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How to make the most of your textbook | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| crazyleseratte Pentaglot Newbie Germany crazyleseratte.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3764 days ago 26 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English, German*, Spanish, French, Italian Studies: Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian | Message 1 of 11 14 May 2015 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I could not find anything specific on that topic, and I have been struggling with my
textbooks for a while, so I would like to ask for your advice. I have different material, mostly several books for my languages - I mostly use German or English textbooks like Teach yourself or Langenscheidt. Up to now, I have been learning everything in the books, doing every exercise and now I feel a bit stuck. I do have a couple of languages, where I can have a conversation, watch a movie or read and appreciate a book. However, there are others like Danish, where I really do have trouble. I really do not know how to approach my book (which is a German course called Langenscheidt mit System) to actually learn something. I understand almost nothing, and cannot remember the vocabulary. I have worked my way through the grammar sections, mostly by reading and rereading. I have done all the exercises so far, and I have entered the vocabulary both in anki and partially in my old flashcardsystem (which involves actual paper). Now I read, that some of you go through a textbook or more than one textbooks within one week, and later focus on grammar using a reference book. I also read, that some of you cover 7 lessons each day, and I cannot imagine how to go through a book that quickly. I feel terribly stuck: When I do not understand, I tend to jump back; the same thing goes for when I had a longer pause. I will not go back to where I was, but I will rather start over, which causes frustration; I tend to almost never reach the good stuff (television, books) in most of my languages, as I have the feeling that I need to know each page in my textbook by heart. Any advice would be highly appreciated! Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5064 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 11 14 May 2015 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to the forum, crazylesaratte! Hmmmm,how did you learn your other four languages if you have so much trouble with textbooks? Some background would be helpful.
In the meantime, I think part of your problem lies here: Not all courses are created equal. As an English-speaker, I know nothing of the Langenscheidt courses. I do know that some learn German just to be able to use German resources for languages and that Langenscheidt is highly regarded. The courses may be too focused on grammar and in that case, perhaps you need to supplement them with an audio course or a "grammar-light" course like Assimil. I have never used a TY course but a search here will show that some are considered good and effective and others are not so good and effective. For me a course book is only one of the tools in my arsenal. For me, I don't feel it necessary to master it before I allow myself forays into the real world. In fact I rarely even officially "finish" one. Have a look at my post on the multi-track approach for some possible advice that may be useful to you. I find that early forays into the real-world of a language (very limited at first- I am talking about twitter and songs or a paragraph or two) help me to see better what the course is trying to teach me and why, but, that's just me. The other question I would ask is, are you studying all these other languages concurrently? If so, I wouldn't expect to make rapid progress. Some people can handle this- Serpent and Expugnator come to mind. Definitely have a look at his log: What Expug is doing in 2015. He can help you more than I can as some of his languages overlap the ones you have and are studying. He uses textbooks a lot in the beginning and a lot of different ones. I admire his dedication, abilities and success very much. Serpent also will have good advice for you. Her methods are somewhat different but equally as effective- Sepent's cyclic log. She also uses twitter, DLI GLOSS and football in a highly effective way. Edited by iguanamon on 14 May 2015 at 10:40pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crazyleseratte Pentaglot Newbie Germany crazyleseratte.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3764 days ago 26 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English, German*, Spanish, French, Italian Studies: Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian | Message 3 of 11 14 May 2015 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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First of all: Thanks for your reply, and the warm welcome.
As for my other languages, I studied Spanish at University, I grew up with both English and German, and I had an on - off experience with French, studying and restudying it throughout school and University. Italian I understand quite well due to my Spanish background knowledge. And in addition I also want to say, that it is not really a problem with textbooks in general, more a frustration, since I do not see any progress whatsoever (anymore), as I tend to go back in the book, and get frustrated. I also do not see the purpose of exercises like Cloze texts, since this is not related to real life. But still, if I don't get it, I get frustrated and then jump back to the beginning. This way, I tend to jump between lesson 1 and 8 continuously.... No, I am not studying all those languages at a time, I tried to, but since I lack the time, I have my main focus on active Dutch, Chinese and Danish for the moment. I will definitely dive into both recommended logs - thanks for those! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 14 May 2015 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Buy a real book written by a native and read it. Move on past the textbooks and get some DVD's, books, etc. It might help you break through your frustration. Then you can go back and use the textbook as a reference.
When I am learning a programming language I never read the manual. I think of a problem I want to solve and use the new programming language to solve the problem. I go back and forth to the manual to look things up, or google for examples, etc. But the textbook just becomes a reference for something I'm interested in. You can do the same thing with a novel or TV show in your target language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3344 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 5 of 11 15 May 2015 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you want to go through a language program quickly, focus on the audio lessons of the textbook. What I usually do is press PLAY on the cd player and then flip through the book as it plays. DON'T press pause and don't play the track one more time "to see if you can understand it better". Just try to get through the entire thing first. Later on, in a few weeks or so, you can repeat this exercise and notice that you understand it much better.
As for the grammar drills, exercises and so on... You can do them but I don't consider them as valuable as the time spent listening to real samples. Do exercises for a very brief few minutes if you want to, but then move on. Exercises are the kind of thing that can be a time sink. You could spend hours looking up rules or sometimes I get sucked into Google-search comparisons to try and answer questions like "Do I say it like A or do I say it like B?". HOWEVER this type of activity is not really learning. Turn off Google and just focus on the material 100% for your study window (e.g. 30min or however long you've allocated). EDIT: By "try to get through the entire thing" I mean don't ever listen to the same lesson more than once on the same day. E.g. if you listen to CD1 tracks 1-8 today, then tomorrow you start on CD1 track 9. You continue this until you finish through the end of CD4 (or however many there are in your program). If you do this with the FSI programs for 30min-1 hr per day, this can take weeks because they are so long. Edited by chaotic_thought on 15 May 2015 at 4:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4323 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 6 of 11 15 May 2015 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Let me address this specific point. Firstly, Langenscheidt might not be your best choice, at least in the beginning. Try something else, Hueber, Assimil, TY, whatever, take a pick. You can always return to Langenscheidt later if you still feel the need of using a textbook. But the one thing you really should address is "I understand almost nothing". You are a German native speaker, you should understand almost everything (talking about a beginner textbook of course). At least you should have the impression to understand almost everything. It should feel easy. Reading that is, not listening. Don't worry about listening too much for Danish in the beginning, otherwise you'll just get frustrated. You need to get familiar with the language and how it is related to your native language. It makes learning it so much easier. Try this: when starting a new lesson, first read the dialogue/text without looking up any words in the glossary/dictionary. Try to translate the meaning in your head, don't worry if you don't know the exact meaning though. If you don't know a word, think about a German or English word that looks similar and fits the context. It might just be the word you're looking for. The basic idea is to understand and appreciate the relatedness to a language you already know. If you also understand Low German, that would be even better to compare with. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6399 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 11 15 May 2015 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I wrote about Danish and Dutch on this page of my log recently. I found lyricstraining very useful for Dutch, and working on my Dutch has actually helped me bridge the gap from German to Danish.
If you want to learn many languages, an understanding of linguistics really helps. So I agree with daegga too (just don't worry about producing a good translation). You can start with the Swadesh lists and then look up more info. I loved how thorough Langenscheidt Finnish is, but I went through it when I already knew a lot. Edited by Serpent on 15 May 2015 at 10:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crazyleseratte Pentaglot Newbie Germany crazyleseratte.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3764 days ago 26 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English, German*, Spanish, French, Italian Studies: Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian | Message 8 of 11 15 May 2015 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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daegga, you are right that I do understand almost everything in my textbook, but when it
comes to understanding audio, I am lost. Since understanding movies is my main goal this is quite frustrating. Today I watched some kind of reality show with subtitles; I could understand the gist of it, but without subtitles I am totally lost, since the pronunciation is really different from the written word. I do also have TY Danish, but I put it aside in the middle of the course, and started over with Langenscheidt (which is my preferred learning system, because of all those really long vocabulary lists. I am not a fan of TY, actually; even though I have some of those too.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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