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4pm-5.30pm.

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Vocabulary Extension continued...Flashcards and Use of Internet Sources.

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Vocabulary Extension continued...Flashcards and Use of Internet Sources.

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Following up from my last vocabulary session (see ISR 3), I decided to use the same method to further build on my vocabulary. I managed to persuade one of my flatmates into testing me again, and it yielded similar results as before: my ‘bank’ of German vocabulary increased substantially. I now know words such as krank (sick, ill), traurig (sad), eklig (disgusting) and a personal favourite, Gerburtstag (birthday). However, despite the amount of progress I made through using flashcards and my flatmate, I wanted to try another method of learning vocabulary. I searched on Google for some German vocabulary websites, looking specifically for games or quizzes that I could do – essentially something a bit more interactive than just sitting there, trying to internalise new words one by one. I did a couple of basic vocabulary tests on a website that I found which was very useful in showing me what words I had a tendency to struggle with. Words which were associated with daily routine were the ones that I struggled with the most. So for me, using the website for quizzes was actually a lot more helpful than just using flashcards. It helped me to learn vocabulary a lot faster, as I think the quizzes require you to be a lot more interactive with your learning.
www.allthetests.com/quiz34/quiz/1511297739/German-vocabulary

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7pm-8.30pm.

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Lektion 1 - Places and Nationalities. 30min. 9.30pm-10pm, 6/10/17.

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Lektion 1 - Places and Nationalities. 2hrs. 4pm-6pm, 10/10/17.

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4pm-5pm.

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Working on Pronunciation: 'ei', 'ie', 's', 'chs', 'w', 'sp' and 'st'. 

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Working on Pronunciation: 'ei', 'ie', 's', 'chs', 'w', 'sp' and 'st'. 

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I started off by using the link below to help me practice recognising food names in German, but more importantly to help familiarise myself with the pronunciation of German letters & words. I have been struggling with the pronunciation side of German mainly, probably because I keep on slipping into French pronunciations of words! This link helped be to better understand the pronunciation of 's' and 'ei' and 'ie' a lot better.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/German/Food_audio.htm
I then used another link to an article in order to practice my pronunciation of the different letters in German, especially the letter with umlauts on them. I went through every letter of the alphabet and attempted to pronounce each letter without listening to the audio. Afterwards I would listen to the audio and then attempted to pronounce the example words in a similar fashion. Any letters which I struggled with, I went back over again to try and familiarise myself with the pronunciation. The link for the article is below:
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-german-alphabet-1444644
This activity further helped me to practise my pronunciation of German letters and sounds, further building on the progress I had made using the first link. I decided
to finish off working on my pronunciation by using the link below to practise some of the letters I was struggling with in particular.
http://joycep.myweb.port.ac.uk/pronounce/
These phrases were 'chs at the start of words', using 'w' twice in one word and using 'sp' and 'st' at the start of words. I think my work on all these elements went well, but it would be worth me continuing to practise these phrases especially, to ensure that I do not forget how to pronounce them correctly.

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2pm-3.30pm.

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Learning about German Grammar: Verb Conjugation and Separable Verbs.

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Learning about German Grammar: Verb Conjugation and Separable Verbs.

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I decided to read the section at the back of my Collins German Dictionary in order to better familiarise myself with verb conjugation - especially about the difference between weak and strong verbs, and separable verbs. I wrote out some of the key points in my German notebook so that I would remember them more clearly and could also use these notes for revision. After looking over these for some time, I practiced using these in different scenarios for different pronouns, and also wrote out some practice sentences so that I knew I would be confident in using them in everyday life.
Overall, I felt that this activity was very successful and has allowed me to solidify and build upon my pre-existing knowledge of German grammar.

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3pm-4pm.

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Expanding Vocabulary Beyond the Specified Content

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Expanding Vocabulary Beyond the Specified Content

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I decided that it was about time to expand my vocabulary beyond the specified content – I bought myself a pack of 1000 German vocabulary flashcards, made by Sparknotes. All of them had the German word (including the definite article) on one side, with the English translation on the other side. I went through the pack of flashcards and separated them into words that I already knew and words that were new to me. This helped to reinforce the words that I already knew as a preliminary exercise before I started vocabulary learning intensively. I began to learn new words by myself, but quickly realised that this was an unsustainable method of learning – instead I enlisted one of my (unwilling) flatmates to help drill me on German vocabulary! Some of my favourite new words were einschlafen (to fall asleep) and bequemen (comfortable) – they were a few among many others. It took a fair amount of time to practise and internalise some of the new vocabulary I learned, but I feel like I now have a bit more of a diverse vocabulary for German.
I hope that this will help me feel more comfortable when speaking and constructing my own German sentences, etc.
I will continue to practise with my flashcards whenever I have a spare moment, so that I can continue to gradually improve my knowledge of the German language.

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8pm-9.30pm.

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German Grammar: Modal Auxiliary Verbs and the Infinitive

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German Grammar: Modal Auxiliary Verbs and the Infinitive

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I focused on the infinitive before I moved onto modal verbs, as understanding infinitives is vital to helping you to understand the use of modal verbs. I learnt that there are four forms of infinitive; present active, present passive, perfect active and perfect passive. There are various uses of the infinitive, for example you should use the infinitive after modal verbs when 'zu' is not before it. The present active infinitive is the most commonly used, and is the form found in the dictionary  - i.e. when used with modal verbs, "er kann schwimmen" (he is able to swim). The Collins German dictionary was very helpful in allowing me to go through the difference in the various forms of the infinitive.
Infinitive phrases can be formed with 'zu', 'ohne...zu', 'um...zu' and 'anstatt...zu'. The infinitive comes at the end of the phrase - this section as a whole really helped me to sort out what the infinitive was in my head. Before my knowledge was a bit jumbled , but through the use of my dictionary and the link below I now understand the infinitive a lot better.
http://www.vistawide.com/german/grammar/german_verbs.htm
I also learnt that modal verbs have two past participles, one being the present perfect and the other being the past perfect. I was able to further expand on this knowledge by using the website below, which had an exercise on modifying verbs into their past participle form. It was very useful as through practising modifying verbs, I was able to understand past participles a lot better.
My work on modal verbs just involved me writing out the modal verb tables and practising using modal verbs through my textbook exercises (German 1, Palgrave Foundations Textbook, 3rd Edition). This was fairly effective but I think I need to do more work on modal verbs again as I am not completely comfortable with using them, especially the modal verb dürfen.

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Working on Grammar: Plural Nouns and Articles & Possessives 

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Working on Grammar: Plural Nouns and Articles & Possessives 

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I started to work through the textbook sections on Plural Nouns (German 1, Palgrave Foundations Textbook, 3rd edition). I read through the grammar summary at the back of the textbook first on page 147, in order to consolidate my knowledge of plural nouns. In the past I have struggled with converting my nouns into plurals, especially when it requires changing vowels (e.g. adding an umlaut). Reading over the grammar summary in the textbook helped me to understand when such vowel changes occur, e.g. der Bruder = Brüder. The addition of -en and -n to the end of words is also something I struggled with, so I decided to focus in particular on these areas.
I went online and found an article which had tips and hints on how to learn the plurals of german nouns. This article was incredibly helpful, and I learnt that with plural masculine nouns, when an 'e' is added to the end, an umlaut also usually needs to be put over the vowel, e.g. der Koch = die Köche. It also further consolidated the fact that plurals always use 'die' as their definite article. This was a concept I hadn't really fully 'digested' before. However, for feminine nouns when an 'e' is added to the end of the word, an umlaut is always added to the vowel. When an -en or -n is added to the end of a masculine or neuter noun, we don't add umlauts, e.g. der Name = die Namen.  This was just a small part of the article, so as you can imagine learning german grammar is a very intensive process! https://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/german-plural/
To work on Possessives and Articles I again began by reading what the textbook had to offer on the subject. Page 148 was very helpful in giving an quick overview of definite articles (e.g. der, die, etc.), indefinite articles (e.g. ein, eine, etc.) and possessives (e.g. mein, meine, etc.). I then decided to try and find some helpful videos online, preferably by native German speakers, on definite articles. I managed to find a very helpful video on helping you to 'guess' the definite articles for German words in general (something which can be very tricky!). I then also found a very interesting article on using mein, dein and kein in different scenarios and how to remember when to use what form of the possessive. The links to both the video and the article can be found below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TXfXvR_Rs
http://joycep.myweb.port.ac.uk/abinitio/chap3-7.html
Overall, this was a very useful studying session as I feel like I have learnt a lot about definite articles and posessives especially. I think that I will now be able to be much more confident when using articles and possessive in my German writing.

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6pm-7pm.

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Understanding Cases in German: Nominative vs. Accusative vs. Dative. 

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Understanding Cases in German: Nominative vs. Accusative vs. Dative. 

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I used my Collins German Dictionary to continue my work on German cases as a follow-up from our recent lessons covering the first three cases. I found nominative fairly easy, accusative was pretty hard but nothing in comparison to the dative case! My aim was to work on the distinction between the cases in my own time, as after the lessons on these cases my understanding of the difference between them was fuzzy at best. I did not understand when to use the accusative case and I struggled to remember the different endings of the dative case, in terms of how masculine, feminine, neuter and plural nouns change. I also did not understand how prepositions work, so decided to do extra work on this too – something which would also help me to complete the homework set for next week which was on prepositions. I think that the sections on grammar at the back of the Collins dictionary are invaluable as relatively detailed and easy to understand guides to the often confusing world of German grammar (at least for a beginner!). Honestly, my dictionary was invaluable in helping me understand German cases in this study session! After a complete of practice exercises, I am already feeling more confident about telling the difference between the cases :)

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3pm-4pm.

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Working on Oral German: Pronunciation and Answer Construction.

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Working on Oral German: Pronunciation and Answer Construction.

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For this particular study session, I wanted to use mainly youtube videos and other videos online to help me with my pronunciation. This is because I think that learning pronunciation from native speakers (of which you have easy access to online) is the best way to learn a language, especially a language with so many new sounds like German! One of my favourite videos was a slow easy-to-follow guide to pronouncing German sounds. It was very useful as it provided a step by step guide to the sound, as well as how the sound compared to sounds in English. It helped me to draw comparisons between German and English, and so now I think that I will be able to associate the German words with English a lot easier, and so remember German much easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWKQczMIhU0
I was also struggling with pronouncing umlauts so I found another video on pronunciation on youtube. I spoke along with the video and I think that my pronunciation has now improved a fair bit! Again the person speaking provided the German sound and then compared it to English - allowing English viewers (including me!) to learn and understand the sounds a lot easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI_lr5DSUws
I watched several other videos of German native speakers just speaking about random topics - not to learn any specific German words, but just to get a better idea of how German sentences flow as a language. Building upon this, I also read a short article on how to form questions and answers in German - allowing me to improve on how I structure my own responses and questions in German (useful for the upcoming oral exam!).
http://www.dummies.com/languages/german/how-to-ask-questions-in-german/
Overall, this study session has been very helpful in helping me feel more confident in myself and my German speaking abilities :) I have always been less confident with speaking new languages. And so, I will definitely be repeating study sessions like this as I feel much less stressed about speaking German now!

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Lektion 1 - Jobs and Occupations.
2hrs. 6pm-8pm, 15/10/17.

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Lektion 2 - Verbs, Prepositions, Adverbs of Frequency and Others. 1hr. 4pm-5pm, 20/10/17.

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Lektion 3 - Hobbies. 30min. 3.30pm-4pm, 27/10/17.

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Lektion 4 - Preferences and Modal Verbs. 2hr. 5pm-7pm, 4/11/17.

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Lektion 5 - Prepositions and Positions. 2hr. 4pm-6pm, 29/11/17.