here's a book i read recently
gillessenheit begins in cough very
interesting about how to be relaxed hi
there steve kaufman here today i want to
talk about how i learned german
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so
my major effort into
learning german took place
in 1987.
and i'm going to go through that with
you
but i did have prior exposure to german
my parents were from czechoslovakia they
spoke german at home although they spoke
english with my brother and with me so i
had heard german but i couldn't speak it
then i worked on a german ship for two
weeks hitchhiking over to europe
i hitchhiked around in germany i even
worked for two weeks on a construction
site in vienna
so i had some use of german but it was
very rudimentary
so in 1987 i was between jobs i had a
month off between jobs
and i said you know i really want to
learn german and i had you know prior to
getting on that german boat i looked at
the grammar book there them deed s
whatever and it's always it struck me
that it was just impossible to remember
those things
1987
long before i had heard of stephen
krashen or input or
link
um
i said i need to read
i need to read to get a sense of this
language i need to get the language in
me so let me show you what i did first
of all
i went to the second-hand bookstores
here in vancouver i don't know what got
into me but i said let's see what what
is there so i found this book in vandal
which is pretty old it's a
university of southern california 1959
it was published and if you look at the
book
it's it's got sort of text
and uh
it's got uh vocabulary you know along
the margin which is really good you
don't have to flip back for it now of
course it's not going to get all the
words that you don't know but quite a
few of them and as often happens some of
the words they explain for you you
already know and you'll see that it's a
secondhand book because this is not my
writing in here it's full of at least
one other person perhaps more look at
this you know scribbling all kinds of
stuff
uh you know in the text
but uh it like look at this one i mean
this some person undertook to translate
the whole thing which i couldn't read
this little
chicken scratch but at any rate so i
read through this book
so but that's not the only book i found
i found this other book
called auslaise
and here it's a little more organized
and they have a word list behind every
chapter
and
i found
so it's again the same idea
always text with word lists if you can
see that all right
not tremendously interesting perhaps but
i was motivated oh here's another one
that i did
uh
so here again and i love history
and so i love this book but this didn't
have the um
you know the glossary so it was more
difficult to read and i just let
whatever words i didn't know fly by me
uh here's another one that i got
das este yar
and here again uh you know lots of um
vocabulary and
text and of course i avoid any
any sort of exercises or things of that
nature
but at any rate these are the things
that i plowed through in that month
and i got a lot of them you know yetz
liz and via
and
i mean these books are probably largely
out of print
deutsche fierster auslander
deutsche brockley after auslander
so more of the same more of the same
and i don't know if you can see here but
just an endless you know
de vega
deutschland
more of the same
now this one i think is my highlighting
uh
machine and mentioned machining the
traffic
now at some point i changed like
okay and there's literature and there's
an
atlas
erkology the shift
when i was in to roll i got interested
uh
what we got here although
again with with exercises and whatnot
i mean no end just listen and learn
now i don't know
whether this matched but at some point i
found
a cassette tape series which was a
series of interviews
uh from german radio interviews with
normal people that was the best i
listened to it over and over again if i
get a hold of audio material where i
find it interesting and i find it
pleasing to listen to it's almost like
music and even if i don't fully
understand it i just listen and listen
and listen
so but i got lots of books so
description their kaufman advanced
german course i don't know what i did
with that i mean it just goes on and on
and of course the leiden is young
i mean you got to read the because for
something like this i also get the
audiobook so i won't go through all of
these books i even got books on what
else we got here you know books on
dusk gehen which is a subject of
interest to me and of course i was in
the lumber business and in building was
you know
very important to me hanbok gazundesbaun
and vonnen
so i read that in german uh what else
did we do here here's a book i read
recently galassen height begins
very interesting about how to be relaxed
sort of a combination of
zen and
stoic philosophy how to relax in your
life
um you know literature
i also got some
here we are yeah
i got some uh some self-help books you
know how to become more efficient
this uh
lightner who sort of
designed the prototype of the
space repetition system
um
books on history
this is an excellent book the effindun
da deutschen
i mean it goes on and on
uh and
these books are kind of good
gun vocab
voice
convoy
where you can learn vocabulary in a new
language
relating it back to german and so you're
kind of picking out vocabulary in both
so
i mean that's just a quick sort of stab
at the
i wanted to demonstrate that
you know long before input and
compelling input was was popular it it
was always obvious to me that that's how
you learn
that's what i did for chinese that's
what i did for japanese and i could go
through all my chinese books my japanese
books
i read and i listened in fact behind me
here
are cds audio cds
and lots for german for swedish for you
know italian spanish russian czech you
name it
and i could show you you know the books
for those and i may do that if there's
interest
the thing is now the world has changed
and so now you can find content of
interest you can find audio material for
download that you don't have i used to
have to go to germany and find cds to
listen to now you can find the audio
material online
uh
if the material is older like goethe you
can import the the text into link and
listen to the audio and learn you know
go do the sort of traditional literature
that way if it's modern books you may
have to buy the book and unfortunately
very often they prevent you from
you know downloading the text or
downloading the audio even if you've
paid for it which is unfortunate
uh but the world has changed so i i
perhaps should show you what i now do on
link
which is where i now spend my time
learning persian and arabic and i've
learned other languages there i haven't
really done that much in german
but i'd have done some so let me just
show you this sort of
my level of activity
on link for german so let's have a look
here at the um
german page and link
and you can see that there's a lot of
different content available to study
here are some of the things that i have
looked at
in my sort of study shelf nothing very
recent actually some of the trending
things what's new many stories there's
just a tremendous variety of
content so i don't have to go looking
for it but i haven't done much on link
when it comes to um
you know german so if i click on my
picture here and i go to my profile
then i will see what i've done so
last seven days nothing however if i go
to all time
we can get a sense of the level of my
activity so here is the growth of my
known words
which
on link is 28 000
some so it's not like i haven't done
much on link i have done but more in the
past typically 2009 seemed to be a
pretty active
period for me
uh if i look at um you know
links created again i was very active
for some reason to 2016.
if i look at listening hours
this is not a good indicator because i
don't necessarily listen on link i might
be listening elsewhere as well
if i go to
you know
learn links
these are the words that i have moved to
no not very many
so typically
i've been doing a lot of listening and
reading
uh but i don't necessarily move words to
known on link
so in terms of my links created
i've got a total of 11 000 words
that i have looked up
but the known words total
is like 28 000. what that means is that
there are a lot of words that i simply
didn't bother looking up because i knew
them and so link keeps track of that and
tells me that i know 28 000 words anyway
that's just very briefly on the subject
of what i did on link but this all comes
well after
my greatest period act of activity in
learning german i wanted to show you
what i have done to improve my german my
german is still not
as good as i would like it to be
i make mistakes
and i was probably better before
uh i have spoken german here with with
people i'm a bit sort of shy about my
german but
you know if i have to speak or speak
i would like to be better as is the case
with many of my languages
but on the other hand i brought my
german from a very rudimentary level
up to a level where i can understand i
can read i can read books for pleasure i
can speak to people and with a little
bit of effort i could bring it back to
where it was before and improve it
beyond that level and that's kind of the
level that i like to get my languages to
call it sort of a
slightly
you know dormant b2 and once you're
there you don't lose
that much even if you don't use the
language or read in the language and of
course i like to have my languages you
know parked at that dormant b2 level so
that i can learn new languages and then
when the opportunity or the need arises
go back and recover those languages that
i have studied before so i hope that was
of interest to you and i will leave you
with a couple of interviews that i've
had in german so that you can criticize
my german thank you for listening bye
for now