“You!”
In my list of basic words to learn, I suggest learning subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) using pictures. Instead of “‘Ich’ is the German word for ‘I,’” I suggest memorizing “‘Ich’ is the German word for [Guy pointing to himself].”
But this may seem like a trivial point. After all, it’s only a small handful of words, and what’s the harm in memorizing just a few translations?
Just a short post that should prove useful if you’ve had trouble finding good pictures for prepositions (on, over, between) or directions (up, down, top, bottom). I found a lovely image of 29 prepositions in English on a language learning site for French students of English, Angloxchange. It has a bunch of English labels on it, but I cut the image up into little chunks, so you should be able to drag and drop your favorites into Anki.
You’ll find the (cut up) image over here
New: A reader just suggested a Slovak website with 12 preposition images in the forms of cute sheep. If you prefer sheep to red balls, check them out here.
A reader who was getting a pretty good vocabulary base asked me how to start developing a base in German grammar, and I took the opportunity to write out a pretty complete reply. The principles should apply to any grammar you’re learning (and if you don’t see how, please post a comment or email me so I can make sure that I’m not missing something). Enjoy!
In the last Q&A, I talked about getting words in context from Google images + Google translate. Let’s talk about this a bit, because it’s an extraordinary pair of tools.
Q: How do I learn abstract words like “to seem” and “to be”? A: Up until you have enough vocabulary to handle a monolingual dictionary, you’ll be reliant on context. My favorite source of words in context is the basic (old) version of Google Images plus Google Translate (I use the google toolbar to dump the Google images search results url directly into google translate). This will give me a bunch of pictures with translated captions underneath. Pick one that you like and turn it into a fill-in-the blank card. In Russian, my example for “seem” translates to “this house seems small“. I already know house and small and I remember enough about the meaning of the sentence that those two other words plus the associated picture from google images that the meaning stays pretty clear. Once that sentence makes sense to me then I can go in the other direction and have “to seem” on the front, and on the back my example sentence. In that card, I’m training myself to more-or-less remember in which context I’ve heard that word before.
Basically, you use pictures to provide concrete anchor points, and you build bridges between them with connecting words (He is a boy, He is mean, the dog wants a bone). Once you’re comfy with those words then you build bridges on top of your bridges (he is drowsy = he wants to sleep a little, etc). The structure gets bigger and bigger underneath, and eventually you can handle a monolingual dictionary and things get easier. It’s a fun process, once you get used to it.
Q: I speak German fluently, but I have a lot of ingrained mistakes. Can I fix them? A: Write, write, write. At your level, it’s how you figure out exactly where your ‘fossils’ are. Routinely write out a 5-minute journal in German and submit it to Lang-8.com. Get your correction and put it in Anki as a fill-in-the-blank-type card wherever you make a mistake. Get a daily Anki habit going.
The program will automatically focus on the more difficult stuff, because you’ll make more mistakes with it, and so you’ll see those cards more often, and it should pretty quickly replace your bad habits with good ones.
I’ve been getting some really great questions via the contact form, and I thought some of the answers might be helpful for others, so I’m taking some of the questions and answers and putting them here! Today we’ll cover a few questions regarding grammar.
Q: How do you use Anki to work on grammar?
A: Most of the time, I use fill-in-the-blank style cards - the sort of stuff you’d see in any grammar workbook (in fact, I usually just copy a few examples from whatever grammar workbook I end up buying):
Front: Right now, he (to walk) to school. Back: Right now, he is walking to school.
Front: Right now, he is walking ___ school. Back: Right now, he is walking to school.
Q: What about verb conjugations? Do you do conjugation tables?
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