German: update
Monday, January 28th, 2013 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manI haven't posted about my attempts to learn German for a while. When I went to spend two months in Berlin last summer, my understanding of spoken German was, after a year and a half of teaching myself from a book and accompanying CD (and recordings of all the chapters which weren't on the CD kindly made by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curious_reader) pretty execrable. I hoped that taking German lessons whilst I was out there might help that.
They didn't. My vocabulary grew a lot, but I still couldn't follow German at natural speed. My understanding of the rabbi's sermons in shul each week only grew from 5% to 15%. Written German I was much better at, as I could take however long I liked to puzzle over each sentence. (I recently tested myself on a short passage from the calendaraviva_m gave me for Chanukah, and could understand 85 out of 98 words.) But since spoken German doesn't come with subtitles (like in one of the Doctor Doolittle books), that does me no good on the streets of Berlin.
Part of the problem might have been because two hour and a half lessons a week did not constitute enough exposure to hearing and speaking German. During the daytime, I was working in the flat of an Israeli, and when her English let communication down, I tended to speak Hebrew, as my Hebrew is better than my German. (On the one hand that was bad, as it meant I wasn't practising German, but on the other, it was good, because otherwise I'm sure I'd now be unable to speak Hebrew for getting German coming out instead.) And in the evenings, it was an uphill struggle foraviva_m and I to commit to speaking German even for quite short periods.
The result of all of this was that I got disenheartened, and since I came back, I haven't learned any more German, and scarcely even practised such as I already have. I did make a brief effort to learn new vocabulary from the abovementioned calendar, but came to the conclusion that even this is counterproductive, because the more words I know, the harder it is to keep myself from forgetting them all, unless I'm constantly using them all, and I just don't have the heart to keep pouring vast amounts of time into trying to keep my German up.
Or at least I don't whenever I'm in the UK; the moment I touch German soil, I regret not being able to speak properly.
And so I've decided it doesn't seem to make much sense to put an effort into learning German until either I move to Germany, oraviva_m and I move into a place together here.
curious_reader) pretty execrable. I hoped that taking German lessons whilst I was out there might help that.They didn't. My vocabulary grew a lot, but I still couldn't follow German at natural speed. My understanding of the rabbi's sermons in shul each week only grew from 5% to 15%. Written German I was much better at, as I could take however long I liked to puzzle over each sentence. (I recently tested myself on a short passage from the calendar
aviva_m gave me for Chanukah, and could understand 85 out of 98 words.) But since spoken German doesn't come with subtitles (like in one of the Doctor Doolittle books), that does me no good on the streets of Berlin.Part of the problem might have been because two hour and a half lessons a week did not constitute enough exposure to hearing and speaking German. During the daytime, I was working in the flat of an Israeli, and when her English let communication down, I tended to speak Hebrew, as my Hebrew is better than my German. (On the one hand that was bad, as it meant I wasn't practising German, but on the other, it was good, because otherwise I'm sure I'd now be unable to speak Hebrew for getting German coming out instead.) And in the evenings, it was an uphill struggle for
aviva_m and I to commit to speaking German even for quite short periods.The result of all of this was that I got disenheartened, and since I came back, I haven't learned any more German, and scarcely even practised such as I already have. I did make a brief effort to learn new vocabulary from the abovementioned calendar, but came to the conclusion that even this is counterproductive, because the more words I know, the harder it is to keep myself from forgetting them all, unless I'm constantly using them all, and I just don't have the heart to keep pouring vast amounts of time into trying to keep my German up.
Or at least I don't whenever I'm in the UK; the moment I touch German soil, I regret not being able to speak properly.
And so I've decided it doesn't seem to make much sense to put an effort into learning German until either I move to Germany, or
aviva_m and I move into a place together here.
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Date: 2013-01-28 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-28 03:06 pm (UTC)Besides <deliberate misinterpretation> I don't hit my friends.
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Date: 2013-01-31 09:12 am (UTC)I don't get much speaking in during the day either, since I'm still working from home for a UK firm, but at least when Dirk is here he does speak to me in German quite a bit; I think in part because he is not as confident in English as maybe aviva m is.
....then there's the dialect thing...we live in Hessen and so sometimes I hear Hessisch but Dirk's parents speak Kölsch...(well, mostly German flavoured with Kölsch, but still...)
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Date: 2013-01-31 03:53 pm (UTC)Also, you're thinking about learning German in terms of building your vocabulary. Vocabulary is important, but being able to come up with the English equivalent of each German word you encounter doesn't get you all that far with actually communicating in German. I think this is why you think of yourself as "better at" written German than spoken, because (given enough time) you have a high chance of remembering or working out what each word means. But that's not a realistic goal for listening to spoken German, because people speak too fast for a new learner to be able to pick out individual words, let alone mentally look them up and find their translations.
I agree with you, it's a waste of time to keep drilling yourself on vocabulary. All you'll do with that is give yourself a slightly bigger bank of words to mentally search through, which is always going to be too slow for understanding conversational German. Instead I recommend just having some German casually in your environment. Listen to German radio stations while you're doing something else, cooking or writing emails or whatever, just to get your brain used to the sound of it. When you're in Germany, don't just tune out conversations people have around you while you're out and about, rather listen in a bit and see if you recognize anything.
Don't expect to understand most of what you hear. Just get used to the sound of German, and let your brain freewheel a bit and do its thing of being extremely good at extracting meaning out of spoken language; that's much more difficult to do consciously than if you just let it happen. So when you listen to the rabbi's sermons, don't count up how many words you recognize and feel discouraged that it's only about 1 in 6. Instead, try to work out whether she's being serious or joking, whether she's trying to convince her audience or telling them something she expects them to agree with, whether she's directly talking about the parshe or relating it to current events. That allows your brain to pick up on non-verbal cues, giving a context in which to interpret the vocabulary, and you'll learn more that way than by looking at word lists.
Absolutely the best for this is watching German language TV or films, with either English or German subtitles. Hopefully some such is available on the internet or on DVD, if you don't have access to broadcast TV. That gives you the full visual information to help give a context, and film actors tend to enunciate a bit more than just normal people in everyday conversation.
Honestly, people in general (whether they're bad at or good at languages, doesn't matter, it's just the way brains have evolved in a language-rich context) don't understand spoken language on a word by word level. Even in your own native language, it's remarkably difficult (unless you're trained) to make an accurate transcription of the words that someone says to you. Instead you just get a kind of gestalt sense of what they're saying, including all the non-verbal cues such as tone of voice, facial expression, body language etc and interpolate the general sense. If you can train yourself to do this with German, you'll make progress a whole lot faster than if you try to identify individual words and work out their equivalents in English.
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Date: 2013-01-31 06:26 pm (UTC)No, and you know what: Coming from a TV-free home myself, I completely failed to notice! (Or at least, if I ever once did, it has completely faded into the background over the course of the last three years.)
Well, she might as well now that they have brought in the compulsory TV license fee whether you have one or not.
They did? Grrr!
....then there's the dialect thing...we live in Hessen and so sometimes I hear Hessisch but Dirk's parents speak Kölsch...(well, mostly German flavoured with Kölsch, but still...)
<looks up> Gosh; I had no idea of the existence of Kölsch or other linguistic entities within Germany's boundaries distinct enough from Standard German to be called separate languages.
I'm not very good at hearing linguistic variation within German; when we went ballooning
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Date: 2013-01-31 08:58 pm (UTC)No, I'd be happy to be able to express simple ideas in German, and follow speech, picking up enough of what was said to be able to get the gist. I still don't think this is unrealistic if you either (a) have a natural aptitude, or (b) take intensive classes. How long did it take you to make reasonable progress in Swedish, and how much time were you putting into it at the time?
Also, you're thinking about learning German in terms of building your vocabulary. Vocabulary is important, but being able to come up with the English equivalent of each German word you encounter doesn't get you all that far with actually communicating in German.
I disagree. Most of the progress I made in following R. Ederberg's sermons was because I recognised more words. I appreciate that one has to start thinking in chunks of German, not individual words—I've been there and done that with Hebrew during my year off, so I know what it is I'm aiming for—but you have to start somewhere, and with no vocabulary, you can't bootstrap yourself any higher.
I recommend just having some German casually in your environment. Listen to German radio stations while you're doing something else, cooking or writing emails or whatever, just to get your brain used to the sound of it.
I told you the last time you recommended that that that wouldn't work for me, because after twenty years I still can't understand more than half of the few Hebrew-language music CDs I have. And indeed, for a while I did try listening to Radio Berlin, but it didn't make any difference, just stopped me from listening to whatever I wanted to listen to.
Don't expect to understand most of what you hear. Just get used to the sound of German, and let your brain freewheel a bit and do its thing of being extremely good at extracting meaning out of spoken language; that's much more difficult to do consciously than if you just let it happen.
Doesn't work like that for me. Understanding means concentrating, intently. If I just let go, I stop concentrating and it all washes over me as a stream of meaningless babble.
Honestly, people in general (whether they're bad at or good at languages, doesn't matter, it's just the way brains have evolved in a language-rich context) don't understand spoken language on a word by word level. Even in your own native language, it's remarkably difficult (unless you're trained) to make an accurate transcription of the words that someone says to you.
Whilst I agree with you in terms of how language understanding works, as I said above, I actually disagree with you in terms of accurate transcription. The problem most people have with transcription is that they can't take it down fast enough. But each of the Jewish learning notes I post to my blog starts life as a literal transcript of what the speaker is saying: it's easiest to take down everything at the time, and then tidy it up afterwards.
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Date: 2013-02-01 08:10 am (UTC)And, oh yeah, the dialects...In Hessen and Cologne as far as I can tell it seems to be mainly older people who mostly talk in dialect; most people do address me in relatively standard German, but in Bavaria and Vienna, I couldn't understand what locals were saying, at all. I was staying with my friend in Bavaria and I totally couldn't understand her parents. Apparently the dialect in Vienna is peculiar just to that city. (BTW though, if you go to Vienna and try to speak to them in German, they WILL reply in standard German!) I can also tell now if someone is speaking with a Bavarian or Austrian accent; they do sound quite different, almost Scandinavian. But I wouldn't be able to tell for example that Dirk has a Cologne accent.
Here's an example of Kölsch, though perhaps not the best - here Darth Vader is speaking Kölsch ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ML2krQ9zuc
Or this one from Pulp Fiction where you can hear it more clearly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lef8bou3GW0
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Date: 2013-02-01 02:44 pm (UTC)Like, when I say stop concentrating and just let the language sounds flow over you, I'm not suggesting doing that will instantly make you magically able to understand everything! You will experience it as meaningless babble at first, that's normal. The point is that you shouldn't give up after five minutes because your subconscious understanding of language falls short of being a Babelfish. You should continue putting yourself in a situation of hearing spoken German without fiercely concentrating on it for a decent chunk of time over a few weeks or months. I suggested listening to the radio while you're doing something else, or watching German language TV with subtitles, precisely because that gets round forcing yourself to be bored and frustrated with not being able to understand in the early stages.
It's very hard to compare my experience in Sweden, because I was never aiming for knowing the meaning of individual words of Swedish. I'm still pretty bad at that, really, if you tested me on a context-free vocabulary list I probably only "know" a few hundred words even now. But I quite quickly got to the point of being able to understand and make myself understood in simple conversations. By 18 months or so I was confident I was understanding most of the Swedish I encountered "in the wild", rapid conversations with people interrupting eachother, people mumbling or speaking with a strong accent, noisy environment, what have you. In terms of effort I did two 8-week sessions of classes, just a couple of times a week plus minimal homework. That helped me with the bootstrapping; I agree you can't learn a language immersively unless you have at least some basic vocabulary and grammar and syntax.
I really really do not recommend listening to German music, especially not if your aim is to pick out specific words and translate them. Music makes it considerably harder to hear individual words well enough to be able to do that. Listen to plain speech with as little background noise as possible (eg a high-brow radio station), or listen to speech where you have other cues to give you context (eg a film). Don't think the latter won't help because the former doesn't, you're comparing a reasonably easy language task with an extremely difficult task.
If it seems like spending time around German (even without concentrating intently to look for vocab you know) is taking away too much time from doing other things you want to do, that's a judgement for you to make. Doing that gives you faster progress than spending the equivalent amount of time working through a textbook (once you've got past the absolute beginner stage). Could still be the case that that's not a worthwhile trade-off for you, though.
Kölsch
Date: 2013-02-06 12:19 pm (UTC)Hah; well it was like the Bavarian I referred to above: I couldn't really hear any difference from standard German (except that I could hear they were pronouncing "ich" as [ɪʃ] rather than [ɪç]); possibly if I'd been able to understand more than 1% of what they were saying, I might have spotted more difference.