Goal: Have a decent knowledge of case systems and sentence structure and be comfortable forming sentences intuitively. Be able to write/speak at least 200 words without using a translator.
I have a decent knowledge of the case systems yes, but the intuitive speaking and memorizing of said case systems is less so. I think this one is going to take bit more than just a few weeks of practice.
I have been slowly enjoying my German class less and less, the content is boring, the classes are unproductive and I feel like I have been learning German in a classroom for too long. I think this contributes to my lack of success in my end goal. I feel like I would prefer to learn German somewhere where I would actually be putting my German to use outside of the classroom. This leads me to be less motivated and spend less time on task.
Nevertheless I have been making some progress. I just completed my German Translation Exam. Which consisted of 12 English sentences that I had to translate into German, making use of cases, tenses and sentence structures such as subordinate clauses etc. I am very interested to see the results of this exam, because I studied pretty hard for it.
As part of my studies I used the Memrise website and found it very very useful! I would even go so far as to recommend it to other people, in fact I'm tempted to let my tutor know that I've made vocab quizzes specific to our workbook so that students in future classes can make use of it as well.
I also made some quizzes on tense marking and case marking, but the app wasn't really designed for this so using the quizzes themselves haven't really worked out well as you can't properly see all the information. Another quiz that I have used (DER DIE DAS) seems to have a different quiz format which is better equipped for articles, this makes me think that perhaps there are different quiz structures, I have checked this out and it seems that there is something called a 'Database' o the website, which can help you personalise a quiz even more, but for now I am just going to stick with my basic courses.
Most of the learning and memorising I did was from actually making the quizzes.
I trawled through the workbook and found vocab words, then I entered these words into my favourite German dictionary site Leo, then I added the words and other grammatical features associated with them to Memrise and voila! a perfect personalised quiz.
Picture: This is a screen shot of my quiz creating, it's pretty small here but I was using 2 monitors, one for the Leo website, and the other for the Memrise quiz and I had my workbook in front of me and was choosing vocab words from there.
Not only did I learn how useful Memrise could really be, I also learnt more about the features of Leo!
I originally found Leo when I was living in Austria and all the Austrian teenagers were using it to translate words to English when they spoke to me, it's meant for a German L1 audience which really appeals to me because it's one step closer to being immersed in their culture again. As a result though, the abbreviations and charts can be hard to follow because the words used to describe things are in German. That was when I just using the app though, since using the website I have found that the abbreviations became much clearer because I could change the base language to English to get an idea of how the website worked and read the 'Search Tips' section.
I primarily used the Leo app in my German class before, but now that I have used the Leo website the app seems much more inferior.
Here's a quick comparison of the main features:
The search results in the Leo app have multiple different tables for verbs and nouns which seem to have no reason for their groupings and the audio pronunciation opens up a website which takes very long to load, so these features, although present, are again inferior to the website.
Another feature that I couldn't have done this without is the conjugation tables:
When learning German verbs, it is hard to know which auxiliary verb they will take when it comes to the past tense sentence constructions, so the best thing to do when you learn the verb is to also learn the auxiliary it takes and its other forms, this is what I have been entering into the 'Grammatical Information' column of the Memrise quiz creator and I got this information from Leo.
Although Memrise does also automatically guess the word you are trying to enter and offer words and information that other users have entered previously, I have been using these suggested entries from time to time, but I always check them with Leo because the other Memrise user may have made mistakes in their entries, so far they haven't though, which makes me feel that the app is more reliable.
Speaking of making mistakes, it seems that either my Workbook or Leo have mistakes in them, as I've found a few words that just don't correlate with each other, for example:
aureisvisen (exit visa) is written in my workbook but Leo only has an entry for ausreisvisum. And where Leseabend is written in my Workbook, Leo doesn't have any entries for this at all. I am inclined to think this may be an error on the part of my Workbook, as it is written and edited by one person, whereas Leo has millions of users and presumably is edited by many more than just one person, so mistakes seem to be less likely to occur there.
In an attempt to quantify my progress I have been marking down how many mistakes, self-corrections and completely correct sentences I have gotten whilst re-writing the exercises from my workbook. Each exercise worked on a different area of grammar and had a varying amount of sentences, here are the results:
On the X axis is the number of the exercise which roughly correlates with the weeks in this Learning Challenge, on the Y axis is the percentage of occurrences.
Looking at this chart we can see that exercise 3 and 5 were my best and exercise 6 was by far the worst. Exercise 6 was a group of translation sentences which were aimed to test all the grammatical concepts together, as opposed to the previous exercises which only tested one grammatical structure at a time. However, looking at my actual translations, it wasn't the grammatical structures that were incorrect, it was actually the small words that connect the sentences together such as 'for' and 'with' and negations which were in the wrong place. This doesn't really help with my fluency goal, but it does show me that I have grasped the grammatical structures at least.
That's enough for this post, hopefully I will get the results of my German translation exam in time to post them up here. I also have my German essay test on Tuesday so that will be interesting to see too.