German as a Second Language

Have you ever asked a native speaker what a particular word means, just to get a blank or confused look? Is your pronounciation so bad no one can tell what you are saying? Would you say En-glish and En-gland or Eng-lish and Eng-land and can you tell the difference? If you see an international word in a German text do you naturally say it in English or in German? Why is this important?

Since setting up with lingq I have got 3 emails.

First was the usual username/password reminder.

Second a description of the way you, or I, should be using lingq. this is fairly useful. The main point seems to be to promote your learning although there is the expected prompt to purchase an upgrade.

Third was a list of the vocabulary I had identified when I was using the site yesterday. This had the subject line of LingQs of the day so I assume I will get one of these daily.

I have spent about an hour on the lingq website and have a bit of an idea of how it works so far.

First you download an mp3 'podcast'
Listening to the audio you can follow the text on screen first slowly and then a little faster.
You can then highlight all the words in the article that you are not familiar/confident with and click a button after each one and it shows you the meaning and the context in which it was used.
This button also adds it to your vocabulary list.
The list als automatically creates flash cards for each word.

This week I am starting to work with LingQ.

This looks quite good. I will only be using the free resources as there is a range of free and paid for activities.

I found this through their podcast on itunes but it is not just a podcast you can learn by listening to. Each podcast is one aspect of the lesson. They appear to be working at a couple of levels and I listened to one of the beginner lessons (#13) and understood about 75% of the dialogue after about 2-3 listenings.

http://www.lingq.com/

This is a tape/CD set, I had the CDs, covering beginner, intermediate and more advanced language. It is a case of listen and repeat so you do need to be in a situation where you can talk to yourself without getting lots of funny looks. I think it is proably the best thing I have used so far for learning 'vocabulary and stock phrases'. I cannot recommend it enough. I did not buy it but ordered it through the library and kept renewing it until someone else ordered it.

The link below is to the CDs on Amazon.co.uk

I've noticed that I am mainly listing things I have used in the past with very little detail and nothing of any substance. What I am trying to do is rush up to the present time because I may refer back to things I have used in the past when comparing resources.

Soon I will be up to day and I will start talking about what I am doing now.

Of the early podcast lessons I used, this was probably the best. The course covered 100 lessons and I really felt I did learn something.

After using this course I became a real fan of podcast lessons and I have used a lot since then and I am still using them now. I regualrly trawl through lists from podcast libraries looking for courses I have not covered yet.

http://www.mydailyphrase.com/german/

This is not a course but a video podcast. It uses a slidshow of still images and a comuter voice to give one word, its pronounciation and its use in a sentence.

The podcast has unfortuneately finished according to the sites blog but youcan still download the original words. There were about 100 words in the entire series.

http://www.germanworddaily.com/blog/