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Plurals in German

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Hi all, We have been dealing with several things: Vocabulary, articles corresponding to the names, declensions, etc.. In German, plurals are not as simple as in English. It is not as simple as addin an  s . There are a few plural endings, and we must know which one goes with each word.  This seems simple but it is very easy to get confused. I believe that eventually, one should remember the plural form by just hearing it repeatedly, however, it is nice to have an aid to memorize the names together with their the plurals. I have separated all these categories in 6 plural endings. The way to do this would be the following. We will create 6 objects or figures. We will place this figures in the same location and story where we have the name. Therefore, we will be able to remember in one go, the meaning of the nouns, the gender and also its plural. Ending Association Example -n N ail polish die Lampe – die Lamp en -en Default plural der Stud
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Weeks 5 and 6: Breaking down declensions

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Hi everybody, These two weeks have been very busy at work and trying to get a journal paper ready for publication, which did not leave much time for German learning. However, I kept my habit and practiced vocabulary using Anki, as mentioned in the previous post to retain the words previously learned. The number of words in my Anki decks are increasing, but luckily, Anki is intelligent enough to ask me only for the words that I have not integrated in my vocabulary yet. That makes the whole system very efficient. In this post, I will present a few ideas regarding what I am learning given my experiences during these two weeks. Since the beginning of the stay, he company that I work for offered me two hours of German classes weekly. This is very nice, and I believe that this is an excellent push for my self-study. In there, we focus on different aspects. Listening, talking, and quite heavily on grammar, and specifically on declensions. As I mentioned in this post, I believe that t
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Weeks 4 and 5: Thoughts on article learning

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Hi! In the last post , I talked about how to memorize articles. Now, I will explain to you what has happened, and what I think can be improved. Essentially, I filled in the gender and associated each of the nouns that I had in my word list . This is not something that I find useful for people to understand you. If you get an article wrong, at least, I haven't had any problem. It is much more important that you actually know the vocabulary, which will allow to express yourself. However, we are already building more and more vocabulary as we go, so we are already covering the basics, and aim to not only be able to communicate in German. The fact is that in German, the different declensions depend on the article; if you do not learn it, then you won't get it right. To the point! Since my word list has now articles, I made an association of each of the three objects; a pitbull for masculine, a lipstick for feminine, and a baby for neutral. Two weeks after, I have learn
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Week 3: Articles

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Hi everyone, In the last posts we went through what we called 'absurd associations', which were associations that were memorable and allowed you to recover the trigger to a memory, and therefore, recall the memory, that was used to memorize a selection of the most frequent words in the German language. Last week, I talked about reviews and how to make the most of them. This week, I will get a bit more into specifics of the language, such as how to learn the correct articles (which might be different from, in my case, the Spanish ones. e.g. (ES, masculine) El sol, die Sonne (DE, feminine) - the sun). Articles In German, we have masucline, feminine, and neutrum articles. Usually, people advice to learn them together with the nouns. I believe that this will end up being like this, but I still did not have all the strategies on place. Despite, I really do not care much, at least now, if I say the article wrong, since I know that native speakers will be able to understand me
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Week 2: Fast-Reviewing in Vienna

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This week has been quite moved. After a flight cancellation, and a day later than expected, my partner and I are finally in Vienna, for at least four months. Yey! Despite having studied a little German 4 years ago (5 months), the learning and review of the most frequent words as explained in the last post has proved to be very efficient. The sensations when speaking to people have been quite positive. Of course, there is still a tone of words, grammar, and connectors which are unknown to us, yet we have at least being able to communicate without problems. Well... There was one problem. We did not know how to express the word Spicy  in a restaurant, and I personally hate spicy food!  Spicy is Scharf ,   lesson learned! In this post, however, I would like to talk about the importance of reviewing . In particular, one very powerful technique that I like to use: Spaced repetition When we memorize anything, it makes no sense to repeat the word like a parrot. It is very inefficien
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Week 1: 80/20 and most used words

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In this first post, I am going to summarize the starting point for my language learning; in fact, what I believe is a fast track for language learning. Many people try to get all the grammar right from the beginning. In my opinion, that just slows us down! We did not get the declensions right, so what? Maybe the message was transmitted anyway. “Me want buy bread”  Can you understand what is meant in this sentence? Communicating is all that matters for now. From there, we will build up. I’d like to mention “Aprende Aleman en 7 Dias” by Ramon Campayo (ISBN-10: 8408131672), one of the books that are going to be my reference in this journey. If you can read Spanish, I definitely recommend it to you. Rule of 80/20: do the 20 percent of the work, that gets 80% of the results. The rule of 80/20 tells us to do the most important things, the ones that will get us 80% of the results, and develop the skill of not paying as much attention to the small details. It does not mean that w
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A stop in Vienna

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After 4 years dedicated to my Ph.D. in London, I am moving to Viena for a short 4 months break to work in something different. This is a great opportunity for me to finally learn German. Since I am personal development and fast learning enthusiast as well as a researcher, I wanted to make an experiment out of this. I plan to use my favorite fast learning techniques and report my results here, explaining how I use them, and allowing people who is in the same path to benefit from them. If you have never heard of these techniques, my goal is to provide by-example guide on how to use them to also help you with your language learning. I love trying to be as effective as I can myself. Because of this, my personal goal is to help people learn more effectively. If I can help a single person to improve their learning, this effort would have been worth. I invite you to follow me in this journey! Happy Fast-Learning :) Talk soon!
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