I’ve been learning German much, much longer than French. That being the case, I know a great deal more of German. The language has become increasingly transparent to me, and most of what I work on now is listening skills and vocabulary acquisition. In the case of many of the words I learn, I have a good idea of what they mean before I look them up, quite often due to them being related to words I already know. In other words, the more German I’ve learned, the less exotic it’s become.

French, on the other hand, while I’m becoming increasingly more familiar with it via Assimil, is still quite exotic. There’s so much about the grammar that I don’t know; there’s so many basic words I don’t know. I’ve definitely left the shore, but I’ve not yet explored much of the ocean, so to say. I’m not implying that I’ve explored all of the German ocean - that would be absurd - but I’ve charted a great deal of it. With the “French ocean”, I’ve explored very little, relatively speaking.

The result of this is that I find myself clamoring to spend more time in the French ocean than in the German. I like to devote a bit of time each day to both languages, but I get more of a thrill (for lack of a better word) during my French studies. My German studies have become mundane, in a way; not boring, by any means, but different than they used to be. For example, reading a German news article, while such an act used to feel like “language learning”, now generally feels like I’m just reading the news. I note the words I don’t know and look them up, but other than that, I don’t even really have to think about it. I read the news in German like I would in English.

Has anyone else experienced this? Have you had a language lose a bit of its initial charms after having learned a lot of it?

German at college

I dropped the German class at college which I posted about previously. The professor finally added the textbook he wants to use at the online bookstore, and he ended up choosing an awful one. I checked out reviews at amazon.com, and both teachers and students hated it. The idea of slogging through a beginner’s German class with a bunch of students who hate what they’re working with… well, that doesn’t sound like much fun. The book also costs $130, which is outrageous. I’ve found excellent language learning texts for $12-$15. $130 is highway robbery.

Assimil French

I’m still slowly working through Assimil’s French course, and am up to lesson 92 in the passive wave. I’ve not been skipping days, but rather, spending more time on these last few lessons; the language in them is much more complicated than earlier lessons, and while I can understand it if I read it while listening, I’m still not able to catch everything by listening alone.

Using a digital voice recorder for language learning

I read an interesting idea yesterday about using a digital voice recorder for learning foreign languages (among other things). The original author puts it quite well, so I’ll let him speak for himself:

As I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts, I’m learning and practicing a bunch of foreign languages, so I’m using this minutes scale audiodidact to help with that by alternating the language I use every day for my 7 minute recording. Although I might lose a little in terms of profundity of thought in a foreign language, it’s a great way to actually practice speaking the language. And you have this record of your progress (at least hopefully there’s progress). My dream is that years from now I’ll be able to listen to some of my earliest recordings of me speaking Hebrew or french, contrast them with my latest, and be amazed at the progress I’ve made. We’ll see. My foreign language topics tend to be a little more mundane than my English language ones. I might just describe what I’m seeing around me in the room I’m in. I might just do a common scenario, like an introduction, talking about myself, my wife, my kid, my cats, etc. And when I listen to it I can hear what I need to work on most.

I thought this sounded like a really neat idea. Much more natural than writing out what you’d say, and, as he mentions, you have a record of what you said and how you said it. If you don’t know a word, you can just drop the English (or your native language) word in, and then look up the word later, when reviewing your recordings.

He also points out that when you’re speaking to a digital recorder, it doesn’t feel quite so weird as standing alone in your bedroom, talking to yourself. You have an audience - even if it is a piece of machinery.

I’m definitely going to give this a try.

French

I’m now on lesson 88 of Assimil’s New French with Ease. If you remember my last post about this, it’s clear I’m not doing the recommended one lesson per day. I know, I know - I’m supposed to. But in these later lessons, I’ve found that I prefer to spend more time with them, as what’s being covered in lesson 85, for example, is much more complicated than what was covered in lesson 30. I’ve also been going back and doing the active wave, mostly as the program recommends.

For the active wave, I first listen to the audio two or three times. I then read the French text as I listen to it again. Then I cover up the French and try to translate from the English back to the target language. When I stumble during this step (and I almost always do), I refer to the text again. I then recite the sentence without looking at the text. After I’ve done this with all of the lesson, I sometimes will translate from English to French again, but instead of speaking it, I’ll write it out and then check my translation against the French in the book.

This obviously takes a bit longer than what Assimil recommends for the active wave, but I’ve found that by really engaging myself with the material, rather than just doing a cursory run-by, I learn far more. I noted that in lesson 50, when the course instructed me to begin the active wave, it was stated that the active wave would “only add about 5 minutes to my daily studying.” My way takes more like 15 or 20, but, like I said - it seems more effective.

When I’m done with French with Ease, I have Using French on my shelf, waiting for me. Once I finish with French with Ease, though, I’m also going to start systematically enlarging my vocabulary. Perhaps I’ll check out Using French Vocabulary, the sister title to Using German Vocabulary, which I’ve been using for a while now.

German

There’s not a great deal to report in regards to my German learning. I’m still plugging away at Using German Vocabulary. I’m still using Anki, but I’ve also started experimenting with Iversen’s word list method. When I first read about the method in the How To Learn Any Language forums, I thought it sounded pretty awful. But after trying it, I must say - it seems to work. I’ve talked with Iversen via the forum, and I think he’s right - waiting until you “know” 5-7 words before you write the translations seems more effective than learning 1 word, writing it, learning another word, etc. I may start learning words initially with the word list method to get them into my memory, and then move them over to Anki.

I’ve largely seen success in adding word pairs to Anki, minus a few cards here and there, most of which I get wrong because they’re so similar. I’ve added context to troublesome cards, which amounts to maybe 15 or 20 cards. Considering I’ve added close to 1500 words from Using German Vocabulary, 15 or 20 troublemakers doesn’t seem too bad.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I went to the site yesterday to look up a French word, and saw that they have a German dictionary again, as well as a new Russian one. This makes it so that the site now offers translations for:

• Spanish <-> English
• French <-> English
• Italian <-> English
• German <-> English
• Russian <-> English
• A monolingual Spanish dictionary
• A Spanish synonym dictionary
• Spanish <-> French
• Spanish <-> Portuguese

Pretty cool.

For those wondering, the new German dictionary being offered is the Pocket Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (2008 version), and the Russian is the Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary (2006 version).

If that’s not your cup of tea, but you still want to try a monolingual German dictionary, you might want to check out Langenscheidt’s Großwörterbuch: Deutsch als Fremdsprache. It’s now available in paperback as well as in CD-ROM format.

Here’s a description of shadowing from Dr. Arguelles’ language study page:

This video [on the page linked above] demonstrates the proper form for using my technique of shadowing or listening to and simultaneously echoing a recording of a foreign language.

In order to shadow most effectively, it is important to observe three points:

1. Walk outdoors as swiftly as possible.
2. Maintain perfectly upright posture.
3. Articulate thoroughly in a loud, clear voice.

I’ve tried doing this with a few Assimil French lessons, and I was surprised by what I found. I did it with lessons I did quite some time ago, lessons which I felt I knew quite well. Simply reading the lessons out loud without shadowing, it felt easy. However, when I tried shadowing them, I discovered that it was far more difficult. I’d practically trip over my own tongue trying to keep up with the native speakers, struggling to say things that I thought I could say quite well.

I like the idea behind shadowing, which, if I understand Dr. Arguelles correctly, works a bit like learning to sing a song. As you listen to the audio and echo it, as long as you’re not tone deaf, you’ll automatically correct your pronunciation to match your speech with what you’re hearing. I’m well acquainted with this idea when it comes to music, as when I sing along with a song in which the singer has an accent, I copy that accent without really meaning to. Trying to force myself to sing without their accent actually feels rather weird, and I can’t do it for very long.

I’m going to keep trying the technique and see if it helps me any. Have you tried shadowing before, and if so, what were your experiences with it?

If you’re interested in the method, you might want to also check out a couple of threads at howtolearnanylanguage.com, in which Dr. Arguelles answers many questions about the method:

• How does shadowing help improve fluency?
• The original thread with the shadowing demonstration video, along with questions and answers

Once you’ve made an account, Lingro keeps track of all of the words you look up. It also maintains a list of all of the sentences that the words appeared in, which makes it all that easier to add sentence items to your SRS application (I recommend Anki).

The site also has a rudimentary flashcard system, but it really is that: rudimentary. I’ve already poked the developers to add an “export” feature.

The dictionaries themselves are all open source, meaning they’re free, and they always will be. Furthermore, they’re largely user-built, so if you hit a word that isn’t in the dictionary you’re using, add it. If you’ve ever used the German dictionary dict.cc, Lingro works more or less the same way. The definitions aren’t always as good as you’d find in a commercial dictionary, but the ease of use - click the word, get a definition - still makes it a worthwhile tool.

Lingro currently has dictionaries for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Swedish.

An example of this is that I’ve spent relatively little time in just listening to German, with no further agenda. I’ve rarely tuned in to German radio stations or listened to podcasts without the intent to make it into a lesson or study session of some sort. If I have the transcript available, as is the case with podcasts from Deutsche Welle, I’ll print it out and read it as I listen, marking words and structures I don’t recognize. If I don’t have such a transcript, I’ll listen with pen and paper in hand, ready to jot down unknown words.

I’ve done the same thing with written material. I’ve never really just read German news articles, I’ve made them into assignments: usually, I’d go through the article, underlining words I don’t know, with a sheet of paper at my side (or a document open on my computer) to put the definitions and notes on.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing this. It’s obviously beneficial to “work” with articles or other materials in your target language. But I think I’ve gone way too far with it, and need to incorporate more simple exposure - just reading and listening to the languages I want to learn, without placing any burden on myself to go further with the activity.

How do you all balance this out? Do you do a lot of listening and reading without actually “studying” the material? No vocabulary lists, no notes? If you do, how beneficial have you found it?