Hello, and a quick intro: I’ve had an account here for some time, but only recently decided to dive in. I am learning German and consider myself to be a “False” B1b learner By that I mean there are a few holes in my knowledge, but on the other hand a few areas (particularly reading) where I do better than my stated level.
As LingQ appears to be more Tool than Method, and the key being interesting input, I am wondering if rather than do the lessons here, if it would make sense to import German ebooks and listen to the matching audiobooks. I do realize that due to copyright they cannot be shared.
This way the content would be of interest to me, with the storyline keeping my interest going
So my question is, is there something I am missing that would make this a less than great personal approach?
It sounds like a good approach to me. I’ve only fairly recently started to try and import content from ebooks. It’s a bit of a problem when trying to import from a kindle ebook at least so far for me. I think the file would need to be converted to mobi or other format, but on the latest iteration of the kindle desktop reader apparently they are using a new DRM that hasn’t been cracked yet. So I’ve been copying chapters. I’ve noticed on at least one e-book though there is a limit by the publisher to how much you can copy. So I’ve recently started grabbing content from that book with OCR software. Kind of a pain, but it works.
If you’re content is in epub, mobi, pdf or other format it looks like it should be a lot easier.
dw.com has a lot of news videos on youtube… DW Deutsch - YouTube
you can import youtube videos and it will pull in the subtitles (german). That might be another approach. Only issue I’ve found with that is in the past I’ve sometimes ended up with no punctuation. On one I tried today though I got the punctuation so maybe they fixed something.
So really any youtube videos that have the german subtitles should work too if you can find interesting content from there.
https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ has simpliefied news articles and slow audio to go with them. That may be too easy for you?
Of course, you can import some German ebooks and some stuff from the internet, read and listen to them without sharing them (it means as private lessons).
But you needn’t to ignore a lot of interesting texts in the German library of lingq.com as well, written by Vera, by Reinhard and also by me with my German friends, for example with Fasulye.
You can try such my German courses for B1-B2 level like KURZE SACHTEXTE, WISSEN SIE DAS SCHON?; POLITIK AKTUELL; GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR; ÜBER DIE ZEIT UND MICH SELBST; AUS DEM ALLTAGSLEBEN; WIE WIR SPRACHEN LERNEN oder grammarische Kurse: Grammatik uns Synonymie, Dein Wortschatz, Verben mit Präfixen etc.
I almost exclusively use imported content when using LIngQ. If LingQ didn’t have that feature, I probably wouldn’t be using it.
Thanks!
I was able to convert and upload (to private lessons) both my Kindle and Audible content, and have started working through the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I find them both fun, and particularly useful for a language learner as they are written in 1st Person.