The German Learning Challenge

Improving recall and fluency in intermediate German

[thegermanchallenge]

Last Blog Post

Guten Morgen!

Today I'm going to give a short conclusion of this Langauge Learning Challenge.

What's the overall verdict on Memrise: I would rate Memrise as a 3/5. It's a glorified set of flash cards. There is a gamified aspect of the quizzes but overall when you use the computer (iPhone) as a tutor in this instance it's not nearly as effective as when you use the computer as a tool. I found that creating my own quizzes were most effective for me, but practicing them became very repetitive and dull. It's community based nature creates a higgledy-piggledy lot of quizzes which tend to be too long and too unstructured. If it weren't for the 'create your own quiz' section I would not use this again.

Things I liked: I really enjoyed a few aspects of this Learning Challenge. One of which is hand-writing. As we depend on technology more and more we forget how useful this can be. In my recent exam I felt more prepared because I had hand-written all my practice essays, therefore when it came time for the essay, my hand was used to making those motions and I hesitated less, which is a sign that my confidence is building. Produced a 250 word essay in German with little difficulty in that exam with no translation tools, which was one of my goals. Surprisingly, I also enjoyed counting my mistakes. I usually tend to think this is too negative, but I found that it spurred me on to really think about what I was doing and strive to get it correct on the first go. I also enjoyed getting to know Leo and the Memrise website, using these two in conjunction to create quizzes was actually quite fun. The layout is good and it's easy to use.

Things to do in future: The next time I attempt something like this, I would utilise the blog more. I like the idea of having a blog that I write in German, which then asks people to correct it, i think it would make good use of the native speakers on the internet and would be a great platform to practice on. For that matter, I would also incorporate native speakers more regardless of what I were doing. Weather it be listening, reading or writing in order to get a better feel for the language. I'd also factor in something specifically to boost my confidence, as that was severely lacking this time and was a barrier to many things. Lastly, as ever, I would give myself more time. In a perfect world I would only be studying one or two subjects at a time in order to give them my full attention.

Pedagogical Intelligence I'd like to conclude by looking at the graph introduced to us in our first lecture, which has an excellent summation of gaining pedagogical intelligence in digital language learning practices.

Applying this to my Language Learning Challenge: Language Skills and Areas used: Writing and Grammar Action research cycle used: Problematise (LLCP), Plan (LLCP), Act (Memrise etc), Observe (blog), Relfect (Blog) Technologies used: Personal, Insitutional (German Workbook), Traditional & New, Smart device, Inside and outside class. Theoretical Lenses used: Learning & teaching, SLA, CALL, Affordances, LL styles, LL strategies

Overall I am happy with what I've done in such a short amount of time and found it to be relatively effective.

Okay, I habe viel Spass gehabt aber jetzt muss ich gehen. Tschuss!!

[thegermanchallenge]

I have made some changes to the old LLCP which I will attempt to briefly explain (although by track record for being brief in these blog posts isn't very reliable)

The first major change I made was to the title. Whilst listening to one of our lectures I realised that I have been using 'fluent' incorrectly. It's not in fact 'fluent' that I need to use but 'Accurate'. Fluent is less of a reachable goal (in 6 weeks anyway) and more of an overarching but never really accessible goal (how fluent can an L2 speaker really hope to be if they start learning any older than a toddler?). So I have changed my title to: Improving accuracy in Intermediate German as a result.

I also, as previously mentioned, have cut a lot of the planned activities such as Skype and Busuu use. I purposely gave myself a wide range of choices in the beginning so that I could trim it down to a more manageable size later. It didn't take me long to realise that time constraints kept me from using all the technologies and doing all the activites in my first LLCP so I let go of the speaking side (Skype). Mainly due to Skyping partners time schedules, but also in part due to my own lack of confidence.

This cull also inadvertently stopped me from working on the Indirect Learning Strategy which I needed to work on most: Social Strategies. I didn't actually realise this until now, but I think this will have to go on the 'Improvements for next time' list.

So essentially I changed my focus from Speaking & Writing to Writing & Translation.

I also scrapped the 'Blogging in German for a little bit' idea, basically due to stress, I preferred to get the blog done than spend ages writing stuff in German. I don't normally take forever to write some simple German sentences but on social media I feel like there will be a million people picking apart my translations. I do like the idea of this still though and will probably do something similar in the future.

I also didn't end up getting my German essays marked by a native speaker, I checked them myself using Google Translate for the sentence structure but a native speaker opinion would have been good. Again this was due to confidence.

I also discovered that there is not quantitative data on Memrise, so I had to improvise and create my own. I used simple tally marks whilst writing out my German sentences to make note of my correct sentences, self-corrections and mistakes, then I found percentages of this and put them into a graph.

Also, I added use of the Memrise website as it is interesting to compare two platforms of the one program and have a look at it's strengths and weaknesses via each. 

And lastly I changed the schedule from 10 minutes of Memrise a day to 60 mins a week (30 mins twice a week) as I had learnt from experience that the app worked best that way.

Stay tuned for my last blog post!

[thegermanchallenge]

Essay and Sentence Writing Proof

I was reminded on Monday that we must submit proof of our work, as Memrise has no quantitative data for me to use I have added photos of my sentence and essay writing to a drop box folder which will hopefully work via this link. They are too many and too messy to add straight to the blog. Obviously there is much much more than pictured here but this will give you and idea of what I've been doing.

Hopefully through my messy writing you can see my colour coding of grammar rules, my mistake counters, and eventually the improvements (there is less crossing out and mistakes in the later essays, the long arrows are paragraph changes)

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Week 5 & 6 Roundup

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.

Status: Not quite.

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. 

Tchuss!

[thegermanchallenge]

Some screenshots from the Memrise app. The progress bar at the top of each exercise is a useful gauge on how quickly you will finish the level. Each level only takes a couple of minutes and I've found that even if you don't remember the sentences its fairly easy to guess which sentences are which. The app starts off by giving you the sentence and the translation and sometimes an accompanying audio file. The also have these pictures called 'Mem's. You can add a Mem to a word and it's like a visual cue which can help trigger your memory. You can add your own or choose some that others have used. Although Mem's are hard to use on the app, I think they will work better online though.

Then the app tests you using four English sentences, then 6 and so on. Intermittently, a sentence structure question will come up and you have you arrange the words in the correct order. This is a great feature. It break up the multiple choice questions and makes you really think, although, as I mentioned in the blog post, this could also be improved. A good feature of this it that if you accidentally put the words in the wrong order it gives you a chance to rearrange them without being negatively affected (there is a points system but it's negligible at the moment, again, this may improve in the online version). The app will automatically mark your sentence as correct if you put the words in the right order (without you having to press enter) but if they are in the wrong order it does nothing and allows you to rearrange them, thus telling you that you are incorrect without actually telling you that you are incorrect.

As someone who takes judgement (even from computers) pretty strongly, I appreciate a system like this.

The creator of this quiz has put in some odd sentences though which, although it adds interest, isn't really what I am looking at using when speaking in German. For example, "Does God exist?" seems to open up a lot of other subjects which "Beginner" German speakers would have no idea how to speak about, let alone understand in the German language.

[thegermanchallenge]

Week 3 & 4 Roundup

Week 3 & 4 

Edit: Since writing this post I have realized that it's extremely long, so I have bolded the main point of each paragraph for easy reference.

Goal: Thoroughly understand case marking system and when each article should be changed.

Status: Yes! Achieved!

During these weeks I have been following my plan as follows:

20 mins re-writing German sentences from Workbook ( although this escalated to more like 40 mins due to the size of the exercises)

200 word essay in German based on the viewing of a German film (per fortnight)

One 30 minute viewing of part of a German film

Using Memrise (although admittedly not 10 mins per day, more like 30 mins per week)

I did not speak with a native speaker, as mentioned before this bit will be scrapped from the LLCP and the Memrise minutes will be changed.

Once I get started with Memrise I tend to want to do more than 10 minutes. But I can only do a certain amount before I get bored and start making silly mistakes.

I think my worst enemy as far as language learning goes at the moment is my other subjects. Once I do the absolute minimum I need to in order to fill the requirements of my German subject, I move onto another subject so that I don't fall behind on anything. My saving grace is the transit time I have, I take the bus to and from Uni so I try to use that time to do some extra German practice. This is why I have been using the Memrise app more so than the other technologies I first listed on my LLCP.

I am glad however that I first listed a lot of other technologies on my LLCP because this shows me what I personally find the most useful as far as learning a language goes.

On a side note I will be formally learning Irish on my exchange next semester, and at that University they have a different timetable as far as their subjects go, they split their semesters in half and study only two subjects in one half, and then a different two subjects in the second half. I am really interested to see how this effects my learning and whether only having one other subject to worry about will enable me to focus more on my language learning and enable me to spend more time on task (which, after all, is what it's all about).

So I have achieved my goal of thoroughly understanding case marking (and incidentally past, present and future tense) in German, to be honest this is more due to re-writing sentences form my German workbook than Memrise, this is simply because there aren't many quizzes on Memrise about case marking or tense marking (but that will all change next week!)

I have found that good old fashioned writing with pen and paper is technology that I just can't do without. In my German Workbook we have a few paragraphs of information that we read in German, which correlates with the Grammar that we are learning that week, then we are given about 30 sentences which we must either re-write using the new Grammar that we have learnt or sentences that we must translate from English to German (these also usually include constructions that we are learning about). These are useful by themselves. But I think for me, re-writing as opposed to re-typing is very beneficial. Writing is slower and therefore gives me more time to think about what I am writing, it's article, it's gender, it's sentence position etc. Typing also does this, but for me it's a little more "shortcut-ey". I feel like I can just take shortcuts when I type and then I end up copy and pasting any translations I get. Whereas with writing I tend to memorize it more because I read it, then transfer it physically.

Also, word-processing inevitably includes spell check and auto correct systems, which are great for writing out reports, but not so good for learning a language. I need to actually take mote of my mistakes and change them rather than have it automatically done for me.

I have been using the Memrise mobile app mostly in this fortnight. I have been using "Basic German Sentences" and "DER DIE DAS German Articles" quizzes which I found through a search of already made German Quizzes. I also have a "German Intermediate Sentences" quiz to follow the Basic German one.

So far the app works well, it's quick, has a simple interface and seems to be quite flexible. It also sends you alerts when you need to "water" your plants. It uses lots of really motivating language like "Growing short term memories" or "watering long term memories" which kind of adds a science-y feel to it and makes you feel like this app has been proven to work and that these words really are going to stick in your memory for longer.

I have found that the app gets a bit dull though, the interface, as simple as it is, is also mainly grey and uses the same exercises over and over again. the "Basic German Sentences" quiz for example has over 900 'items' in it, which means it's going to take an awful lot of bus trips to finish!

Having said that, this is a great app for learning sentences, it breaks them down into words too and asks you to put them in the correct order, which is especially useful for me. It would be even more useful if it could recognize different parts of speech, articles for example. If it could test me on a sentence but purposely add in another type of article so that I absolutely had to learn the article, instead of just choosing whichever article happened to be there, that would be very useful. Otherwise I just end up problem solving my way out of the question using a process of elimination.

I am finding that learning sentences is an excellent way of learning vocabulary, rather than just drilling myself on the words on their own I am learning both the meanings of new words and how to put them into a sentence correctly. This is very, very useful for my original goal of improving my overall fluency.

Another good thing about these sentences is that they are short, which makes them more manageable and increases my confidence in forming a good German sentence (which is my original challenge in my LLCP). This isn't so much due to the app but more due to the original author of this particular quiz.

Okay, so that's it for this post, next time I'll be looking at Memrise on a computer and making my own quizzes!

[thegermanchallenge]

Technical Issues

Okay so after some technical issues I am finally back on Tumblr! A few weeks ago I got an email from Tumblr suggesting to reset my password because there were some security issues on the site, and then the next time I tried to enter the site my login details were not working, and the time after that, and the time after that! I couldn't reset my password or even enter the site at all and I know from experience that it takes a while to get a reply from the Tumblr people. All was looking grim until a couple of days ago when my login miraculously worked! Praise the Tumblr gods! So I am back on track. In the meantime I have been writing blog material in Onenote on my computer so that I don't forget it all. Now that I am back in I will post it all up! :)

[thegermanchallenge]

Week 1 & 2 Roundup

So the first thing I have noticed is that weekly roundups aren't really my thing, I organise my life by fortnights mostly because of work rosters, so I guess it makes sense that I completely forgot to do a blog post at the end of week 1 (12th April). Also, it was my birthday on the 13th so I was taking a day off that day.

Anyway, as expected, some changes must be made to my plan.

Memrise: Going ahead as planned, although less frequently than expected, I was aiming for 10 mins a day but I seem to be doing about 30 mins in one day, once a week. Once I get into it, I don't really want to stop, and the format is such that it makes you want to finish the deck of flashcards all in one go, which takes longer than 10mins. So I'm going to run with this and try to complete two 30 minute blocks a week instead.

German Workbook: This is going well, the re-writing sentences idea is very time consuming though. I have been running through all the grammar we have learnt and re-written that out multiple time so that I have a better chance of remembering it.

Chat with native speaker: This was supposed to be 10 mins per week, unfortunately all the native speakers I have spoken to are quite busy or "habe keine lust" (they just plain don't want to) speak German. I haven't gotten onto Busuu yet though, that is where I am most likely to find eager native speakers. As mentioned before though, I may have to drop some aspects of this challenge because of time constraints and I think this may be it. I will try Busuu this week though.

Fortnightly Essays: If you remember, these are the set essays that I complete for my German class and are marked by my german teacher. It turns out these are actually not fortnightly because of exams and mid semester break, so I have completed one and received the results (which I will post shortly) and the next one will be completed by the end of next week.

German Film Viewing: This is still going ahead as planned. I really like this aspect as it is passive and it feels less like study, also I tend to get certain words and sentences from the film stuck in my head, much like a catchy song.

I think these technologies are working well for me so far, especially the film, perhaps I am more of an audial learner than I thought.

As far as evaluation goes, I have gotten feedback from my German teacher about my essay and have qualitatively evaluated my progress so far. I though memrise had a built in quantitative system but it turns out that it doesn't so I think I will use my exam scores as quantitative reference points.

I will be posting my essay feedback and some more things I have made note of about the usefulness of Memrise in the next few blog posts.

Tchuss!!

[thegermanchallenge]

I found this quite an interesting link, as I am still searching for a quantitative way to show my progress. Ideally I would like to have a large line graph which slopes upwards so I can congratulate myself on that good looking slope, but on the other hand, is it really that easy? Can knowledge be measured in numbers and pretty graphs? I think perhaps instead I should focus on my use of technology within this challenge and how useful it has been.... perhaps I can make a pretty graph about that!

[thegermanchallenge]

Some background knowledge

One of the things I've always noticed about truly understanding a subject is that you have no trouble explaining it to others. In fact, explaining it to other people generally helps me grasp the subject more firmly and feel more confident. Keeping that in mind I thought I'd give a quick overview of the areas of German which challenge me.

  Here are some brief explanations of some fairly language specific topics, in case your knowledge of German is scant:

Articles: In English these are words such as 'a' and 'the', auf Deutsch these are 'Der', 'Die', and 'Das'. Each of those articles correlates with a gender (Masculine, Feminine and Neuter) and one of these articles is used with every noun. These articles are basically randomly assigned to nouns and there is no hard and fast rules for which one goes where so German learners simply have to have a good memory.

To make matters worse, the articles change depending on the case used.

Cases: We have very few cases in English (phew! .. But not so 'phew' cause it kind of makes it harder for us to learn other languages). 'I' and 'me' are good examples of what little case systems we have: 'I' uses what's called a nominative case and 'me' uses an accusative case. Nominative case usually marks the subject of a sentence (e.g. 'I like you') and the Accusative case usually marks the direct object (e.g. I like you or You like me). In German there are many more cases for many more different parts of the clause and when the noun uses a different case then the article which correlates with it changes to a different article.

Tense: German has similar tenses to English but sometimes a change in tense can mean a change in syntax and morphology. This is an area that I need to work on to understand better. A good example is the sentence 'I drove to Brisbane' (past tense) and 'I have driven to Brisbane' (perfective) in German this would be 'Fuhr ich nach Brisbane' and 'Ich habe nach Brisbane gefahren'.  The sentences change on a syntactic and a morphological level.

[thegermanchallenge]

The Peer Review

The peer review we had last week brought up some good points and did make me re-think a few things.

One question I was asked was whether I would be focusing of casual or academic language and my answer to that would be: Semi casual. I won't be using academic language but I won't be speaking in slang either.

Another thing that came up was that I had actually forgotten to list what challenges me in my language learning and instead just wrote down my goal.This is a really good point, because knowing the challenge you face goes a long way to helping you overcome it.

  Some more things I did to my LLCP since the peer review are:

Scrapped my proposed Skype sessions: my native speaker contacts are a bit too hard to organise for a regular session and I decided to focus more on reading and writing.

I narrowed my iPhone app options from 3 to 1.

I added more quantitative measures

I re-wrote my 'technologies' table to be more personalised to me and less generic in terms of affordances and constraints.

  I am still however trying to find a more concise way of showing my progress from start to finish , I am looking for something more quantitative/visual. Perhaps something where you can see the difference.

  I will ponder that thought and get back to you.

[thegermanchallenge]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/81274493/Language%20Learning%20Challenge%20Proposal%201.1.pdf

Without further ado, I present for your viewing pleasure, my Language Learning Challenge Proposal (LLCP).

  I have incorporated the use of multiple technologies and many activities in my LLCP, I figure that if I give myself plenty of options then I can just cut them down if they don't work out for me or if I have time constraints. Also, my challenge itself is fairly broad but I would really prefer to work on my overall understanding of sentence structure and grammar rather than just work on vocabulary which can only get you so far.

  Happy reading! Hopefully that link works, I have never linked a public document before!

[thegermanchallenge]

Willkommen!

Hallo! Willkommen bei  'The German Challenge'. Ich Heisse Fabianne. Fur meine 'German Challenge' ich will meine Satzstruktur und Zungenfertigkeit sich verbessern. Aber das is nicht ein einfach Aufgabe.

  Hello! Welcome to 'The German Challenge'. My name is Fabianne. My 'German Challenge' will be to improve my sentence structure and fluency. But that is not an easy task.

 Each week, among other things, I'll post a few sentences 'auf Deutsch' and the English translation. I'll keep track of what I was unsure of and reflect from there.

 For more info on my Learning Challenge Structure and Plan see the following post!

  [Words I needed to translate: Satzstruktur, Zungenfertigkeit, sich verbessern, einfach, Aufgabe (5)]