Comment by Alex-Programs

Comment by Alex-Programs 3 days ago

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> Learn to speak German like a 5 year old

This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".

There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.

I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.

marssaxman 3 days ago

Thanks - I'll give your plugin a try.

Along similar lines, I subscribed to r/nederlands, so that random reddit scrolling features intermittent Dutch practice. I figure that this sort of everyday exposure will help me build a subconscious, pattern-driven sense of grammar and word usage.

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  • Alex-Programs 3 days ago

    Yeah, it's been kinda interesting to see the effect of Nuenki actually.

    I haven't been doing much proper German studying for a while - partially because I've been focused on Nuenki. However, I've been getting into it again recently, and I'm going to go to a language exchange.

    There are a lot of sentences I can intuitively just sorta understand, even if I might not be able to tell you what a certain word or grammatical feature is. I think it's quite useful for getting you over the mental block of "ah I don't follow it" to getting the gist. I wanted to find something on the German Wikipedia a week ago, and I was able to navigate it as if it were all in English - even though, if you asked me what a specific word meant, I probably wouldn't know.

    You definitely need to pair it with something with more active recall, though. My passive vocabulary is much larger than my active one after this break.

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patapong 3 days ago

I think this is a brilliant idea, congrats on building it! Will try it out as well. I think some passive exposure to dutch is exactly what I need.

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