Is vocabulary the key? by Bard7 31. May 2008
I am now learning German afetr always being terrible at languages at school, but I am encouraged by the example of Sir Paul Nurse the Nobel Prize winning scientist who failed French O Level six times. He ended up working in a field of science dominated by the French and picked up French very quickly when he started to study all the French scientiffic journals. He now regularily addresses conferences in France - in French!
I have attended an evening class in German for the last six months, but I am now only making progress in communication and understanding German, once I made a real effort to learn vocabulary. I am now up to about 400 words.
I think that the problem with most language courses, at least for language dunces like me, is that they are nearly always prepared by people who are good at languages and do not address the way people actually learn how to communicate with each other.
I have been doing something very similar to what this site does before I found the site. I prepared an Excel programme which had a list of all the words I knew and kept adding to them. I graded the words in terms of how well I knew them. Once I could remeber a word I upgraded it and then concentrated on the words I knew. I was able to randomise using an Excel function, similar to the way this site does it.
I am very pleased to find the site. Great work.
Best regards
Brad | twhite 11. Jun 2008
I have to say that overall the vocabulary is key, but it is only about 2/3 of your understanding of the language. You must at least have a minor understanding of the grammar. I suggest trying to grasp the Nominative/Dative/Accusative cases and learning some basic sentence structure. In college I found this very useful: SVTMO. Subject Verb Time Manner Object. It will help you form MANY of your sentences, the possibilities are endless. Also check out this site: http://german.about.com/library/blcase_sum.htm
Good luck!
Travis |
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