Will Duolingo actually help me read Tractatus or Being and Time in the original German? I feel like a lot is lost in English translation, rendering a lot of the text nonsensical.
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Will Duolingo actually help me read Tractatus or Being and Time in the original German?
Entschuldigung, wo ist der Taxistand?
Lel, guess that's a no
I wish I could tell you I'm on unit 3 or 4. You're better off with an immersion program if you're serious. Or asking
Are you saying you wish you could tell him that you were only on a beginning unit of Duolingo's program (but in fact the advanced stages of the program are quite shit), or that you wish you could tell him the answer (but in fact you don't know the answer because you are only on a beginning unit of Duolingo's program and don't know what lies beyond)?
Nta but it's obviously the latter
Download German for Reading by Karl Sandberg
Whenever you encounter a new word/phrase or a word that is used in a new context, make an anki card which contains that sentence, highlight the word you wish to learn and then put the English translation on the other side of the card
Afterwards you will have a vocabulary of maybe 1000 or so words and another 500 that aren’t so familiar to you
You need to increase your very small vocabulary and to do so you need to read a lot
The thing with vocabulary acquisition is that you need to see the words in
context and you need to see them often
As a beginner German reader you need to start with simple texts which permit you to read as many words as possible per day, it’s not about the difficulty but just exposure
I suggest reading Harry Potter
Someone who finishes German for Reading and then completes the Harry Potter series is going to have a far better grasp of the language than somebody who manages to make their way through beyond good or evil in the same amount of time
But Harry Potter sucks! Can't I just read Faust or something?
Faust is too short
After you finish German for Reading your foundations will still be quite weak
There will be basic prepositions which you've memorised but you cannot instantaneously understand them when you encounter them
You will have memorised a certain sentence structure but you won't be able to immediately intuit their meaning nor even recognise them
Maybe you can see an article and after a bit of thinking, remember the gender and case but you don't immediately know it
Reading something like Harry Potter will enable you to strengthen these foundations because you will encounter them so often
The reason why reading 3500 or so pages of Harry Potter is better than reading 3500 pages or so of different authors is because you will spend more time deepening and strengthening your foundations instead of having to constantly readjust to each new author's vocabulary
Something you will realise pretty early on is that as a beginner reading in a foreign language, every time you start reading a new author you will be hit with a LOT of new vocabulary
Authors will share the same core vocabulary but depending on the genre/topic/age of the book that core vocabulary can be surprisingly small
Harry Potter is also good because the grammar gets more complex with each book and the vocabulary increases as well
This means you can have as smooth of a progression as possible
Forget it, I'm not reading genre sloppa. Also have you never heard of the memory palace technique?
I think learning languages through memorisation is a huge mistake and just doesn't work
you can't read faust straight away but my god please don't waste your time reading the entire harry potter series lmao, find some other books (possibly in translation) with relatively simple vocabulary. I read the complete stories and novels of Kafka in French, for example, which took me from lower intermediate to advanced (while studying grammar, listening to podcasts, etc. too).
OP i did nearly exactly this and have lots more progress than with any class or duolingo.
try it lol, reading is good practice but also you want it to be level appropriate if you want it to actually be effective.
Agree with Sandberg, however I hate Anki and never do / did it for any language, also don't expect to LIKE Sandberg just suffer through it.
I hate the "highlight the word" method, maybe it works for some people but tbh the answer is ALWAYS more comprehensive input. Just stop caring about having to look up words when you have to look them up. Your brain understands how to learn a language, it's primed to remember shit if you just encounter it a bunch of times, literally a magical device that goes "Zerknupfung?? Why does he keep feeding us Zerknupfung??? I guess we'll just remember this forever, he seems to like it a lot."
Just BOOTSTRAP yourself to the point that you understand basically what is going on grammatically in a sentence, and by basically I mean don't read in "chunks" and "try to feel your way around" but also don't obsess over knowing every single rule from memory. Just know what is going on, so when a sentence is a shitpile of ambiguity you can intuitively go "this is obviously the subject, this is obviously the verb, this is obviously the prefix of the verb, this is obviously an adverbial phrase" and bracket out the ambiguities so you know what to actually look up and can do so efficiently.
Once you can do this to a decent level, you can literally just take any text short of a Heidegger-type author (who uses language extremely deliberately to draw attention to the deeper meanings of ordinary terms, which adds an additional layer of complexity that may be hard to track) and read it extensively. Who cares if you have to look up every other word? Who cares if the words you look up are words you already encountered in Sandberg? What are you going to do, cry and shit your pants that your brain wasn't the perfect Sandberg-assimilating machine? Just keep reading anyway. Eventually it'll go from being every other word to one word every sentence, then one every few sentences, etc. And this is not a linear but an exponential process since your brain is soaking up so many secret patterns in the background and getting a "feel" for the language. Sometimes I get sick of reading a language and just stop reading it at all for a while, and when I come back to it, I'm somehow 10x better than I was. I call this the Vegeta Principle.
Frick Harry Potter bullshit too. Just read whatever you want, although obviously something with "steady, medium-level," non-literary prose is better than an ultra-dense philosophical thicket. Also fiction is always harder because 70% of the vocab you're learning is useless trash vocab like "The thicket rustled with the chirping of wrens and I put on my mittens" instead of core vocab. Just read whatever you want honestly, even Heidegger.
Also if you read Heidegger in parallel English/German, or at least have an eye for when you should look up key load-bearing German terms he uses, with the M&R translation (because of its good explanatory annotations), you should be fine. Same with Wittgenstein, there's a reason most good editions are parallel with Anscombe's translations on the right. You just need the load-bearing terms to clear up ambiguities. That sort of reading (in parallel while actually paying attention to the German when your gut tells you it'll clarify some ambiguous English expression in the translation) is itself a good way to practice German, it's basically vocab practice.
Seriously, reiterating what I said above: Frick Harry Potter. Frick this "if you just [run some horrible ball-breaking odious gauntlet you have no innate interest in], you will be good." If you're going to suffer ANYWAY, why not suffer because you're reading something interesting but challenging, instead of suffering because you're reading something uninteresting but not challenging?
The whole Harry Potter meme makes me sick. I wish Harry Potter were real so I could beat the living shit out of him.
I find that duolingo and language apps become stale and the progression slows. At a certain point when I understand a very rudimentary amount of vocabulary and grammar I just go straight to reading short stories from my target language that aren't too dense. I'll look up things I don't understand and cycle through all my short stories and reread all of them until I understand each completely.
Ambitious
I'm learning French right now to read Stranger in French, I'm one month in and can understand a few things with the help of intuition
Doin it wrong OP
>Duolingo
bruh
no. ignore the advice given to you by other morons in this thread, it doesn't matter. they are likely monolingual amerimutt morons who don't know what they're talking about. I am literally engaged to a German woman and she says she can't read Hegel, Wagner, Heidegger etc. in the original German and she often peruses English translations to aid her understanding. of course this truthnuke will fall on deaf ears of IQfy morons who SURELY learned to read the classics in German after a monthly streak on Duolingo. if you've missed the critical period in language education you are never going to make it
>wife is illiterate as per fiqh
>can't read heidegger
>blames it on the opacity of the original german
I said we're engaged, not married. your inability to parse even this short paragraph written in English makes me seriously doubt your credentials when it comes to German
I am sorry, when I read things by subhumans I aggressively purge them from my mind so as not to clutter it with junk data about the contents of moronic consciousnesses ("This moron says he likes blue things better than red things," "This moron has a fiancee I don't care about," etc.), but I am tired from a long day of reading German so I slipped and was over-aggressive and began purging all knowledge and memory of you even before I finished writing my response to you, which was rude.
>but I am tired from a long day of reading German
And how did you like Die unendliche Geschichte?
I've heard this shit from a lot of German philosophy students but every single professor reads them in German.
Why do people still read the Tractatus if Wittgenstein himself said it was nonsense?
Wittgenstein was wrong therefore it's important to study the works he thought were wrong because they were right
Mahler burnt all his chamber music. Sometimes the creator is just wrong.
I'm looking into German for Reading and they don't introduce the cases until much later? Is that a mistake? It's only after like 1/2 way through that they tell you to learn the cases of nouns from the nouns themselves and not the article/pronoun
Probably for the troons
>Will Duolingo actually help me
no
details: https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/why-shouldnt-i-just-keep-using-an-app-instead
Is AJATT incomprehensible input method?
ajatt is about comprehensible input.
https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/what-is-comprehensible-input
https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/introduction-to-learning-japanese#how-to-immerse
>Duolingo
AHAHHAHAHA
Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language.
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