View Single Post
Old January 29th, 2014 #76
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by N.B. Forrest View Post
Good insights from someone who knows what he's talking about. I've long wanted to learn to speak/understand German, for ancestral reasons as much as Adolf reasons. I'd hoped that maybe Rosetta Stone, or one of the Pimsleur courses would cut the mustard, but apparently not.
This is what I'm saying, though: do you want to READ german or be functional in it in real life?

The first you can do, you're a smart guy. The second, you can't really learn to do without going to German or some other way immersing yourself in German, not merely passively but actively. I don't believe that interactive tapes will do the job, I've used some of them. They'll help you recognize words some, but most of it will be simply too fast.

Here's a way to do it.

1) I'd say, get a basic grammar: learn 30 lessons, or whatever it is. Do the workbook exercises. write sentences in german, even if you have no one to correct them. When I was in Germany, I studied a learn-French book for Germans - dreissig stunde franzoesich (thirty hours french). BOOM, double-threat learning! You gotta be inventive. School is so limiting, it's all one kind of thinking but there are many ways to get things done. It's similar to exercising. It's not somethigng that takes place in a GYM ore requires EQUIPMENT. there are a million ways to work out your body.

2) torrent the, say, top 50 movies in German of the 20th century. get them with English soundtrack and German subtitles. read the subtitles. and listen to the german. then maybe try all-german. so you're watching last summer at marienbad, or nosferatu or metropolis - get it coming into you all ways. watch some german porn. some german workouts, some cooking shows, some talk shows. stuff where you know what people tend to say in that particular environment, then you latch on to how germans say that stuff. shit, i wrote stuff on toilet walls in germany, and then came back, and someone would have written something making wittier of mine... i'm not kidding. i scratched "Tod dem linken Schlangen" -- Death to Left-Wing Snakes! in one stall. this was a very commie university...in marburg...philipps universitat marburg ... and i came back and someone else had written "Aber was fur schlange Linken?" which literally means what about snakey leftists, but i suspect has some sexual entendre too. I call it FOUND LEARNING, says jerry. cereal boxes, bathroom stall, porn movies, chicks in leotards on mats shows, whatever, i dont care. it all helps you SEE what these kooky deutschers are up to - THEIR way of taking the world. all people are NOT the same.

3) take some American books you've read that are no more than medium difficulty, get a copy in German. Look up every word you don't know.

that way you can learn to read and recognize german. and you know some of tones.

People who are more extroverted, more mapped onto other people, are good with FUNCTIONAL language, they pick up almost instinctively on the FEEL in languages. We who are more INTROVERTED pick up the rules and grammar and precise, book-based stuff more easily. but then in real life we get trapped trying to say things right, rather than purely focus on communication, and forget the scold in our head. people who are dumber and less self-conscious have an easier time learning functionally, i think.

As for 3), i had no tv in Germany, and my classes weren't much. I had a lot of hours to fill. I got Steven King's Christine IN GERMAN and looked up EVERY WORD i didnt recognize. there were a million marks at the start...and not many at the end. That's one good way to learn the guts of the vocabulary.

But to become truly fluent, you're not doing that off any tape, believe me. When those shitheads say you'l be speaking german...yeah, you'll be speaking the ten sentences they teach you, that' not knowing the language.

I'd say set your goal to learn to read german, and you'll accomplish that easily enough. It will be work, but it's doable. And at the end, you can read newspapers and articles on line, with some pain. But dictionaries are online too now, so you can always check.

Quote:
Also thought about watching the Mexcrement channels on cable (basically the only free foreign ones): it might be good to pick up some of the lingo - but who the hell wants to be able to talk to speeks?
Spanish is a white language. People forget that!

BTW, the point is not to speak to speeks, it's to spy on them.

Last edited by Alex Linder; January 29th, 2014 at 03:32 AM.