Weeks 5 and 6: Breaking down declensions
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 this might not be very important, but the teacher puts quite a lot of effort in there, and I think that it is a good chance to practice it. So if I can get the declensions in my mind (or have the table next to me), that will just be practice exercises.
What I have seen, is that we could create two categories regarding to language learning concepts. Those that allow you to express new things, and those that allow you to express things better.
Here are some examples of concepts that allow you to express new things:
In my limited study time, I'd rather put more weight in trying to express new things, and allow the other category to come on their own. Of course, that does not mean that if I do not even care about it, it will come, however, it is fine to make some mistakes here and there.
Right now, I am inputting to Anki around 100 new words per week. These words are extracted from language exchange, German classes and daily experiences. Therefore, these are the words that most frequently happen for me. I believe that if I can internalize around this number, it is a great progress in terms of being able to say new things every week. In the end, how big is one's active vocabulary? We don't really say that many different things!
Ok, having clarified the importance of learning to say new things, I am interested in why declensions are so difficult to incorporate. People say, this comes with time... But I can't help to think what do you really do over time to come? And, can you take this, understand it, and hack it to learn it faster?
Essentially, I tried to break them down into small pieces.
First, you have to know the gender of the name. Then, once you have the gender, you need to identify what grammatical case the sentence corresponds. Third, you have to add the corresponding ending to the words, when all that is known.
In the last post, we talked about how to memorize the gender, and this is still an ongoing process, from now on, every name that I memorize, I pack it with the gender as well. Secondly, there are a set of "rules" to identify what grammatical case we are in, which, sometimes seem a bit fuzzy, but sometimes there is a clear distinction. For example, when the question is "Where?", then it is Dativ for sure. For now, I haven't had time to have a close look at this, but probably in the next posts, I will go through it.
Finally, being able to declense, given the gender and grammatical case. Even if I know all of this, it took me more than 5 seconds, sometimes more than 10 to say the right endings.
Hmm.. this is not very practical. However, this might be one of these things that "come with time". I don't really like that idea, and I think that this can be accelerated, and trained with specific exercises. For example, in this post, I mentioned the indefinite article - adjective declension for the nominative case.
Well, I created a small applet to practice it. It goes like this. The program gives you an article, and adjective, and a name. To ease the process, these are the articles:
Then, as fast as possible, you have to get the endings right. If you do it a bit every day, you should, at least at the beginning be able to take this down to less than one second.
Let me know if this was helpful and what your times were.
Happy learning! :)
Marcel.
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 this might not be very important, but the teacher puts quite a lot of effort in there, and I think that it is a good chance to practice it. So if I can get the declensions in my mind (or have the table next to me), that will just be practice exercises.
What I have seen, is that we could create two categories regarding to language learning concepts. Those that allow you to express new things, and those that allow you to express things better.
Here are some examples of concepts that allow you to express new things:
- Modal verbs
- Vocabulary specific to day-to-day situations that you face. e.g. shopping
- Common and simple verbal tenses.
- Common expressions from the area. e.g. Passt shon for "no problem"
- Give directions
- etc.
And here there are some examples of things that will help to improve the fluency, but they might not be very necessary at this stage:
- Declensions
- Prepositions
- Vocabulary that is not used in a day-to-day basis.
- Different ways of saying the same thing.
- etc.
Right now, I am inputting to Anki around 100 new words per week. These words are extracted from language exchange, German classes and daily experiences. Therefore, these are the words that most frequently happen for me. I believe that if I can internalize around this number, it is a great progress in terms of being able to say new things every week. In the end, how big is one's active vocabulary? We don't really say that many different things!
Ok, having clarified the importance of learning to say new things, I am interested in why declensions are so difficult to incorporate. People say, this comes with time... But I can't help to think what do you really do over time to come? And, can you take this, understand it, and hack it to learn it faster?
Essentially, I tried to break them down into small pieces.
First, you have to know the gender of the name. Then, once you have the gender, you need to identify what grammatical case the sentence corresponds. Third, you have to add the corresponding ending to the words, when all that is known.
In the last post, we talked about how to memorize the gender, and this is still an ongoing process, from now on, every name that I memorize, I pack it with the gender as well. Secondly, there are a set of "rules" to identify what grammatical case we are in, which, sometimes seem a bit fuzzy, but sometimes there is a clear distinction. For example, when the question is "Where?", then it is Dativ for sure. For now, I haven't had time to have a close look at this, but probably in the next posts, I will go through it.
Finally, being able to declense, given the gender and grammatical case. Even if I know all of this, it took me more than 5 seconds, sometimes more than 10 to say the right endings.
Hmm.. this is not very practical. However, this might be one of these things that "come with time". I don't really like that idea, and I think that this can be accelerated, and trained with specific exercises. For example, in this post, I mentioned the indefinite article - adjective declension for the nominative case.
Well, I created a small applet to practice it. It goes like this. The program gives you an article, and adjective, and a name. To ease the process, these are the articles:
- Die Tasche
- Der Tepish
- Das Glass
- Eier
Then, as fast as possible, you have to get the endings right. If you do it a bit every day, you should, at least at the beginning be able to take this down to less than one second.
Practice the nominative indefinite article
Let me know if this was helpful and what your times were.
Happy learning! :)
Marcel.
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