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Showing posts from June, 2018

Weeks 4 and 5: Thoughts on article learning

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

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

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