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.

The downhill slope

Sometime last month in the midst of grad school finals I came to the glorious end of the FSI German Level 1 course, having churned diligently through 12 units of Phefferkucken-thick lessons (that's gingerbread, apparently--pepper cake.) The duration of the feat was lengthy; I started the lessons in November 2008 and even went through the first couple several years prior. It's safe to say though that the small amount of flexibility offered by my grad school schedule allowed me to dedicate many a morning to the lessons over coffee and a cinnamon-chip muffin (Zimtmuffin? Yes! Verified by Google: http://www.chefkoch.de/rs/s0/zimtmuffin/Rezepte.html)

When I finished the book I quickly ordered up FSI German Level 2 and then sat back and reviewed the first. There was actually quite a bit of material that I missed the first pass through, and I chose to go over some of it. My main error of omission was a nifty extra reading at the end of the later chapters that introduced a pile of new vocabulary. I read these over and excitedly added the new words to my flashcards. More minor were the conversation and writing exercises, which I passed over with little regret. I think writing and speaking are extremely important, but I can delegate those activities to more modern activities, such as writing in German in this blog.

I've taken to libraries lately and checked out a couple German-related books. The first is the history of the German language. I read a chapter and realized it would be more appropriate when I've thoroughly studied the language, which may be never. What I was really looking for was a fun book about German, such as Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue written about English. I suppose I'll need to look for such a book in the German language. The other book is a collection of fairy tales by the brothers Grimm. I'm a few pages into Hänsel und Grethel, and I do mean a few pages. I takes me about an hour to read the tiniest of pages. I probably look up about 20 to 30 words a page. This is well above my 10 word maximum, but it's so delightful to read this familiar story in its original language. I can anticipate each line, and there's nothing like learning words of place. Forest words are especially enthralling, from woodsman to shining pebble (not really a forest word), the story lights up. I miss some of the more complex structure and idioms, but the simplicity of the story makes for a great opportunity.

I have just over 900 flash cards now, and I don't want to give the impression that I have a 1000 word vocabulary. Many of these cards are a struggle to recall. But I work on them frequently and need to dedicate more time to really studying flash card composition and learning techniques. I've finished the first lesson of the level 2 book and the vocabulary is mounting, not to mention that from Hänsel und Grethel.

Resuming until it hurts

This was written on 10/5/09 but somehow I never published it.

Oh poor little language learning blog! I've neglected you again as I had my German studies. It's understandable, since I started grad school in September and have lately figured out how to reincorporate the pastimes of my last life into this new crazy one.

I feel good about my German studies at the moment. I wasn't sure how to reprioritize it until I spoke to a couple different students in my program who speak German from extended stays there. Well that was enough to rally me back to the Küchentisch, that big wooden surface in my kitchen, and sit down with the book over breakfast. Somewhat startlingly, I keep returning to German after these little motivators. I seem good at recognizing a good opportunity when it hits me upside the face.

On a related note I had a party Saturday night for about 40 people and made my room the coat room. One of the students that showed up commented on my Hebrew alphabet chart, and wanted to know if I knew the language. After explaining my brief foray that was interrupted by German, he offered to teach me should I ever be interested. This was less of an opportunity than it might seem, since I don't really see the point in being taught until I get myself through all the FSI courses. Too many times I've painfully witnessed beginning language lessons. Much like teaching your girlfriend a little guitar, it typically doesn't lead anywhere. It's not that teaching a beginner is worthless, it's that the beginner needs to prove to themselves that they are really interested by putting in some solid hours alone before seeking out a teacher. I must have played guitar for four years before I sought out instruction. I went into Spanish cold turkey in university and it was quite painful for the duration. I'll never do that again, unless my company ships me off to live in Rangun for a year on short notice.

So here I am, feeling back in the language driver's seat. I'm continuing to apply the same techniques and finishing off the first FSI course in German. I've started listening to an all German music radio station (painful) and I'm going to try to learn to sing some basic songs, such as Eidelweiss and Hopp Hopp Hopp, Pferdchen Lauf Galopp, which is an old folk song that my grandfather used to sing to me on his knee (how cute is that?)

I'm not going to write anything tonight in German, but I'll do so in my next post and it will be awesome.

The importance of word origins

I've been reading a book about building vocabulary in English, whose title I'll post here as soon as it's back in my hand. The book's primary methodology is learning word root and prefixes of Latin and Greek to help remember and parse new vocabulary. (They also mention some other techniques like using word context and mnemonic devices.) Learning word origins is similarly applicable when learning the vocabulary of a foreign language. Unfortunately, very unfortunately, translation dictionaries don't give you the origins of words when you translate them. This is even true of the online dictionaries that should have unlimited space and be able to link to the origin of each word from its true dictionary definition. I've been scouring the wonderweb with search terms like "German word origins" but nothing really comes up. I'm sure that a full German dictionary such as Das Deutsche Wörterbuch has word origins, but I can't read well enough to make any sense of it yet. Luckily for me my target language shares many common roots with English, so often I can look up the English origin of the word. For example stattfinden means to take place. I looked up statt by itself and found that it means instead of. That led me to look up stead in English, which means the place or roll that someone or something should have or fill. I only use stead when I say "in his stead" instead of "in his place," as you probably do as well to sound clever. Anyhow, I can think of stattfinden as meaning to find in the place of which leads me to to take place. I know this is pretty basic stuff but applied to more complicated words this technique is invaluable. Of course I'm taking advantage of the common Germanic root which in Old English is stede which means place. Also the Oxford dictionary says that it comes from an Indo-European root shared by the verb to stand. Neato.

I'm slowing progressing throught the first twelve units of the FSI German course. I'm now right in the middle of unit 10, which is disappointing since I've been at it for 9 months or so. But lack of discipline and life's turmoil always slows me down. I hope in time that I can learn to value an hour of language study each day as much as a shower or cup of coffee in the morning. The key to the habit is as always motivation. I need to imagine that I will soon be attending urban planning conferences in the German speaking world and this will lovely Germanic to chit chat with afterward over beer and spätzle. I start a graduate program in urban planning in two weeks. I have no idea if that will permit me any time for language study. Vielleicht.

And a season passes

I took a break from German so that I could prepare for my trip to Spain and France, practicing those languages. Italy was hopeless. Anyhow, I'm jumping back on dem wagon now and am gonna go at it again and see what happens.