German

I received an newsletter today from the university I attend, and they’re (finally!) offering a German course. It’s offered this fall, and I’ve gone ahead and signed up for it. It’s just an “elementary” German course, so I’m not really sure how much I’ll learn, but I’m still looking forward to it. At least it’ll put me in a position where I have to use the language some; while corresponding with people online in German is quite helpful (not to mention enjoyable), it’s not quite the same as talking directly to someone, face to face.

I just hope the class moves fairly quickly. If it’s really slow, I may go mad. 15 weeks of reciting basic verb conjugations does not sound fun.

I’ve written in the past about my attempt at using word lists, and if you’ve kept up with those posts, after reading this one, you’ll probably think I suffer from split personality syndrome. But, I can at least say I’m being honest here.

I’ve gone back to Using German Vocabulary and am adding words - lots of them - to Anki. No sentences; indeed, I’ve added no extra context unless it was needed with a particularly ambiguous word. The result? It’s working extremely well. I’ve added nearly the whole first chapter, which, while I can’t give an exact number, probably hovers around a total of 500-600 words. The vast majority of them are sticking in my memory quite well. Some words, particularly those that have a few siblings which are similar in form and nearly identical in meaning, have given me some headaches (Bettbezug, Bettzeug, I’m looking at you!). Overall, though, most of the words I’ve been able to memorize after a few appearances in Anki.

So, what’s different? I said before that I kept forgetting word pairs that I added to Anki, right?

Well, the difference is, I did something I should have been doing from the start: I enabled Recognition and Production cards in Anki. Previously, with all of the material I added to Anki, I was doing Recognition only - see the foreign word, think of the (often rough) equivalent in English. I’m not sure where I got the idea of leaving out production cards - I think it might have been All Japanese All The Time (but don’t quote me on that).

I’ve found this time around though, that the production stage is where you really get to prove your mettle. It’s far easier to look at a foreign word and say “yeah, I understand that perfectly!” than it is to be given a word in your native tongue and to produce a foreign equivalent.

But Why?

I used to think that learning vocabulary in context was the way to go - that is, the only way to go. I still view it in a good light, and it still makes up a large part of my language learning regimen. However, as I’ve used Using German Vocabulary, even just adding all of the words from the first chapter - out of 20! - I’ve realized just how many words in English I take for granted. You can see what I mean by skimming through the English-to-Whatever-Language-You’re-Learning section of your dictionary. I never realized how many English words I knew until I looked at how many German equivalents I needed to learn to have a decent command of the language. And by decent, I mean knowing simple words like broom and kitchen sink, words which I didn’t know until I started going through the vocabulary book.

It’s words like those that lead me to be hesitant to vouching solely for contextual vocabulary learning. I’ve read a lot of articles in German, but unless I’m reading about housecleaning or home renovation, how often am I going to see der Besen or das Spülbecken? Probably not that often at all. And yet these are words that we all pretty much take for granted - every native speaker of English knows broom and kitchen sink.

So, for me, the reason to go through the (at times boring, I’ll admit!) process of adding huge numbers of word pairs to Anki is simple efficiency. I can learn more words in an hour with this method than I’d learn in three or more hours with reading articles or books. Taking the “brute force” approach lets me cover a lot of different ground, covering all sorts of everyday words that I need to know. With most of them, with a few key words added, I can make sure I don’t get things confused due to a lack of context. For example, I recently added die Umgehungsstraße - bypass to Anki. While the Recognition portion would be easy, simply seeing bypass could be troublesome - what kind of bypass? Are we talking about heart surgery here? By simply changing it to bypass (think cars!), I avoid any stupid word confusion.

Furthermore, by using large thematic lists from a book, I avoid the issue I mentioned above: if you rely solely on articles and other reading for vocabulary, if the word doesn’t show up in something you read, you don’t know it. Period.

While I’m not going to set anything in stone at this point, if my luck with this process using the above-mentioned book continues, I may make “word hoarding” one of the first steps in approaching a new language. Inadequate vocabulary has been my number one problem with German, and I think a systematic approach like this may be the solution to said problem.

I discovered through the WordReference Forums today that the whole Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch, which consists of 32 volumes, is available for free online. The project page for this is here; the direct link to the dictionary itself is here.

The Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch is rather like the Oxford English Dictionary, except that it’s for German (obviously). I’m not sure as to how helpful it would be in actual language learning, but I’m sure it’d still be fun to dig around through. You can read more about the dictionary and its history here.

There’s a company called Champs-Elysées, which makes four different audio magazines for language learners: Champs-Elysées, Puerta del Sol, Acquerello italiano, and Schau ins Land. Each issue of the audio magazines comes with a CD or cassette tape (around an hour long), along with a small magazine. In the magazine, there is a complete transcript of the audio on the left page, with vocabulary words in bold; on the right page are the vocabulary words and definitions. Throughout the text there are endnote numbers, which refer to the back of the magazine, where lots of cultural / news information is given in English.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? They are pretty nice, I’ll admit. I had a subscription to Schau ins Land at one point (which, at the time, amounted to 5 issues per year), and quite enjoyed them.

The problem, however, is the price. For 6 issues of Schau ins Land, you’ll be paying a hefty $129. If you want the study supplements for each issue, add on another $30. Assuming you don’t want the latter, you’re still paying $129 for 6 hours of audio, along with the transcripts, the select translations, and the cultural information in the back. Considering the aim of the magazines - to help learners improve their German - while the cultural stuff in the back can be interesting, it doesn’t really add much language learning value to the package. So, one could argue that, at least in regards to language learning, you’re paying $129 for 6 hours of audio, transcripts, and translations of the trickier words.

This may have been a decent deal years ago, but in my opinion, it’s rather steep now, considering how many free, high-quality resources are online. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’d argue that Deutsche Welle’s offerings trump Schau ins Land, and Deutsche Welle is all free. They have four podcasts which all have studio-quality audio (they are, after all, made in a studio ), complete with transcripts and, in the case of one, vocabulary lists:

• Top Thema mit Vokabeln (main page; archive) - This is the one that has vocabulary lists for each article (as anyone could probably guess from the name of it ). Note: the definitions are given in German.
• Sprachbar (main page; archive)
• Alltagsdeutsch (main page; archive)
• Stichwort (main page; archive)

The Top Thema mit Vokabeln podcasts usually come out a couple times a week; they’re 2-3 minutes long each, and the archive for them goes back to April 2004. With some very rough math - an average 2.5 minutes per episode, with episodes coming out twice a week - it comes out to about 21 hours of audio. I can’t give the rough amount of time that the others total up to, as the archive pages for them are done alphabetically instead of based on date. Sprachbar and Stichwort episodes all hover around 4 minutes each; Alltagsdeutsch comes in at around 15 minutes apiece. Suffice to say, add it all up, and there is a lot of material here.

It’s really hard for me to recommend Schau ins Land to anyone when such a comparison is done. To be fair, I do think that the translations in Schau ins Land are a little better than provided with Top Thema, because they’re in English, and generally speaking, Schau ins Land provides a higher number of word translations per paragraph of text. But, I’m no stranger to looking up words in a dictionary, just as anyone else who’s understanding of German is good enough to use Schau ins Land. So for me, I suppose it comes down to: is having the transcript in a pretty little magazine with copious endnotes in the back worth $129 per year for 6 episodes?

I’m afraid I’ll have to say Nein, danke to that.

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to German lately, mostly podcasts. I’ve been listening to Alltagsdeutsch from Deutsche Welle, along with two from Annik Rubens, Slow German and Schlaflos in München. To perhaps stop other German learners from going mad with frustration, I thought I’d point something out: either the variety of stuff I’ve listened to thus far is misleading, or Annik Rubens speaks extraordinarily fast in Schlaflos in München.

For a long while, I thought it was that my ears just weren’t accustomed to normal speaking speeds; I thought I just needed more exposure to the spoken language. The more I listen though, the more I think Annik just talks really, really fast. In Alltagsdeutsch, there are often large segments in each podcast where they’ve interviewed people on the street, and I can usually understand these people just fine. While I very rarely understand the meaning of everything they say, I am at least able to understand what they’re saying, so I can look up the unknown words. With Schlaflos in München there will often be segments of each podcast that I just can’t understand at all - the words are flying by so fast I can’t pick any out, they’re just a bunch of syllables squashed together.

This, of course, is not an “attack” or any such thing on Annik Rubens. It’s her podcast, and she should be allowed, if you will, to talk however she wants. After all, she makes a specific Slow German podcast for us learners. I do think, though, that learners might find it useful to know that, in my opinion, her speaking speed is not representative of the normal speed at which Germans speak. If you listen to a few episodes of Schlaflos in München and suddenly feel as if your listening skills have taken a lunge backwards, try listening to something else. It may very well be the material, not you.

Can anyone else comment on this? Have you noticed it as well? Could a native German have a listen at Annik’s site, and let me know if I’m crazy or not?

I wrote previously about word lists vs. words in context, and said that I thought for a lot of words, context just wasn’t needed much. This is especially true of concrete nouns. A bakery is a bakery, whether you say “bakery” or “die Bäckerei,” a library is a library, whether you say “library” or “die Bibliothek.”

But…

One aspect I didn’t really think about when I was writing that post was the issue of enjoyment during study. I checked out Using German Vocabulary, which consists almost entirely of thematic word lists, with some exercises / authentic German material after each unit, from the university library. I had the intent of systematically adding all of the words in it to my SRS application, Anki. The book has a huge number of everyday words, and so I figured learning all of them would be a good thing.

Except… I’m not doing it. The book has sat on the shelf for a while now, while I’ve continued yanking whole sentences from news articles and from my monolingual German dictionary. Why? Mostly because sitting and typing in word after word into Anki isn’t a great deal of fun, whereas reading articles and slowly increasing my understanding via learning new words, is.

Maybe a dual approach is needed - use the word lists in the book as a guide as to what to learn, but look up sentences for each word via Google or my dictionary. I’m hesitant to just toss out the book (or return it to the library, more specifically), because I’ve found that if I just read news articles and what not, I end up with large holes in my vocabulary, particularly words for everyday things. I’ve not read many articles which have dealt with bookshelves, shelves, sets of shelves, etc., which are all things I recently learned the German for, via the above-mentioned book.

Certainly, though, I don’t think just cramming word lists into Anki isn’t going to work for me, at least not as a long term learning practice. It’s effective - I could learn a lot of words in a short amount of time - but only if I can bring myself to do it, which I’ve failed at. Live and learn.

I sat down a few minutes ago and flipped through a few pages of Using German Vocabulary, not really looking for anything in particular - just enjoying seeing new words, really. I landed in a section on the animal word. Looking over some of the words for animals and their associated parts, a couple of the words made me genuinely smile: das Nashorn, and der Stoßzahn.

Das Nashorn is basically “nose horn”, if you take the elements apart, and means rhinoceros. Der Stoßzahn is a little trickier. Der Stoß can mean a push, shove, punch, as well as stab or thrust. I suppose the most menacing literal translation of Stoßzahn would be stabbing tooth. To me, that has so much more character than tusk.

A little over a week ago, I went into the university library to pick up the copy of Using German Vocabulary that was waiting for me. As I work at the library as a reference assistant, the lady at the counter knows me. Seeing what book I was checking out, she asked: “Oh, do you speak German?”

Umm. Good question. One which, alas, I’m not really sure how to answer. I paused briefly, and then said, “Well, yeah, some - but.. well.. yeah.”

German is the foreign language I’ve been learning the longest, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been learning it in a from-here-to-there way - quite haphazard. And so when someone asks me, “Oh, do you speak German?”, the best I can say is “Yes, some” - which is truthful, but it certainly sounds rather lackluster, considering how many years I’ve been at it! I have an extremely difficult time gauging where exactly on the spectrum of “knowing German” I’m currently at. How far along do you have to be to be “allowed” to simply answer “Yes!” to “Do you speak [X]?”

Does anyone else have trouble with this, or am I just a peculiar one?

In poking around at the How to Learn Any Language forums, I’ve come across many good discussions on vocabulary acquisition. One of the things that the discussions usually revolve around is whether one should avoid using word lists, relying solely on items in context. For a long time, I had stuck strictly to context items, basing my usage of SuperMemo and Anki on the strategies given at antimoon.com. However, based on one of the forum member’s (Iversen) posts, I’ve been giving word-to-word cards in Anki a try, and they’re working well, depending on the type of word.

Iversen views wordlists (or simply learning L1-to-L2 and vice versa translations without context) as a stepping stone, not the end of the road. He figures (rightly, I think) that by exposing himself to the translations of words, when he encounters the words in context, he’ll either A) understand it correctly or B) have something to work with in regards to figuring out what the word does mean, if the translation he learned doesn’t work.

Furthermore, while I see the value in learning words in context, particularly verbs, with many words, the context just isn’t needed, because the usage in L2 corresponds so closely to the usage of its translation in L1. For example, do I really need context to understand der Hund (dog), die Stadt (city), der Korb (basket)? Certainly, by simply learning that der Korb means basket, I won’t be learning any idioms, but I wouldn’t be doing that anyway, even if I had a sentence with Korb in context. To learn the idiom I’d have to see it in context or look it up in a dictionary, and then add that to my SRS program.

I’m coming to see that it’s not really a matter of “words in context vs. wordlists.” Instead, I see them both as things which have their purposes along the way toward proficiency in a language. For many words, context is vital, and trying to learn the words without it is a waste of one’s time. An easy way to see this is to pull up the English-German translation of “to go.” Here’s the page for the translation at Reverso. For the vast majority of those words, you really need some context to figure out what exactly is going on.

On the other hand, for many words, context isn’t really needed. I think by obsessing over “words in context only!“, people have made it sound as if languages have no correspondences whatsoever, that if you learn the word der Hund, you better learn how it’s used. To that, I say: unless I’m missing something, dogs in German-speaking areas behave essentially like dogs everywhere else in the world. And, again, learning anything about a word in your target language, even if its a simplified idea about it which will be refined through reading and use, is better than learning nothing at all. (As can probably be gleaned from that last remark, I don’t go for the idea that making mistakes in your target language is devastating; if that were the case, no one would ever learn any foreign language decently - let alone their native tongue.)

I’ve not posted about how my language learning is going for a while now, so here’s the obligatory update.

My German is going extremely well. It’s mostly just an activity of vocabulary acquisition at this point. I’m familiar with all of the grammar, and can read most things with a bit of help from a dictionary. I’m still working on my listening comprehension, by regularly listening to German podcasts and audiobooks. I’m slowly chipping away at the German version of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.

I’ve shuffled my learning plan around some in regards to Russian. I was initially just working with the texts I have, Russian for Beginners (Duff) and New Penguin Russian Course (Brown). While I was making so-so progress with them, I felt like I wasn’t really learning how to say anything. So, I’ve added in a final element, which comes with a huge amount of audio: the Princeton Russian course. I posted about this previously, and sadly, it appears Princeton has taken the course material down. However, I downloaded it all when it was available. I’m listening to one dialogue a day, repeatedly, until I understand it in full. I’ve already found that I was overpronouncing a lot of things, in particular, the y soft sound on е, ё, etc. Despite my efforts, I’m still finding that my progress with Russian is much, much slower than my progress was when I started learning German. However, I think from listening to the dialogues regularly from the Princeton course, I’m starting to get a better feel for the language.

Finally, I’ve decided to throw another language onto my list: French. I’m using the Assimil course, New French with Ease, and am loving every minute of it. For those not familiar with Assimil, the setup of the course is thus:

You have the audio portion, and the book. The audio is all in the target language. In the book, you have a transcript of each lesson on one side of the page, and the translation on the opposite page. There are also grammar and vocabulary notes for each lesson, but these are generally kept relatively short. You go at the material in two waves: the first passive, the second active. You do the first 50 or so lessons passively, simply listening and repeateding the audio, and making sure you understand all of it. Once you’ve reached lesson 50 or thereabouts, you go back to the beginning of the book, and go through the lessons “actively”, doing the exercises and translating from English to French. While doing this, you obviously continue on with the passive phase until you reach the end of the course. I’m about 10 lessons into the course now, and I really like it. I wish I’d started learning German with the Assimil course. I’d nab the Russian course, but they don’t offer a new version, at least not with English as the base version. I guess there’s not much market right now for English-speaking people wanting to learn Russian.

I’ve been studying German for 4 years or so now, and since I began, I’ve been pounding away with alt-code keys. Alt+0220 for Ü, alt+0246 for ö, etc. I just discovered something which will save me quite a bit of time: DeKey.

It’s a custom German keymap for Windows Vista or Windows XP, which allows you to easily type letters commonly used in German, e.g.:

ü, ö, ä, ß, «, », etc.

Instead of using the alt-codes, all you have to do is hold down the Alt key and hit the corresponding letter, so:

R-alt + u = ü
R-alt + a = ä
R-alt + shift + o = Ö

You can download the installer here; instructions on how to enable the keyboard are included in the zip file.

I was wondering about something: why have I never seen the equivalent of a German Merriam Webster online?

For English, many commercial or professionally made dictionaries provide a free online version to anyone who wants to use it. The one that quickly jumps to my mind is the Merriam Webster online dictionary. For German, I’ve yet to see one - at least for native German speakers. Off the top of my head, the only German<->English dictionary that I can think of that is professionally created, available for free online, is PONS. However, there is no Langenscheidt Online, no Duden Online.
All of the other German<->English dictionaries that are online are user-created, dict.cc and dict.leo.org being the two major ones that I know of.

Are there dictionaries online for German speakers provided by German dictionary companies, or is the field a mere void? If so, I find that pretty odd.

I blogged earlier this month about listening to Schlaflos in München to work on your German listening skills. In my previous post, I neglected to mention that Annik also offers a special version of Schlaflos for learners of German, Slow German. With these, she selects a topic from one of her podcasts and does it again, except slowly (I bet you couldn’t have guessed that based on the title, huh? ). Each episode of Slow SiM (Schlaflos in München) also has a complete transcript, so you can hunt down the words you can’t quite understand while listening.

You can access all of the episodes of Slow German here, at podcast.de. You can access the latest episode, along with its associated transcript, at slowgerman.com.

I have written previously about some German podcasts I listen to, which are produced by Deutsche Welle. Those aren’t the only podcasts I listen to, though. The podcasts by Deutsche Welle, while of high production quality, are more formal than everyday speech. It’s clear listening to them that they aren’t spontaneous, but more like news articles read aloud. They’re good to learn vocabulary from, but Germans don’t really talk like that. That’s understandable; I don’t normally speak like CNN news anchors!

Schlaflos in München, however, is (I think) a better representation of how most Germans speak. Annik (the maker of the podcast) talks about all kinds of things - her cat, her life, stuff in the news. It is essentially a personal German blog, but in podcast format. However, don’t let that fool you - in making over 400 episodes of Schlaflos in München, Annik has learned how to keep the production quality high. The sound quality is great, as are all of the “extras” she edits in - funny sounds, music, clips from listeners.

Listening to her podcast is a good way to train your ear to understand “rapid fire” German, complete with emotions. Unlike the Deutsche Welle podcast folks, Annik often laughs, speaks in fake voices to imitate someone or something, speeds her speech up when she gets excited over something, etc. And let’s face it - we all do this in our native tongues. While it would make things easier for foreign language learners if everyone spoke in the same dull, unemotional voice, it’d get pretty boring.

Her podcast is also a great source of everyday vocabulary. As I wrote in this post, not all vocabulary is alike. While it’s good to know the vocabulary that news articles use, knowing that vocabulary won’t necessarily make it easier to understand natives speaking about everyday things. Some vocabulary is formal; some is informal. You need to strike a balance. Schlaflos in München will give you your dose of informal vocabulary.

So, if you’re learning German and haven’t listened to Schlaflos yet, please give it a try. I think you’ll enjoy it. If you do end up enjoying it, you’ll have plenty to keep your hands (or iPods) full. The complete archive of her show is available through iTunes. (You can also get all of her old episodes via this feed, if you’re not an iTunes user.)

… is it worth the trouble?

I’ve read in a few different places that using a monolingual dictionary which is in your target language is a good way to advance with your studies. I can certainly see the logic in it - if the dictionary is all in your target language, simply looking up a word exposes you to authentic language.

However, while that sounds great, the practicality of it is definitely in question. I can comment on this from personal experience. A few years ago, I was able to get, after much poking around online, a copy of Langenscheidt’s Großwörterbuch: Deutsch als Fremdsprache. (They have since printed a new paperback version, so while the wait is pretty bad - 4 to 6 weeks - you can get a copy of it.)

This dictionary is made specifically for learners of German, hence “Deutsch als Fremdsprache” - “German as (a) foreign language.” I got it with the hopes that I could switch to using it almost exclusively. At the time, I thought my reading level in German was at a high enough level for me to do that, at least with a dictionary that was written for learners. What I got, however, was a pretty big surprise, and what can only be called mixed success.

Certainly, some words that I looked up in my new dictionary, I would read the definition and understand it almost right away. However, with the majority of words that I wanted to look up, I ran into a fairly big problem: I didn’t know quite a few of the words used in the definition! This often led to a humorous “chase down the words” session. I’d start writing down all-German definitions on a piece of paper (or two…), just to figure out the meaning of one word. While I suppose all the reading in German could be seen as beneficial, when you’re trying to read a text and you have to stop for 30-45 minutes to figure out one word, frustration can set in. This problem could be particularly bad with words dealing with concepts instead of physical things or actions.

Of course, my problems were not with the dictionary per se - the dictionary is quite nice! - it was me that was the problem. The monolingual dictionary would have worked great if I’d known all or most of the words used in the definitions, but that just wasn’t the case.

So, the question is: is it worth using a monolingual dictionary to help you learn a foreign language, or is it too much trouble? I think my answer would have to be a yes - with some stipulations. Namely, that you use your monolingual dictionary as a supplement to a bilingual one. Certainly somewhere in your language learning career, you will probably be able to exclusively use the monolingual one. But until you’re at a fairly advanced stage in the language, I think trying to use only a monolingual dictionary is more of a headache than an aid to learning. If your experience ends up being like mine, you’ll find yourself struggling to understand many of the definitions.

Perhaps a balance could be struck, though: try to use your monolingual dictionary first, and if you find that you don’t understand a definition, only then look it up in your bilingual dictionary. Or perhaps even try to figure out the definition in your monolingual dictionary for say, 5, looking up words you don’t understand. If, after that time is up, you’ve not figured it out, whip out your bilingual dictionary.

At any rate, I do recommend getting a monolingual dictionary in your target language at some point or another - just don’t toss out your bilingual one when the monolingual one arrives.

A native German, kittyiseverywhere, commented on my May German vocabulary list, at Language Geek’s former location (languagegeek.wordpress.com). (Here is the complete vocabulary list for May.) Here’s her comment:

Hey there, some words you have on here are pretty uncommon in daily life if you still need sample sentences, I’m happy to help (I own three blogs here - you can write me under (her email address) in MSN ^^)

Her comment highlights an issue that all language learners must deal with: what words are used in everyday life, and what words are typically reserved for news articles or other registers?

Even though words might make sense in a sentence meaning-wise, they might seem peculiar, in that they don’t really fit into the context. For example, let’s look at some English adjectives that have similar meanings:

• great
• awesome
• exquisite
• marvelous

Now, all of those words, while not exact, mean similar things. Someone learning English might find it okay to use “exquisite” in a sentence, when the word they really should be using is probably “great” or “awesome.” A native speaker of English would probably recognize this issue right away, i.e., which of these sentences sounds like something you’d hear in an everyday conversation:

1. Our trip to the amusement park was exquisite / marvelous.
2. Our trip to the amusement park was great / awesome.

There’s nothing really wrong with the first sentence - a native speaker of English would understand the message being conveyed - but it still sounds pretty bizarre.

So how does one deal with this issue? How do you figure out what words a native German (or Russian or whatever) would use, and what words they’d find to be a bit odd in an everyday context? You deal with it through lots and lots of exposure to different types of language material. A language learner has to realize that the language style and vocabulary that the news site Deutsche Welle uses will be quite different from the language style and vocabulary that say, a personal German blog uses. The differences can be easily seen in your native language (English, in my case). Do I write on my blogs the same way journalists write on, say, CNN.com? BBC News? Do I use the same vocabulary? Of course not.

It’s easy to forget this, however, when learning a foreign language. A language learner can fall into the trap of seeing all foreign language material as basically “the same” - it’s in the same target language, so all of the vocabulary, styles, expressions, etc. can be used in any context. This is wrong, and you need to watch out for it. You don’t talk the same way at a rock concert as you do at a formal wedding dinner, do you?

So, when learning a foreign language, make sure you have lots of examples from various sources - both formal and informal. More formal or “reserved” examples are easily found on lots of news sites. On the other hand, with the explosion of blogs during the past few years, there are countless sources for informal language all over the internet. Reading personal blogs in particular is a good way to gain access to everyday speech in your target language. Casual podcasts in your target language are another source for everyday speech, for example, Schlaflos in München offers a huge amount of casual German speech for learners of German.

Finally, it should be noted that most decent dictionaries will tell you if a word is strictly used in informal situations or is typically offensive. In one of my German-English dictionaries, for example, many words are marked as “umgangssprachlich” (colloquial). Other words are marked as “formell” (formal), impersonal, offensive, etc. However, this is rather rare in most dictionaries, in that while these markers are applied to some words, most words have nothing of the sort. You are given the meanings of the word, and are not told whether the word is formal, informal, offensive, etc. It’s up to you to know how the word is used, and in what context. To be able to do that, you have to be exposure to various forms of the language you’re studying.

I posted back on the 14th of May that I was going to try and add 5 German words to my “to learn” vocabulary list. It now being June 1st, the list is officially complete (more on that shortly, however!)

I fell a little bit short of my goal. Since I started on the 14th, and the month ended on the 31st, I had 17 days. 5 words per day, for 17 days, should come out to 85 words total. I ended up with 72. I missed some days completely due to being swamped with other work; other days, I did far more than 5 words. All in all, I’m happy with the results. I fell a little short of my goal, but 72 words isn’t too bad. For June, I think I’m going to try and do 7 words per day.

In regards to the list being complete, it is complete, in that I won’t be adding any more words to it. However, a huge proportion of the words don’t have example sentences. I’m trying to go back and get sample sentences for all of the words, but if you want to help, that’d be great, too, particularly if you’re a native German speaker. You can drop me an email at langgeek (at) gmail (dot) com, if you want to contribute example sentences.

I just went through my vocabulary notebook and added a bunch of words to my May, 2007 vocabulary list. While a large number of the words don’t have them yet, I’m also trying to find example sentences / usages of each word, to make the list more helpful to me, as well as to others. After Kelly mentioned it, I’ve started using Google search to find example sentences. It’s actually pretty effective, and doesn’t take much time at all, at least for words that are used often in everyday speech and writing.

I’ve decided to copy (hey, at least I’m honest) edwinlaw’s plan of learning so many words per day. I’ve created a Resources page, which links to the lists I’ve worked on thus far (only one, for German, currently). I’m planning on 5 words per day, at least for the first month. I got started yesterday, but as can be seen, there’s more than 5 words on the list. During my studying of an article in German, I just kept going and going, so I decided to copy out all of the new words that I’d written down in my notebook. Starting either tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to try and learn 5 new German words per day.

Heavy Russian vocabulary learning is on hold at the moment. I’m still exposing myself to some Russian, particularly in the listening department, but I just don’t have time for a lot of active studying of it right now. College classes and German are eating up most of my time.