German – Tongue Quest

German B1 Goal Results

Today’s the day. The German B1 goal is upon me. Here are my results from a couple of online tests:

https://www.languagelevel.com/german/index.php
Result:

B1

https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/kup/tsd.html
Result:

“You have…

correctly answered 14 out of 30 questions.
incorrectly answered 1 out of 30 questions.
not answered 15 out of 30 questions.

Very good! You can handle many everyday situations in German.”

Regardless of these results, I honestly feel I have not reached B1 in German. My grasp of grammar and size of vocabulary feel a tad short (but not too far) from the B1 level. I must be somewhere in the A2 area still, but I think over recent times I must have jumped from the lower to the higher end of that. Or, perhaps, I was never A2 to begin with, and overestimated my level before.

This is a cause for celebration nonetheless! I’ve accomplished and learned a lot, and will continue. I’m not quitting until I’m fluent, and I’m still exploring routines and strategies.

For now, I won’t set another timed goal. Not yet. But soon(tm).

Wir leben noch, und deshalb muessen wir weitermachen. Gott mitt uns, yo.

A Change of Strategy: Reading, Ho!

I can’t understate the importance of breaks. I forced myself to take one last Sunday. It was hard.

So as it turns out, Glossika is pretty boring for a person in my situation. It’s not that it’s bad, in fact I’d say it’s a simple way to make daily progress without a ton of effort; it just isn’t a one-size-fits-all product. What makes or breaks progress in language learning is up to personal interests and motivations.

Boredom is a bane to learning. Avoid it at all costs. If something bores you, stay away. Don’t even so much as think about it. Escape while you still can. If you don’t, you’ll likely suffer burnout, killing your motivation and damaging your progress. This is my experience at least, and unfortunately I learned that lesson the hard way. That break I took was a direct reaction to sensing just that little spot of boredom.

I like to take a forced break one day a week. Not only does this help prevent burnout, but it builds excitement for the following day. This kind of segmentation also lets me easily work in weekly consolidation with reviews, flashcard creation, or the decision to try a new strategy/method/activity for the following week. Keep things fresh and exciting.

One could say that there are two parts to learning a language: content and methodology. Ideally, you want the content you consume to be as interesting as possible, and the methodology you use to be as fun as possible.

For my German, I’ve dropped Glossika and instead started reading a lot. It’s quite enjoyable. My new routine goes like this (rather, I aim for this):

Intensive reading (reading and translating):
- Read while translating unrecognized words as I go, each on a new line inside the translator (DeepL seems to work the best for this). Sometimes look them up in a dictionary and find sentence examples and such (time for another plug: Linguee! Great dictionary.)
- Throw all words and translations into 2 columns of a spreadsheet
- Save as “<YYYY-MM-DD> <book/chapter title>” — I can use those words any way I’d like later. Just good data to keep along the way, and I can easily measure my progress by the day, too. I know when I started and finished reading a book, and all the words by the day and in order that I translated. Keeping data is fun :^)
Extensive reading (reading without translating), perhaps with a separate book, perhaps with a book I read intensively from awhile back
Listening/watching podcasts/TV — Yay, cartoons!
Fiddle with mini projects like crafting some beautiful German spreadsheets for grammar stuff (I will defeat you yet, case/gender system!)

I do each item for anywhere from 15-30 minutes, with a minimum daily requirement of the intensive reading resulting in 50 translated words.

It’s a fairly simple process of reading and listening. Steven Kaufmann was right, it’s the best way to go. Simple, enjoyable, and effective. Those latter two go hand-in-hand, I think. I enjoy this new process much more than even using Lingq, and unlike Lingq, it’s free! Best of both worlds.

I might get into the subject of reading more deeply later — Olly Richards covers intensive vs extensive reading well on YouTube — but this update just needs to be thrown out there for the sake of recording the change on this’ere blog.

I keep saying that I’ll get into some subject or another in more detail later, and they’re starting to pile up now. That ain’t good.

Meanwhile, the challenge timer says there’s 16 days until I should have a B1 level in German. Can I do it? I think so. My grammar should be sufficient by then, too, as I’ve got some case-gender memorization cards in the making that should work beautifully.

Auf wieder…lesen? Gut genug.

Update on my German Study Routine

I’ve taken to the following process with Glossika:

I review the last day’s 100 sentences via the audios A or C
I read through the first 50 sentences (speaking aloud and visualizing as I go, very important)
Then I listen to audio A (English-German-German) for those 50 sentences, referencing the text occasionally when I miss word or sentence
I repeat steps 2 & 3 for the next 50 sentences
Finally, I listen to audio C (German) for all 100 sentences

Step 1 takes ~20 minutes, step 2 takes ~5*2 minutes, step 3 takes ~10*2 minutes, step 5 takes ~20 minutes, and we can add a 10 minute buffer in there for my lollygagging, too, making for a total of ~80 minutes.

That’s a bit longer than I had hoped it would be, — probably because I forgot to consider the last day’s reviews during my previous estimates — but keep in mind that I often play menial video games while the audio is going. You know, grindy games and the like. Nothing keeps the hands and eyes busy like classic ol’ World of Warcraft.

This is, in fact, my age-old strategy all the way back to my Swedish learning days: Play World of Warcraft and listen to audio lessons. This can have some funny effects, like my memory of the word “näsa” (nose) being tied directly to my memory of a specific instance that I was walking back up the Drag in Orgrimmar with my undead mage. …Alright, this is getting too nerdy. An interesting point is illustrated though: The game works for me like a weird form of memory palace. Not a terribly effective one, but one nonetheless.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand:

My daily German studies don’t stop there. Not because of flash cards (which I should really consider picking up again), but because of Learn German with Jenny. From what I’ve seen so far, that YouTube channel is a goldmine. The video lessons are well structured in and of themselves, and they’re ordered into playlists per CEFR level up to B2. There are so many videos covering probably every subject there is to learn! It’s like a complete curriculum. Her cadence is perfect too, and should be noted. Language learning is far easier when there are good online resources, and I’m quite thankful for her very professional-feeling videos. I’m considering working them into my daily schedule.

Language 1: German

Here we go — language #1. The adventure to true multilingualism begins.

You know what’s cool?

The German language.

You know what isn’t so cool?

Germany. Not nowadays, it isn’t.

Germany reminds me of a lot of numbers. 1914, 1933, 1984… yeah, not fun. Good luck, meine Brueder, but I don’t dream of spending much time within your borders any time soon — not too far from my thoughts on the USA, if I didn’t already live here. But hey, times change, I can only hope improvement is on its way for all nations and cultures.

So why would I learn German, then? Four reasons:

My sister wanted to, and I said “Why not?” Also, it seems everyone I know wants to or is currently learning it
Switzerland and Austria are pretty great. I’d love to visit them some day™, even live there for a time if fate would have it
The language itself is pretty great, bringing me images of fantastical castles and fairy tales and stuff :^D ! Oh yeah, and there’s a lot of history and literature that’s worth checking out, too
It’s the second most prominent international language of Europe — Very useful in the international space. I’ll run across many speakers, native or otherwise. I have already. They’re everywhere, I tells ya, everywhere!

I started learning German “seriously” some time in late January, but in recent times I’ve slowed down. But as of yesterday, I’m going at it again full force and hope to achieve fluency for the sheer sake of it in… how long? Let’s make a good estimate:

Currently, I know somewhere between 500-1000 words. We need to get this number to 3000-5000 in order to be in the realm of “learn by using” rather than “learn by studying.” This is where I want to be, naturally. I’ll get there mostly with sentence mining, and lots of it. (Details on why that is will come some other time)

To get to where I am now, I used a combination of self-made flash cards based on podcasts/books I would read and study a few times until I learned them, but in greatest part, with Lingvist. Not a bad program, that Lingvist. Perhaps I’ll review it someday. I quit using it for a reason, though. It’s too pricey, especially given it’s merciless to typos which has surely wasted too much of my time. But that’s fine, I have another method…

Glossika. Straight-to-the-point sentence mining with audio and book. Over the course of 3 levels, there are 3,000 sentences; If you learn them all, you’ll know, 2,000-3,000 words, I guesstimate. That’s close to the number of words needed to conceivably not have to consciously study any more. Each lesson covers 50 sentences, and 3 audio tracks that last under 10 minutes each. That is, one lesson only takes 30 minutes of time to read and listen to. I’ll be doing more reviews throughout the day (and following days), though.

Math time:

3,000 sentences / 30 days = 100 sentences per day
2 lessons (100 sentences) = 2 * 30 minutes = 1 hour per day

That’s approximately 2,000-3,000 words in a month — B1’s word count is ~2,000.

That’s pretty amazing and ridiculous, isn’t it? You could quite possibly learn a language to B1, not too far from fluency, in a single month. That is, if you’re consistent and smart enough about it.

This doesn’t take into account the little things like referencing grammar now and again, really setting in your vocabulary with books/audio/video, things like that. But that too could fit into another 30-minutes-to-1-hour throughout the day, really.

Now if we factor in getting past the dreaded B1-to-B2 plateau (bridging the gap from 2,000 to 4,000 words), we should add one or two more months. So… mostly-independent lower-end fluency in 2-3 months? Not as catchy as Benny Lewis’ book’s title, I’ll admit.

I have an advantage with my preexisting German progress which makes this even easier, so let’s finally put this to the test and see if my estimates are right. Here’s the plan:

I started yesterday, on March 15th, 2019
I should achieve B1 by April 15th
I should achieve B2 by May 15th

Fluent in 3 months indeed! Let’s see how this goes.

Bis morgen, meine Freunde. Ich wuensche euch Glueck (und mir auch, natuerlich. Es brauche ich wohl)

Oh, and I’d use diacritics instead of archaic German spelling, but Windows has buggy IME “functionality” and I can’t be bothered to mess with it. :^)