Learning German: Week 3
By: Keith
Last week I was trying to figure out nouns and pronouns. Well – I’m still at it, but now I think I’m making progress. After reading excerpts of advice on the subject from various grammar books I have decided that learning the Dative, Accusative, Nominative and Genitive cases is important but that it will come naturally as my ear becomes accustomed to the language. The important thing at this early stage is repetition and pronunciation. Grammar lessons can be added as I grow. There’s no need to know it all right away. Having taken the “experts’” advice on the matter, I spent the last week continuing Level 1 of the German Rosetta Stone program, which I have ¾th completed.
In addition to Rosetta Stone, I started doing the Barron’s program. Barron’s, unlike Rosetta Stone, is all about repetition. Each lesson has a grammar lesson to read, and a practice conversation that incorporates the new grammar and vocabulary. Then there are substitution drills, variation drills, translation drills and response drills. Each one has to be repeated again and again until mastery is achieved. Here’s in an example of a substitution drill:
3. Wieviel kostet der Kaffee?
a. Wein – Tee
b. Bier
c. Zigarren – Streichhölzer
d. Wein – Zigarren – Tee – Streichhölzer – Bier
4. Wie ist das Bier?
a. Wasser – Hotel – Restaurant – Café
b. Kaffee – Tee – Wein
c. Bank – Milch
d. Zigarren – Streichhölzer
e. Bier – Tee – Hotel – Wein – Wasser – Kaffee – Milch – Zigarren – Café – Bank – Streichhölzer
It goes on like that where you are supposed to substitute the vocabulary with the correct gender along with the recording. When you can do all 10 substitution exercises without error, you’re ready for the variation drills, which look like this:
Variation Drill
1. Ich Verstehe Sie
a. I understand you well. Ich verstehe Sie gut.
b. I understand you very well. Ich Verstehe Sie sehr gut.
c. I understand you well, too. Ich verstehe Sie auch gut.
d. I don’t understand you. Ich verstehe Sie nicht.
e. I don’t understand you either. Ich verstehe Sie auch nicht.
2. Verstehen Sie mich?
a. Do you understand me well? Verstehen Sie mich gut?
b. Do you understand me well, too? Verstehen Sie mich auch gut?
c. Don’t you understand me? Verstehen Sie mich nicht?
d. Don’t you understand me either? Verstehen Sie mich auch nicht?
e. Don’t you understand me well either? Verstehen Sie mich auch nicht gut?
There are 19 variation drills like that in the first chapter, which require mastery both from English to German and back again and in random order. Lastly, I’ll give you an example of the translation drills:
1. Is that the embassy? Ist das die Botschaft?
2. No, that’s not the embassy, that’s the hotel. Nein, Das ist nicht die Botschaft, das is das
Hotel.
3. The embassy is over there, to the left. Die Botschaft ist dad drüben, links.
4. How is the beer, is it good? Wie ist das Bier, ist es gut?
5. No, it’s not very good. Nein, es ist nicht sehr gut.
Anyway, there are 25 variation drills and 38 similar response drills in the first chapter. They’re all based on vocabulary and a conversation that was introduced at the beginning of the chapter. It should be obvious by looking at the drills that the primary lesson in the first week is noun genders. It’s highly repetitive, and some people might find that boring, but it has one huge advantage over Rosetta Stone that I like. After you finish with a section, you’ll know it backwards and forwards without hesitation. If someone asks you how to say I understand you or any of the variations of that, you’ll blurt it out without thinking twice. That’s the beauty of repetition. Rosetta Stone is gradual. You won’t actually be able to say anything until a few months down the road, and even then it won’t be without fear of misspeaking.
So, what do you like? Barron’s isn’t flashy, just a crappy little book and 15 CD’s. The whole program costs less than 100 bucks, but I can already tell it’s effective, if not exciting. The alternative is Rosetta Stone Software. It, too, is effective, but it takes a dramatically different approach. It’s shiny and it’s gadgety. It keeps your constant attention with games and interactivity. It works, but you’ll have to wait a while before it clicks. It also costs 800 bucks for all 5 levels. I’ve decided to use both at the same time. With time I’ll make a clearer determination as to which is ultimately more effective.
Disclaimer: Rosetta Stone sent me level one German v.4 for free to compare against the several v.3 programs that I already have and which I bought myself. I complained to them that I couldn’t get a true determination of how good the program is unless I could own all 5 German levels and I could actually use the program to become fluent in a new language. They didn’t want to send me more levels, so I decided to learn German anyway by employing a multitude of techniques. I have no loyalty to Rosetta Stone and I’m more than willing to slam them at every corner in which they deserve a beat down. Next week, I’m going to talk about their restrictive, annoying, almost impossible DRM software which has already prompted several calls to customer support even though I have only installed my programs on my own computer and nowhere else. It’s ridiculous to spend 800 dollars on a program just to have to politely ask that they allow you to F$*&@& use it!
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Rote learning (or variation drill in your case) is a toughie, Keith
. I find it very difficult even with visualisation. I have just finished memorising a reasonably long poem and started yesterday learning prose verbatim. Prose is definitely one of the hardest things to memorize for me. I am struggling through every single sentence at the moment. I tried different techniques but seem to go nowhere quickly.
But I enjoy experimenting with different mnemonic systems. It’s actually very odd that not only do many schools fail to teach learning techniques but discourage learning by heart altogether. That leaves kids only to their own devices with mediocre results.
I’m not saying everything has to be drilled into kids but a good working memory makes life much easier.
Jorg: This is not rote memorization (which I agree would be a bad idea). Barron’s uses graduated contextual learning. There are grammar lessons (not included here) that pinpoint the exact purpose of each progressive lesson as well as contextual conversations for each grammatical point. It’s not a massively huge phrase book where nothing builds on anything and the student doesn’t understand what’s being said. I was a Spanish major in college, and took a few linguistic classes along the way. Language learning methods are nothing new to me. Rote memorization, you are right, has been proven less than effective. That’s just not what the Barron’s method is. Repetition, yes, but not mindless memorization.
ops.. I didn’t have a proper look at the definition of ‘rote learning’. I confused it with ‘learning by heart’. It’s easy to make an idiot out oneself in a foreign language. That’s the risk we take