Thanks everyone for your responses. This is really gives me a much better idea of what I can generally expect, and also of the huge variation. My husband is actually German and I kept asking him but he was getting exasperated as he said he had absolutely no idea how long it might take! I was still impressed with the level of understanding that spritsmugler achieved so quickly. Don’t think I could achieve that.
I had a weekly tutor for about 6 months before a trip to Germany but I was pretty half-hearted and did no practice between classes. So I probably only learnt a few basic phrases and words, and was introduced to the concept of nominativ and akkustiv cases (touched on dativ). This year I suddenly got passionate. I used Memrise for a few weeks then started with LingQ, plus I have a couple of textbooks I read from a few times a week. I’ve only done about a dozen lessons on LingQ so far but I think it’s already improved my listening.
VeraI I think I know quite a few more words than my profile indicates in that there are quite a few yellow words that I can recognise the meaning of during the vocab tests, though I may not be able to recall the German word without context. Also, there are quite a few where I know the root word (e.g. wissen) and can recognise some of the forms when seen in context but wouldn’t be able to recite the conjugations. I am mostly doing the lessons in your course Annas Tagebuch, which I’m really enjoying. I find that when I first listen to a new lesson I can grasp maybe 20-25% of the meaning and it feels fast. After LingQing and reading it through once, then listening to it on a loop for maybe 30-45 minutes, I find I can follow around 80% of the meaning, and feel like I am ‘hearing’ at least that percentage of the individual words. It requires concentration and I’m not sure how much is just memorising the meaning of an individual lesson but it doesn’t feel too hard and I like that I can feel quite a dramatic difference in understanding over the course of a day or so.
It is interesting re some of the level classifications on LingQ…for example I also listened to I think it was your interview Irene777 about your trip to Malta. I loved this lesson because it was a natural conversation and the content I found very interesting. But I was surprised it was classified as intermediate because I could understand the gist of this more easily at first listen, than the lessons in Annas Tagebuch which are beginner 2. I think this was largely because the speech was much slower, and also the interview format with questions helped give a better textual framework. My husband is Swabian also and it was interesting that I sensed something familiar about your voice but didn’t realise what it was until my husband who was also listening pointed out that you were Swabian (and that Swabians also speak more slowly)!
ColinJohnstone, that’s great motivation to know. You studied a lot more intensively than I am doing but I still think it’s fantastic what you manage to read in that timeframe, especially the more scientific stuff. One of my ultimate goals is to read Rilke in the original as I love poetry. In the intermediate, it would be great just to be able to read contemporary literary. For now, I’m starting on kids books though. I managed to read ‘Wie shoen is Panama’ and understand most of it, while not knowing quite a few individual words. Hope to read ‘Die Kleine Hexe’ series maybe in a month or two, and I guess ‘The Little Prince’ a little after that. Starting simple! I could probably work through them now but I want to have more vocab under my belt so I can enjoy the flow.
I think I’m listening to LingQ about 30 minutes to an hour a day, but am going to try to increase that.
I guess I’m not paying too much attention to the known words marker because I’m not sure how it can be an accurate representation when different forms of the same root word would be considered different words by the LingQ system? I had assumed knowing ‘a word’ wouldn’t mean counting the different forms (e.g. blau, blaues) as new words? So the known words figure on LingQ could become quite inflated? Anyway, that’s probably a different thread…
Thanks again everyone (and to the German course content producers).