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Date: 27/01/19
This week I have been practising my German skills using Duolingo. Duolingo is a useful app that allows me to improve my vocabulary and practice my pronunciation but also put into practice the grammar I have learnt in class when writing answers in German. I try to complete at least 15 minutes of Duolingo every day but have spent half an hour improving my vocabulary.

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I started watching Dark on Netflix with English subtitles. This gave me a much better understanding of the pronunciation of German in a natural setting and helped me revise word order and sentence structure. I particularly enjoyed rewinding to hear phrases I have previously learned in order to hear and repeat the pronunciation and inflection that would be used by a native German speaker. Plus it's a really good show.

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After receiving feedback for the essential homework 1 I wanted to work on my knowledge of word order so I found some classes on this on YouTube and used these along with dict.cc to write out several examples of sentences making sure to adhere to keeping the conjugated verb in the second position and the rule of Time Manner Place. This exercise was helpful practise for me but it's something I'm still struggling with and I think I'll need to continue to practise this aspect of the German language in different ways before I fully grasp it.

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GERMAN LESSON 44: German Sentence Structure Explained Part 1 💡💡💡

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I'm still trying to improve my understanding of word order and so I looked online for some word order exercises and found some useful links. I found it pretty difficult at first but the more I tried the more I improved and I'm hoping if I continue working on these types of exercises it will begin to come more naturally to me. I think this exercise was extremely helpful for now but I'll need to spend much more time on this aspect of my learning.

https://german.tolearnfree.com/free-german-lessons/free-german-exercise-109866.php

http://deutsch.ie/german-grammar/german-exercises/german-word-order/german-word-order/

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I really need to brush up on my knowledge of the gender of different nouns as I know it's important to learn the genders as you learn new nouns. Duolingo is helpful in that respect but I found a Gender Trainer exercise online. I wrote down useful words in separate lists for der, die oder das. I also made a note of some useful rules to help remember whether a noun was der, die or das using the table at the bottom of the page that I have linked but also using a useful YouTube video* I found. I found this exercise to be fairly productive as I haven't spent enough time so far on learning the gender of different nouns and so it made me feel more confident and in particular discovering that there are at least a few rules to adhere to that can help indicate the gender of certain nouns was definitely beneficial to me. However, most of the vocabulary in this particular quiz was fairly obscure and not particularly useful so in the future I'll be adding vocab from the textbook to my lists instead.

http://deutsch.ie/german-grammar/die-der-das-game/

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Today I spent some time revising the German cases. I made separate tables (as shown below) for the nominative, accusative and dative cases and how they change the definite and indefinite articles of nouns, the endings of adjectives and the personal pronouns. I then made spider diagrams outlining the fixed prepositions for the dative and accusative cases. I found this exercise really helpful as it helped me to learn and visualise the cases and their respective articles and I think having a visual representation such as this is really going to benefit me when I need to remember these in the exam.

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I found some exercises online to help me put into practise what I have learned about the German cases and spent about half an hour on them. I found it was quite useful as it helped me realise that my main problem is remembering the gender of the noun in the first place so next I will be revising all the vocab that we have learned during the course and make sure I know the gender of each noun so that I am able to correctly use their definite and indefinite articles in the nominate, dative and accusative case.

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Dativ Akkusativ Exercises - Online German Course

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Free Dativ Akkusativ Exercises - Online German Course

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Practice Dativ and Akkusativ! To exercise Dativ and Akkusativ is the only way to get it right!

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In order to improve my pronunciation of German I spent some time watching a number of YouTube videos demonstrating German pronunciation and practising each sound. I chose to watch the same YouTuber as I did previously for sentence structure. I find her videos really engaging, helpful and easy to understand. I also appreciate that she repeats everything she says in both German and English and leaves reasonable pauses so that it's possible to repeat words and phrases to yourself as she speaks and allow yourself to fully understand concepts/sounds before she moves on. I would highly recommend her videos to anyone learning German.
I watched 6 different videos explaining the pronunciation of the alphabet, vowels, consonants, Umlaute, ß and the sounds EI, IE, AU and EU.
These videos were very useful in explaining the pronunciation of letters and sounds in different words and contexts such as highlighting long and short pronunciations of the different vowels as well explaining the different pronunciation of -ich depending on the vowel it follows among other difficult consonant sounds.

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GERMAN PRONUNCIATION 4: Learn How to Pronounce the GERMAN VOWELS

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*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TXfXvR_Rs&list=PLYzp2xhTw9W1Z9RvnCoveC0W7pkwUMHXy&index=11