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Hardufyr

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  • Currently studying
    German, French, Icelandic, Portuguese
  • Native tongue
    Norwegian
  • Fluent in
    English, Norwegian

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  1. Is this correct? Nominative The man reads. Der Mann liest. (Definitive, singular, masculine) The men read. Die Männer lesen. (Definite, plural, masculine) A man reads. Ein Mann liest. (Indefinite, singular, masculine) Men read. Die Männer lesen (Indefinite, plural, masculine). Should "die" be removed? And if one would say "people die", as a general remark, would that be "menschen sterben"? Accusative I read to the man. Ich für der Mann lesen. (Definitive, singular, masculine) I read to the men. Ich für die Männer lesen. (Definite, plural, masculine) I read to a man. Ich für einen Mann lesen. (Indefinite, singular, masculine) I read to men. Ich für Männer lesen (indefinite, plural, masculine). The last sentence could be a reply to the question "did you read to men, women or kids?". Genitive The man's favorite book was read. Des Mannes Lieblingsbuch gelesen wurde. (Definitive, singular, masculine) The men's favorite book was read. Der Männer Lieblingsbuch gelesen wurde. (Definite, plural, masculine) A man's favorite book was read. Eines Mannes Lieblingsbuch gelesen wurde. (Indefinite, singular, masculine) Men's favorite book was read. Männer Lieblingsbuch gelesen wurde, (Indefinite, plural, masculine) Dative I read the book to the man. Ich lese dem Mann das Buch vor. (Definitive, singular, masculine) I read the book the the men. Ich lese den Männer das Buch vor. (Definite, plural, masculine) I read the book to a man. Ich lese einem Mann das Buch vor .(Indefinite, singular, masculine) I read the book to men. Ich lese Männeren das Buch vor (indefinite, plural, masculine).
  2. My motto is "if it's not fun, you're doing it wrong", so what I am thinking about - and I am not sure how effective it'd be - is to both read and listen to great audio books in the target langauge, and then read aloud and record the quotes I like the best, and then get feedback from a native speaker on the pronounciation. Reading the same quote (for example a passage of a hundred words) over and over until I get it right. And I have signed up for the free IPA course at Memrise, and am considering buying the IPA set over at Fluent Forever. And then listen and read the 100 most common words and get feedback on my pronounciation on them until they are okay. Not great, but okay.
  3. About the repetition thirty times, have you looked at the forgetting curve. The Leitner repetition system is in large part based on this curve.
  4. P.P.S. I have for long toyed with thought of setting up an offshoring business in Ukraine, beginning with a couple of bright freelancers slash employees, whom gets to B2 or C1 In Norwegian, and then'll do office work a whole lot better than the dull Norwegians they'd replace. I've thought about it for like four or five years. Around Christmas last year there was, a bit to my surprise, a news report on local television of a company that does almost that thing: handling customer calls (!) in Norwegian, instead of just emails, from outside of Kiev. I think we'll see an explosive growth in such businesses. Accounting (with the double-entry bookkeeping system) is in its fundamental way quite similar in many countries, so that's primarily what I've thought about. Not sure how it would float, though. There are bound to be obstacles.
  5. My motivation mainly the pure joy of it. I have a great appetite for books, and I'd like to taste the works of these authors in their original language: Peter Handke, Michel Houellebecq, José Saramago and Snorre Sturlason (who wrote our national epic some thousand years ago, in Old Norse, which is almost like Icelandic). Being able to read and enjoy the language is more important to me than being able to speak it, although it'd be fun to converse. I might do some chatroulette video chats in my target langauges. Perhaps also Verbling. My objective though is reading comprehension, and getting an ok pronounciation would be a bonus. My plan is to learn the thousand most important words, and then read a translated book (for example Eisenthron) that I've read in other langauges. That way contextual clues becomes even easier to pick up, since I've already read it several times over. The other motivation I have for learning languages is getting more familiar with memorization techniques. I know how to learn pi with thousands of digits, but I am not that familiar with the rest of the memorization techniques, and by learning language I'll get accustomed to using them (method of loci based on lexical classes and the first letter of words, and a lot more). I am not there yet; I have barely begun. I've read somewhere that you can run through all the 25 levels of Duolingo in 118 hours, if you're quick, and that will get you to basic speaking ablility. Like you, I am a big fan of dictionaries, especially etymological entries, since it also, indirectly, says something about history. What I am a bit uncertain of though, is if there's something missing from the list I made in the original post. P.S. Impressive TOEFL and GMAT score!
  6. Hey, no problem. Would you mind giving input on the question I raised in the thread I created?
  7. You can paste your Excel vocabulary into Quizlet (it's free), and they also have German and English audio, and Russian also for that matter. If you click play, it will begin to read aloud what's in column a and column b (first and second side of the flashcard). When you are in learning mode, you can also turn on audio, so that the words you revise are read aloud to you. When you add a new word to the deck, you can also choose to auto define the word in Russian, so that you don't have to look up the definition, and the software will read aloud both the German term and the Russian definition. You choose to either make it display only the term, and then you'll write the definition, or only the definition, and then you'll write the term. You can also make it display both the term and definition when looking over the list. Spelling exercise is also an option. If you download the app to your mobile phone, and use a headset, you can revise, with audio, on the subway or train. I'd say the method that makes words stick best, is memorization techniques (the type of technique where you memorize pi with a thousand digits in a couple of days), but the method that is quickest and best for building a large vocabulary, is flashcards, like you make in Quizlet. Combining the two techniques is very effective if there is a word you constantly miss.
  8. In order to acquire new words faster, I would highly recommend downloading a speed reading app to your tablet or phone. It's pretty common to read 150-300 wpm, but after using a speed reading app, you can double that. I read prose at 400 wpm, English prose a little faster than 300 wpm. That's prose with a moderate LIX score (not Shakespeare). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIX When I use the speed reading app, I read at 1500 wpm, but that's only for practise. If admiring the landscape and appreciating the beauty of language is alike, than reading at 1500 wpm is like appreciating the scenery from a rally car. The purpose of reading at extreme speed is only practise, to go 'speed blind'. You should read at approximately 3x your target speed. My target is 500 wpm. It's very uncommon to read prose faster than that, at a comfortable pace. Comprehension begins to plummet when the speed goes higher than 500 wpm. ReadingTrainer (an app) has a PowerReader mode, and there you can adjust the speed, and paste in the text you'd like to lread. If you google speed reading, you can also find websites that lets you paste in text. If you paste your Excel sheet into an flashcard app, I guess speed typing would also be very valuable. Going from 30 to 60 to 90 wpm doesn't require that much practice. Let say that it takes 30 minutes to revise 100 flashcards, that can be then done in 10 minutes. Writing faster than 100 wpm requires a lot of training, but doubling the speed from thirty to sixty wpm is done pretty fast.
  9. Interesting! What's your reading speed in your mother tongue, reading an article of the same kind?
  10. Hmm, what's your reading speed in German, when reading articles in Der Speigel at a comfortable pace? Although you speak English well, the distance between Russian/Ukrainian and German on the Indo-European language tree might play an important role. I had French in junior high instead of German, but with an blink of eye I'll know that abschaum is scum, because it's called avskum in Norwegian, making contextual clues very easy to pick up.
  11. You have a rich vocabulary with over 15000 words, and many teenagers, born and raised in Germany, wouldn't understand all the words in a difficult newspaper article, so if you enjoy reading Der Spiegel, and can read at a fairly high speed, you can by all means call that fluency. If you want to get an idea of how what the benefits of learning another thousand words would be, you can do this. - Get a frequency word list for German. Add up the number of times the 15000 most common words are used, and divide by the total number of times every single word in the dictionary is used. Do the same with the 16000 most common words. This is by no means exact, of many reasons. What it can do though, is to give a vague idea of the benefits of learning another thousand words. If you want to push your boundaries, you could read a book with a complex and rich language that you've already read in your mother tongue. The percentage of words you'll understand by context is very high, and the vocabulary will grow pretty fast.
  12. Native-language vocabulary size "Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study shows that junior-high students would be able to recognize the meanings of about 10,000–12,000 words" A junior high student can read a newspaper, so 15560 words should be plenty to be able to read a newspaper and understand many of the words you don't know simply from the context. How many words do you read on average to get to 20-30 words you don't understand? And do you have a rudimentary understanding of the 20-30 words simply by context, or are most pretty cryptic?
  13. When learning a new language, for example a Romance language, are there any important things to do besides these? - Learn all the important words in the closed word classes (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions etc) - Learn the grammar - Learn pronunciation - Get a grasp of semantics and syntax - Learn the most important words in the open word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc) - Learn common phrases and idioms (for example it wouldn't be obvious to someone who doesn't speak English what "An arm and a leg" means, despite knowing what each of the words by themselves mean) When that's done, are there any other important things to consider when learning a language?
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