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

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.

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.

… [T]here is one old and earthshaking secret too often forgotten about all aspects of our lives: If you work at doing something as well as you can and consistently, you are on the way to excellence. So whatever your method or technique for learning language these days, stick to it. If it fits with what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll soon be on your way.

This is great advice. I’ve found that with language learning, often, what is lacking is not the “perfect” method, but simply enough time invested. With regular study, even if it’s 10 or 15 minutes, you can see improvement in your understanding. I’ve been extremely busy with college classwork, and so my language learning time has been pretty slim. However, I’ve been able to squeeze in 10-15 minutes a day for both French and Russian; German, as my primary language target, usually gets half an hour to an hour. While I certainly won’t win any language learning races by studying an hour and a half a day, luckily, I’m not in a race; I just want to continue learning, which I’ve been doing successfully. A drop here and there will eventually fill a glass, then a bath tub, and then an ocean. I suppose language learning is similar.

So, as Geoff said: stick to it. Even if it may feel like you’re not making much progress, you probably are. Just keep adding drops to the container.

However - I have come to the rescue! Before the files disappeared, I had downloaded them all to my hard drive. I was able to contact the creator of the courses, David Freedel, and asked if he had any problem with me sharing them. He said, basically, “Nope, I don’t work at Princeton anymore - feel free to share them however you wish!”

So, I’ve created a torrent of the files. You can download the torrent here. Please note that, since I just created the torrent, I’m the only seeder - so you’ll need to be patient with the download! I’d also ask, if it’s not too inconvenient, that you please help seed the files, at least for a while, once you’ve downloaded them. That way the whole brunt of the downloads won’t be placed on my internet connection.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I screwed up the creation of the torrent, using a tracker that won’t work. I’m recreating the torrent now; I’ll post a new link soon. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE #2: Alright, here is the new torrent link. Please ignore the numbers (0 seeds, 0 leechers); I know for a fact they’re wrong. I checked the actual seeding files a few minutes ago, and there were 25 peers connected out of a total queue of 66. And I know there’s at least one seed - me.

What he does is this:

• Writes out 25 head words in the top left of a page, along with their translations and any other pertinent information (gender, special constructions, etc.)
• Waits at least 2 weeks (but no more than 2 months). He then selects 70% of the words that he remembers the least, thus “distilling” the words. In his words: “You are looking to distil out the “hard to learn” expressions and obtain a concentrated, whisky-like list of distilled words that are an absolute bugger for you to learn (by which time you will, of course, actally have learned them, because they will have gone through this distilation process ten times with two weeks’ break in between each time).”
• With that smaller list, he simply repeats the process: he waits at least 2 weeks, and then distils the list again, selecting 70% of the words that he remembered the least (or removing 30% of the words that he remembered best; same thing).
• After you’ve done this process down to the third distillation, for a number of different head word lists, you combine the third distillation lists into a new head word list. This further “concentrates” the list of words that you’ve had trouble remembering.

That is, of course, a very short overview of the process. If you’re interested in it, check out his full explanation as well as the videos.

One thing that I thought was intriguing about his process is that he says that it works best if you don’t really worry about remembering the words. When you’re writing out the words, you shouldn’t be cramming them; instead, you should just write them out slowly and neatly, enjoying the process. His explanation for this is the following:

The long-term memory is not a conscious function. Its samples are taken automatically and subconsciously out of the material which is run through the conscious. What we decide to memorise or forget only relates to short term memory. You cannot decide to learn to the long term memory any more than you can decide to forget to the long-term memory. … We banish unpleasant experience from the long-term memory and garnish pleasant experince to the long term memory.

Following that train of thought, he believes it makes little sense to suffer during vocabulary learning, because suffering won’t help you remember it; in fact, it might make it less likely to be remembered. I’m not an expert on how memory works by any means, but it’s an interesting idea. Can anyone vouch for the validity of his claim?

I do have some aversion to the system, mostly because it sounds rather clunky. I’m particularly against the idea of having multiple books to continue lists in; I can’t really say why that turns me off, but it does. Perhaps I’m thinking too far into the future with the system, and envisioning stacks and stacks of A4 notebooks all over my desk. (Not that that would be much different than the state of my desk now, but I digress.) Perhaps that is the reason I’m hesitant about the system: I’m a terribly disorganized person, and the idea of dating all of my lists, and keeping track of when a list is due to be distilled, sounds like a nightmare for me. There’s a reason I like computer programs to keep track of when a word needs to be reviewed.

The other concern I have is that using this method, I don’t think a lot of contextual information can be given easily. If you were to put a sentence with each word you want to learn, you’d need far more space than he’s allowing. Furthermore, when you distilled your list, would you copy over the example sentence again? How does one deal with words that have multiple meanings? Do you put all of the meanings under one head word and hope you know when to use which word, or do you make a separate head word for each meaning?

How does one deal with various expressions that one can build with one word? There are some words in my German dictionaries that have dozens (literally) of different expressions. Do you make a new head word for each expression, or include all of the expressions you care about under the pertinent head word?

At any rate, as I said, it’s an interesting system. I especially like how he stresses that one shouldn’t “cram” while writing the words out. Just write them out and enjoy the process; it’ll probably help you remember them.