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Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of cours

Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer. Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier". At the beginning of learning a language, reading texts is too slow. In that phase, memorizing and practicing vocabulary or short translations (like Duolingo, which I can wholeheartedly recommend) are a good start. In my experience, especially from learning English, it's a good idea to not look up every unknown word when reading. You quickly develop a sense of which words or grammatical concepts are important for the meaning of a sentence. If you see a new word in different contexts a few times, you may get curious enough to look it up. Or you already have a sense of its meaning.

RightMillennial 8y ago
I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I can't imagine reading a foreign language and surmising what a word means without a definition.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  I won't say it's easy, but it's easier than you might think. Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
- the_duke 8y ago
  When I learn a new language I always start with learning the 1000 most used words without reading much/any text. Knowing those will usually get your comprehension to a surprisingly high level. You can start filling in the gaps from there.
- ramblerman 8y ago
  lingq is a great resource to consume lots of content in foreign languages at the right level.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  That's why I propose a two-phased strategy where the first phase is dominated by drilling and the second phase is dominated by reading and immersing.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Lots of reading is how my high school English became adequate enough to write a Ph. D. thesis. As soon as I started reading books, the language just clicked. Before that it was just endless amounts of grammar and vocabulary. Also reading something interesting is a bit more engaging than processing endless amounts of meaningless dialogs and other examples from grammar books. The first book you pick up will be a bit of a struggle but that is kind of the point. It gets progressively easier. I remember doing something similar with French and being able to process a simple novel but sadly I never pushed through and I've since forgotten most of my high-school French. A few tips, for reading. 1) don't use translation dictionaries and instead look up words in the native dictionary. E.g. Merriam Webster is great for English. English words explained in English gives you a good sense of the full context of the word. It's all about getting a sense of context of words and constructs. 2) So, try figuring out things from their context. Language has lots of redundancies and you can sort of skim a sentence and get a rough idea of what it means even if it contains verbs and nouns you have never seen. A fun little exercise is transposing all the verbs in a sentence with something non-sensical like "fu--". Many sentences continue to make way more sense than they should after that. 3) Languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. have lots of common roots. This can help you as well. Understanding the etymology of words that look similar across languages can help as well. E.g. English has lots of nautical terms adapted from Dutch, lots of French words that the Normans introduced and quite a bit of viking stuff as well. I actually picked up some Swedish when I was living there a long time ago; enough to be able to process simple Danish and Norwegian as well. That being said, my German still sucks even after living in Berlin for many years. So do as I say, and not as I do ...
- xaedes 8y ago
  My tip for learning and understanding new words from (nearly) any language: Looking up their etymology. Seemingly arbitrary words suddenly make sense and the story behind it makes you remember them and connects them to other words. Also it is so much more interesting than just looking up some definition or word-by-word translation.

RightMillennial 8y ago

I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I can't imagine reading a foreign language and surmising what a word means without a definition.

Baeocystin 8y ago
I won't say it's easy, but it's easier than you might think. Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
the_duke 8y ago
When I learn a new language I always start with learning the 1000 most used words without reading much/any text. Knowing those will usually get your comprehension to a surprisingly high level. You can start filling in the gaps from there.
ramblerman 8y ago
lingq is a great resource to consume lots of content in foreign languages at the right level.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
That's why I propose a two-phased strategy where the first phase is dominated by drilling and the second phase is dominated by reading and immersing.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

Lots of reading is how my high school English became adequate enough to write a Ph. D. thesis. As soon as I started reading books, the language just clicked. Before that it was just endless amounts of grammar and vocabulary. Also reading something interesting is a bit more engaging than processing endless amounts of meaningless dialogs and other examples from grammar books. The first book you pick up will be a bit of a struggle but that is kind of the point. It gets progressively easier. I remember doing something similar with French and being able to process a simple novel but sadly I never pushed through and I've since forgotten most of my high-school French. A few tips, for reading. 1) don't use translation dictionaries and instead look up words in the native dictionary. E.g. Merriam Webster is great for English. English words explained in English gives you a good sense of the full context of the word. It's all about getting a sense of context of words and constructs. 2) So, try figuring out things from their context. Language has lots of redundancies and you can sort of skim a sentence and get a rough idea of what it means even if it contains verbs and nouns you have never seen. A fun little exercise is transposing all the verbs in a sentence with something non-sensical like "fu--". Many sentences continue to make way more sense than they should after that. 3) Languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. have lots of common roots. This can help you as well. Understanding the etymology of words that look similar across languages can help as well. E.g. English has lots of nautical terms adapted from Dutch, lots of French words that the Normans introduced and quite a bit of viking stuff as well. I actually picked up some Swedish when I was living there a long time ago; enough to be able to process simple Danish and Norwegian as well. That being said, my German still sucks even after living in Berlin for many years. So do as I say, and not as I do ...

xaedes 8y ago
My tip for learning and understanding new words from (nearly) any language: Looking up their etymology. Seemingly arbitrary words suddenly make sense and the story behind it makes you remember them and connects them to other words. Also it is so much more interesting than just looking up some definition or word-by-word translation.