German lessons: Getting the right level of tuition
Friday, July 27th, 2012 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manAfter a year and a half of trying to teach myself German from a book, and learning lots of grammar and vocab but not really managing to improve my speed of parsing spoken German or of thinking in German, I started German lessons last night.
Possibly it's wrong to generalise from a single lesson, but there was no German grammar taught in the lesson. However, that's not a problem, as I can continue to teach myself that from my book. What there was was an hour and a half of listening to the teacher talk, at around the limit of the speed I can follow, and occasionally saying things myself.
At the end, the teacher asked me how happy I was with the level. (I'd previously done a short written assessment, scoring 16 out of 20, which was right at the top end of their B1.2 slot; however, I'd pointed out that as it was all written German, I probably scored considerably higher than I would have done on a spoken/aural test.)
I said I could understand about 80% of what he was saying, and about 40% of the material on the CD he played, which was way too fast for me. (Possibly I should have added that that 40% was after he played each piece three times, the third time a few sentences at a time: the first time, I understood 5%.) He said I could try out the class below if I wanted, but he thought I should probably stick with his class.
What do you think? I suppose listening to lots of German is what I'm there for, and if I dropped a class maybe I would find it too easy and not pushing at my limits. OTOH it's not worth it if I can't understand what's being said. But I could understand most of it, so maybe I should stay as I am.
Possibly it's wrong to generalise from a single lesson, but there was no German grammar taught in the lesson. However, that's not a problem, as I can continue to teach myself that from my book. What there was was an hour and a half of listening to the teacher talk, at around the limit of the speed I can follow, and occasionally saying things myself.
At the end, the teacher asked me how happy I was with the level. (I'd previously done a short written assessment, scoring 16 out of 20, which was right at the top end of their B1.2 slot; however, I'd pointed out that as it was all written German, I probably scored considerably higher than I would have done on a spoken/aural test.)
I said I could understand about 80% of what he was saying, and about 40% of the material on the CD he played, which was way too fast for me. (Possibly I should have added that that 40% was after he played each piece three times, the third time a few sentences at a time: the first time, I understood 5%.) He said I could try out the class below if I wanted, but he thought I should probably stick with his class.
What do you think? I suppose listening to lots of German is what I'm there for, and if I dropped a class maybe I would find it too easy and not pushing at my limits. OTOH it's not worth it if I can't understand what's being said. But I could understand most of it, so maybe I should stay as I am.
