of progress

It's been many a month since I reported my progress to this blog. But I've made noteworthy progress since then. A few months ago I finally finished the 24 lessons of the German FSI course (though I must admit I skipped the last few pages of Diplomatic cables which demonstrated a grammatical structure to which I'll revisit later.) Since then I took a little winter break and then faced my two thousand plus flashcards and tried to figure out what to do with them. The problem with a flashcard that is only designed to test you is that you quickly become tired of testing yourself. So I started making my flashcards a more complete teaching tool. Whereas previously the English side contained the english word or phrase and a mnemonic device, it now adds a sentence using the word in English. The German side, therefore, contains the German word or phrase along with the translated sentence in German. It's generally easy for me to put the translated sentences in because the FSI course has most of the dialogs and drills translated to English. All I have to do is search each German word in the two manuals (online PDFs with character recognition for search is mandatory). At the first use of the word that I find with an English translation I copy the English and German sentence and paste them into my flashcard (I just downloaded a multiple copy/paste tool PTHPasteboard for the Mac, which helps tremendously.)

I am slowly working my way through two thousand flashcards to add dual sentences to each one. Occasionally I come across a word that I didn't get from the FSI course, in which case I have to go to the Internet to find a sample sentence and possibly translate it myself (wordreference.com is a good bet for getting translated examples.) This may seem tedious, but it turns out that it's a great way to truly study my flash cards for the first time. And best of all, I'm not studying the flash cards by testing myself, which is tiresome. To enhance the sentence copying process, I today began to read the German sentence and then recite it without looking at the computer--as if I'm talking to the imaginary friend across from me. I've addressed recitation before--it seems critical for becoming familiar with the structure and pronunciation of the language.

English Side	German Side
one-and-a-half Think on the half [mnemonic device or clue] I had to stand in line an hour and c half for my ticket.	anderthalb Ich habe anderthalb Stunden für meine Karte anstehen müssen.
performance Off foolish rungs of the ladder, or ?, his climbing performance started strong Here's your program for today's performance of Tannhäuser.	die Aufführung, -en Hier ist Ihr Programm für die heutige Tannhäuser-Aufführung.

In a couple more months I will finish adding sentences to the flashcards, at which point I'll invent a new activity that gives me an excuse to go through them all. One idea that I keep flirting with is to print them all out on, gasp, paper and draw mnemonic devices on them. I haven't been using the sentence mnemonic devices as much as I hoped, so images might be more effective. I might alter the approach slightly and export the cards to a drawing program so that I can draw and paste images onto them (My flashcard app, MentalCase, already supports attaching an image and sound.) I might skip the whole flashcard printing process, though, and move on to something else.

The other German activity in which I'm currently engaged, besides watching movies and radio listening, is the Wise Guys Project. The Wise Guys Project is my effort to take a bunch of songs by the German a cappella group, the Wise Guys, and translate the German lyrics to English, in order to acquire more vocabulary and be able to sing along with the tunes when I listen to them. I love this project because it's a chance to immerse myself in the language through song, which is undoubtedly one of the most effective techniques. It also gets me used to listening to the language of modern native speakers, though a cappella is obviously artificially clear speech. There are plenty of contractions and other cheats to make the song rhythm work, which probably mirrors the spoken language to some extent.

Here's an example of a translation in process. I listen to the song part by part and practice singing it once I know what it means:

Wise Guys - Sie bricht mir das Herze

Ich habe nächtelang kein Auge zugemacht, weil ich so furchtbar aufgeregt war. Ich hab die ganze Zeit an den Moment gedacht, und jetzt ist der Moment auf einmal da... Ich hatte sie gemieden, war ihr ausgewichen und komm' doch immer wieder bei ihr angeschlichen. ich habe sie unglaublich lange nicht geseh'n, jetzt seh' ich mich hier in ihrem Zimmer steh'n.

Night after night I haven't slept a wink, because I was so terribly agitated/nervous.  I thought the whole time about the moment, and now is the moment at once since... I had you