RE: Learning German, advice or help appreciated!
September 8, 2015 at 1:33 pm
(This post was last modified: September 8, 2015 at 1:34 pm by I_am_not_mafia.)
I've been trying to read comics in German because it's visually appealing and keeps my interest compared to a wall of impenetrable text.
My dad is a native German but he never spoke German to me at home so unfortunately I'm having to teach myself at the age of 40. I'm currently using duolingo myself to improve my grammar. I still use memrise but I think I have enough words now (almost 5,000).
The sense of reward from learning a language comes when you use it or understand something. My theory is that children aren't actually better at learning a language, they're just not expected to know as many words and so have less to learn. So whether it's a child learning their native language or an adult learning a foreign language, a good way of learning a language is to read books and watch television where the language is very basic.
A colleague of mine is a computational linguist and when I worked with her she taught herself Swedish by borrowing another colleague's children's books and working her way up. When I had some German lessons in Munich the first thing my teacher told me to do was to buy a book. So I bought the Hobbit. There's also the Harry Potter series because they start off as children's books as well.
Having a pen-pal is also quite useful, although nowadays with the Internet you can go on discussion forums and find people to converse with.
My dad is a native German but he never spoke German to me at home so unfortunately I'm having to teach myself at the age of 40. I'm currently using duolingo myself to improve my grammar. I still use memrise but I think I have enough words now (almost 5,000).
The sense of reward from learning a language comes when you use it or understand something. My theory is that children aren't actually better at learning a language, they're just not expected to know as many words and so have less to learn. So whether it's a child learning their native language or an adult learning a foreign language, a good way of learning a language is to read books and watch television where the language is very basic.
A colleague of mine is a computational linguist and when I worked with her she taught herself Swedish by borrowing another colleague's children's books and working her way up. When I had some German lessons in Munich the first thing my teacher told me to do was to buy a book. So I bought the Hobbit. There's also the Harry Potter series because they start off as children's books as well.
Having a pen-pal is also quite useful, although nowadays with the Internet you can go on discussion forums and find people to converse with.
