Wikibooks

Wikibooks ist eine Bibliothek mit Lehr-, Sach- und Fachbüchern. Jeder kann und darf diese Bücher frei nutzen und bearbeiten. Unsere Lehrbücher spiegeln bereits gesichertes Wissen wider, das heißt die hier vermittelten Kenntnisse sind in ähnlicher Form in anderen tatsächlich publizierten Werken des jeweiligen Fachs bereits dargestellt.

Do take a look at the German version of Wikibooks which has offerings across a wide range of subjects including Deutsch als Fremdsprache.

I have to say that after browsing through some of the material on Wikibooks some of it is in an early stage of development. If you feel really confident about your ability to write in German you could always make a contribution to one of the books.

Vocabulary learning tips

I managed a whole week without connecting to the internet once but I did still use a computer to help with vocabulary revision. I use Teachmaster which is a free download from http://www.teachmaster.de/ (See also the earlier entry in this blog). I had copied my installation of Teachmaster onto a memory stick along with some vocabulary files so I was able to run the program straight from the stick without loading it onto the borrowed laptop that I had with me while I was away from home and office.

The vocabulary exercises I use are home made with words or phrases in English used to prompt for the German equivalent. Teachmaster uses a series of virtual card boxes (Karteikasten). Everything starts off in box 3. If your response is correct it is promoted to box 1 the first time and everytime your response is incorrect the word or phrase drops to box 5. You can choose then to work with just the vocabulary that's in the lower boxes, the aim being to promote the vocabulary one box at a time by getting it right.

What I did last week with anything that landed in box 5 was repeatedly work with it to promote it up to box 1. I realise now that this might not be the best way to learn because I was promoting the vocabulary through the boxes using short term memory. A longer interval might have been a better way of handling 'doubtful' vocabulary. Fortunately, I tested myself with the same material again the next day.

There are several methods for using the learning program and I've rather ignored some of them recently. What I probably should be doing to learn new vocabulary is use the Patience method which also gets a mention in Sebastian Leitner's Buch So lernt man lernen.

I've found it difficult to access the manual on the Teachmaster site. The English version is still "under construction" and the German pages will not load for me but I did find I had a hard copy from a previous version of the program so I'll quote an extract here.

Der Clou [die Patience-Lernmethode] besteht darin, dass die Vokabeln in einer ausgeklügelten Reihenfolge relativ häufig wiederholt werden. Ein Lerndurchgang is beendet, wenn alle Vokabeln einer Lektion alle vier Ebener durchlaufen haben.

I have used Teachmaster for many years and the one improvement I would like to see is an ability to include pictures so it could also be used to create electronic flashcards.

Maifeiertag - May Day

Heute ist Feiertag, aber nicht in Großbritannien. Wir müssen bis zum Montag warten. In Deutschland, Österreich, Teilen der Schweiz und vielen anderen Staaten ist der Maifeiertag ein gesetzlicher Feiertag.

There's a big difference between the May bank holiday on Monday in Britain where most large shops and some smaller ones remain open and the Maifeiertag in Germany today. The shops will not have opened in Germany today - Feiertage sind für Beschäftigte grundsätzlich arbeitsfrei - and there will have been no lorries on the move.

The origins of the May Day holiday are not easy to determine. Some sources refer to the seventeenth century but I have my doubts. Kalendarblatt suggests origins in the US in the nineteenth century and the German start coming in 1890 - 1.5.1890 Tag der Arbeit

May Day is still a popular time for protest marches and demonstrations. Reports from today include Zehntausende protestieren gegen Neonazi-Aufmärsche and Blockierer zwingen Neonazis zum Umdrehen. Unfortunately left and right both end up behaving violently toward the police. Demos gegen Neonazis - Steine gegen Polizisten gives more reportage and there's a video to watch.