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- Started German yesterday
Started German yesterday
I did a "final" review of my Italian trees (Regular, & Reverse) a couple of days ago, and started on German yesterday. This is only a refresher course, since I studied German in college - although that was over 50 years ago. As a result, I am moving pretty fast, and it is amazing what is coming back to me after all those years, even though I never really used the language. I still have the sound turned off, and it is just as well. I checked the sound on a couple of sentences, and it was horrible. I at least know how German words are pronounced.
I do not expect to go on to any other languages; I was just interested in learning Italian (and I certainly have a long way to go there), and I thought, as long as I have the opportunity, I may as well refresh the German.
I keep making the same kinds of (stupid) mistakes as I have done with the Italian - like mixing up gender, and misreading the articles. And I find the occasional mistake in duolingo, too.
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That's so great that you decided to tackle German again - wonderful! I just started too, although I'm disturbed that the pronunciation isn't quite spot on.
One site I've found that has very good pronunciation compared to DL (at least for French)?
Google Translate. Absolutely fantastic. Type something in German to be translated to English and hit the "speak" button and see what you think!
Or, you could just use the Google Translate app, called Translate.
If you think the German pronunciation is bad, try listening to the American girl on the reverse ( German to English ) tree. She's awful! I feel sorry for the English learners being exposed to this voice. Since I speak with a decent accent in German, I don't mind the German voice as much; but I wouldn't base my pronunciation on her accent.
Well, I only listened to a couple of sentences; maybe others are better. I do have trouble hearing the audio, even with my speakers turned way up. But as I said elsewhere, the audio - what little I heard there - on googletranslate sounds pretty good.
I had turned of the sound when I was doing the Italian, because too much of the time I couldn't make it out. I think it did help me a little with pronunciation, but I wouldn't want to depend on it.
Don't worry about the genders, it will come with practice (also check out some videos on Youtube, they will give you tips on remembering some of the genders but the rules don't apply to everything). One thing that kept me going, is knowing even Germans mix them up sometimes too. Deutsch ist schwer, nicht unmoglich.
Do they also mix up their pronouns? The Dative/Accusative ones at least?
I ended up meeting a German fellow a few days ago, and I must say he inspired me to learn the language. I've never really been around many German people - nor do I have prior experience with the language, but it is quite fun. Best of luck on your refresher course, and glad to hear how much progress you've made with your Italian! :-)
Hi Susanna, I finished my German tree yesterday, after over a year of doing a little of it every day.
My progress down the tree was deliberately slow (for a long time it was non-existent) while I worked mainly on either French, Italian or Spanish, but it picked up greatly once I started to use the excellent Memrise flashcards prepared by Bakpao. http://www.memrise.com/course/335725/comprehensive-german-duolingo-vocabulary/
I found that if I learned the vocab for each lesson with Memrise before doing the Duo unit, I could then concentrate on working out the language patterns. The spaced repetition you get with the Memrise system helped me keep the words in my ageing brain.
Good luck with the new tree.
I probably go much too fast; I finished the Italian tree in two months, with only a little previous exposure to the language. German is different for me though, since I already studied it in college, and a very high percentage of the vocabulary is familiar to me - even if I don't remember the meanings right off the bat. A lot of the grammar is familiar, too.
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Congratulations on so much learning and relearning! You are inspiring me to keep moving along in German.
I have also used duolingo to revise forty year old German. I remember a lot of vocabulary but rather less grammar. My children learnt German in school so I was able to help with their homework.
I have not quite finished my French tree also forty year old revision but intend to do either German or Spanish properly next. I also keep making the same mistakes mainly to do with spelling in all languages including English.
One of the mistakes I keep making in German is forgetting to capitalize the nouns. I know very well that all nouns are capitalized in German, but the Italian course wasn't picky about correct capitalization, either for Italian or English. And the German course doesn't seem to care about English capitalization, either. Otherwise, I would have already been in the habit of capitalizing when required by the rules of the languages.
I am amazed by how much I am commenting just on this one discussion, but me too! I tend to not capitalize the nouns either!
I can see why it could be confusing, but surely context would show you which it was. I'm trying to think of situations in English where something similar might apply, but, of course, when I try to think of it, my mind goes blank. Hm, there is a case I know of - not with a noun and modifier, but where a noun looks exactly like a verb. The verb is "lead" meaning to guide - the noun is "lead" - meaning a very heavy metal. They are pronounced differently but look exactly alike, and I can't imagine a context where you would mistake one for the other.
Surely you can find out by context what's meant, but if you read it wrong the first time, you have to go back and re-read the sentence once the context tells you what it's really about. There have been studies showing that you read much faster in German with correct capitalization, since your eye jumps to the important nouns. Besides, it comes across as very sloppy to ignore it, so if you want to write in German one day, it's better to train yourself now to write correctly.
(Replying to your last post). It's very true that you should learn to write correctly in a language you are learning - but shouldn't that also including capitalizing sentences? And punctuation? Quite often, not using the correct punctuation can be confusing at the best, and changing a meaning entirely at the worst.
Thing is, we DID learn how to punctuate correctly and capitalize and all, but German decided to change its rules!!!!!!!!!!!