Language Learning

Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaelogist who claimed to discover Troy, had to learn English in a short period of time and he made some recommendations about language learning based on that experience.

His main method was to read a lot of texts out loud without attempting translation and have a daily lesson. He wrote down details of things that particularly interested him and improved upon them with his teacher's help and learnt them by heart (auswendig lernt) and then he recited (aufsagt) his corrected piece.

Memorising was a problem at first. Mein Gedächtnis war, da ich seit meiner Kindheit gar nicht geübt hatte, schwach, doch benutze ich jeden Augenblick und stahl sogar Zeit zum Lernen.

He used to go to English church services so he could model his pronunciation on the preacher. ich ... sprach beim Anhören der Predigt jedes Wort leise für mich nach. This shadow speaking is a useful aid to language acquisition and pronunciation. We can do something similar by using recorded materials, for instance, podcasts from Deutsche Welle. It might be as well to start off with something spoken slowly but it is surprising how quickly the speed builds up. And we can do something that Schliemann could not - we can hear and shadow the same piece several times. We could even record our own voices and compare them with the sounds and rhythms of native speakers.

What I find quite incredible is Schliemann's claims about how much his memory improved. So stärkte ich allmählich mein Gedächtnis und konnte schon nach drei Monaten meinem Lehrer mit Leichtigkeit alle Tage in jeder Unterrichtstunde zwanzig gedruckte Seite englischer Prosa wörtlich hersagen, wenn ich sie vorher dreimal aufmerksam durchgelesen hatte.

No wonder he claimed he had discovered ancient Troy when he worked like a Trojan. A phrase that in German would have to be rendered as "er arbeitet wie ein Pferd". I don't suppose that has anything to do with Trojan horses!

Memorising Vocabulary

I just remembered something I meant to include in yesterday's post. Ok, it's easily sorted but reminds me I have a flaky memory. Some people manage to remember things by repeating them over and over. That doesn't really work for me. I get bored, go sleepy, lose concentration.


So how do you build up a good vocabulary (Wortschatz)? Two things have helped me. One is the sheer level of exposure to the German language through reading and listening. The downside is I hardly ever write in German so the gap between my understood and written vocabulary is probably greater than it need be. The second aid to learning has been a program called Teachmaster. You can download this free from http://www.teachmaster.de/ There are instructions and an online manual in English.

Teachmaster has an editor for you to build your own exercises by entering German words or phrases and their English equivalents - or some other pair of languages. Lessons need to be kept to a reasonable size for ease of learning - though you can have several lessons in a single file and as many files as you like. If you are revising stuff you know reasonably well then 30 word pairs per lesson would be fine but if it's new then smaller lessons make learning easier.

The other part of Teachmaster is a teaching program which presents you with the text in one language for you to enter the matching text in another. If you don't get some right first time you'll find they are repeated at the end of the exercise. Those words you don't get right are the ones that need more practice and Teachmaster has a mechanism that lets you concentrate on those if you want.

I was never very good at remember the gender of nouns but by including the definite articles with any nouns in my Teachmaster exercises I've improved enormously. At one time I tried associating genders with cutlery. Don't laugh! - der Löffel, die Gabel, das Messer. I would visualise putting things onto a table next to the spoon, fork or knife according to gender. Some people imagine a 3-storey building and associate words with a particular level. Or if you can live with gender stereotypes - associate masculine with garage or basement, feminine with kitchen and neuter with some shared space like the sitting room. Divisions of labour don't work like that in our household.

If there are things that help you memorise or free software you want to recommend then please let everyone know by leaving a comment.