7 ms·
Rinse lather repeat. It took about 2 years before I was confident enough in my German skills to consider myself conversationally fluent at a beginner level. I s
by ozzmotik 10y ago
Rinse lather repeat.
It took about 2 years before I was confident enough in my German skills to consider myself conversationally fluent at a beginner level. I spent four years of devoted study (yes high school) to get the concepts down, and now I've basically tried to maintain it in the 8 years since. For me it was important to focus on syntax and semantics more than vocabulary. It's super easy to find a translation for concrete concepts like "dog", "cartographer", and so forth, but it's rather difficult to find an elegant translation of advanced concepts like expressing conditional circumstances, and all those fun different tenses and voices. Repetition of vocabulary and all that helps to build up conversational awareness, but I find that it's important to focus on how the pieces are supposed together more than the individual pieces themselves. But hey, ymmv
- ozzmotik 10y agoI'm just overly fond of the procedural and qualitative approach of grammar and syntax first, but I know that runs contrary to how other individuals tend to acquire language. You do have to find some individual pieces beforehand so you can have pieces to put together, so obviously vocabulary itself functions as an important part, but I find that you are more likely to become fluent in a language when you've trained yourself to think with the logical approach that the language you're learning utilizes.