How I Learned German

Here's a book I read recently .... Very interesting, about how to be relaxed. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today I want to talk about how I learned German. Uh, remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe like on a bell on the bell for notifications. If you follow me on a podcast service, please leave a review.

I do appreciate it. 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. Uh, my parents were from Czechoslovakia. They spoke German at home, although they spoke English with my brother and with me. So I hadn heard German, but I couldn't speak it.

Then I worked on a German ship for two weeks hitchhiking over to Europe. Uh, 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'd looked at a grammar book ..., 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 LingQ. 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, 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 a, it's got a 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 look at this one. I mean, there's some person undertook to translate the whole thing, which... how you can even read the little chicken scratch, but at any rate, so I read through. So, but that's not the only book I found. I found this other book called ... and here it's a little more organized and they have a word list behind every chapter and I found, you know,

so it's again, the same idea: always text with word lists. If you can see that. Alright. Not tremendously interesting, perhaps, but I was motivated. Oh, here's another one that I did. ... 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.

Uh, here's another one that I got ... and here again, uh, you know, lots of, um, vocabulary and texts. 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? ... and I mean, these books are probably largely out of print ...

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 ... more of the same. Now this one I think is my highlighting, uh, ... Whatever.

Okay. Lots. Now, at some point I changed like, okay...and there's literature and there's ... When I was in Tyrol, I got interested. Uh, what do we got here? ...again with, with the exercises and whatnot. I mean, no. And 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, uh, 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 to that. So, but I got lots of books ... advanced German course.

I don't know what I did with that. I mean, it just goes on and on. And of course ...you got to read the, because for something like this, I also get the audio book. So I won't go through all of these books. I even got books on, uh, what else we got? You know, books on ... which is of interest to me.

And of course I was in the lumber business and building was, you know, very important to me so I read that in German. Uh, what else did we do here? Here's a book I read recently ... very interesting, about how to be relaxed, sort of a combination of Zen and, uh, in the stoic philosophy, how to relax in your life.

Um, you know, literature. I also got some, I, here we are. Yeah. I got some, uh, some self-help books, you know, how to become more efficient. Um, this, uh, Leitner who sort of designed a prototype of the, uh, spaced repetition system, um, books on history. This is an excellent book. .I mean, it goes on and on. Uh, and these books are kind of good.

...where you can learn vocabulary in a new language, relating it back to German. And so you're kind of picking up vocabulary in both. So, I mean, that's just a quick sort of stab at that. I wanted to demonstrate that, you know, long before input and compelling input was, was popular it had, it was always obvious to me that that's how you learn. And 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, uh, 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, 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 to... I used to have to go to Germany and find CDs to listen to an audio.

You can find the audio material online. Uh, if the material is older, like Gerta, you can import the, uh, the text into LingQ 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 uh, 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 LingQ, uh, 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 have done some.

So let me just show you the sort of my level of activity on LingQ for German. So let's have a look here at the, um, German page at LingQ. 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 recently.

Some of the trending things. What's new, mini 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 LingQ when it comes to, um, you know, in 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 the time, We can get a sense of the level of my activity. So here's the growth of my known words, which on LingQ is 28,000 some. So it's not like I haven't done much on LingQ, 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, uh, LingQs created again, I was very active for some reason in 2016.

Uh, if I look at listening hours, this is not a good indicator because I don't necessarily listen on LingQ. I Might be listening elsewhere as well. Uh, if I go to, um, you know, uh, learned LingQs, these are the words that I have moved to known. Not very many. So typically, um, I've been doing a lot of listening and reading, uh, but I don't necessarily move words to known on LingQ.

So in terms of my LingQs 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 cause I knew them. And so LingQ 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 LingQ, but this all comes well after my greatest period 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. Uh, 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 if I have to speak up 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 pleasurem, I can speak to people.

And with a little bit of effort, I can 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, 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.