In the middle of July, I was in Florida with a couple of people to see the last shuttle launch. While we were in Florida, we also visited Universal Studies for two days. Somewhat surprisingly to me, Universal Studios was absolutely flooded with people from foreign countries. I would probably estimate that out of 10 people, perhaps 2 were speaking English.

It just so happened that there was a German family behind us when we were in line for the Harry Potter ride. We were in this line for nearly an hour and a half, so I had plenty of time to covertly listen in on their conversations. (You know you’ve done it before, so don’t act like you haven’t.) The frustrating bit, however, was that despite untold hours of learning German, listening to German, reading German, I could understand nearly nothing of what they said. I’d occasionally catch a word here and there, but mostly it was like listening to a language I’d never studied at all. Their accent was one I wasn’t entirely accustomed to, but even with that in mind, I found the experience to be really, really frustrating. Living in southern Ohio, it’s not often that I get to hear German spoken on the fly by people in “real life” (okay, so it basically never happens). Hitting a brick wall while in Florida has me thinking that I need to be listening to less “news” type materials and more stuff similar to how people really talk, like in movies and T.V. shows.

Have you had any similar experiences where you thought, alright, have I learned anything in all this time? The whole thing had me seriously considering throwing my hands up in the air and calling it quits. But I’m far too stubborn for that.

Languages contain many nuances which can be misunderstood or overlooked by the non-native language student. Without the ability to comprehend these nuances, it can be very difficult to know how to tackle them. So you’ve looked in a dictionary and found a direct translation for every word in the sentence, you’ve applied your reasonable grasp of German grammar, but you still can’t make sense of that one word in the sentence and your native speaking friends or German tutor tell you your translation doesn’t sound quite right. The chances are that you are dealing with a modal particle – a word which gives a certain nuance to the German sentence – words such as doch, ja, eben, halt. These words may appear in your dictionary with English translations, but a dictionary is unlikely to tell you how these words work. Modal particles can either stress the focus of a sentence or express the attitude or mood of the speaker and are essential to German language – there may be more words in the English language which might appear to make English a more expressive language, but German more than makes up for it through the varied deployment of these tricky modal particles.

Mastery of German modal particles is essential for everyday communication in German speaking countries. Although their use tends to be more colloquial, the huge number of levels of expression possible through their use makes them very important. If you listen carefully to a native speaker, you will often hear them say the word ‘mal’ (regularly shortened to ‘ma’) and other similar words (which may not make any sense to you). This is evidence that in order to sound authentically German, you need to try to chuck in some of these words, but it’s not just as simple as learning a word which has an equivalent English translation – you need to understand how these things are used!

So how do they work? To get some idea of what we’re dealing with, here’s a table of the most common modal particles:

Let’s look at the first one in the table, ‘aber’, which of course means ‘but’ or ‘however’ – well, not in all cases. Look at the sentence below:

“es war aber sehr ermüdend”

In this example, the word ‘indeed’ could actually be used to translate the word ‘aber’ (i.e. “it was very tiring indeed”). However, when the word ‘aber’ is used as a modal particle, its grammatical function is to stress the focus of the sentence. Modal particles used in this way generally appear in spoken and more colloquial contexts. As such, this stress is usually expressed in written English through the use of italics. The example sentence is therefore more likely to be translated as [it was very tiring].

But what about the other functions of modal particles? The word ‘doch’ is probably one of most useful words in German and you’ll hear it all the time. It can be used to counter a false statement or a negative question and should be interpreted as something along the lines of “on the contrary”. For example, the negative question “Besitzt du kein Auto?” [Don’t you own a car?] is best answered with either with ‘nein’ [no] or ‘doch’. If you answer the question with ‘ja’, when you do in fact have a car, a speaker of German may think you are saying “no, I don’t own a car”. If you don’t own a car, the answer is nein, but if you do, the answer should be doch. It all seems very confusing, but the word doch as an answer to this question would be translated as yeah [I do have a car] (with stress placed on the contradictory ‘yeah’ when spoken). As is the case with ‘aber’, ‘doch’ is used more in spoken than written German.

Sticking to the word ‘doch’, modal particles can actually be combined as in:

“Versuchen Sie es doch mal!”

The sentence means “Just try it!” In the English translation, the exclamation mark is enough to convey the idea expressed in the German. The ‘doch mal’ is there to emphasise the idea that the speaker thinks the addressee really should try it. This example shows that the subtle nuances conveyed by modal particles are sometimes impossible to translate fully into English. This poses a huge challenge in the field of language translation, as there is often no single correct translation. As long as you can understand the ideas and emotions being expressed in the German and express it satisfactorily in English, you can’t go far wrong.

If you want your German to sound more authentic, it is important to learn how to use all of these modal particles. Many grammar books clearly explain their proper use, but it can be difficult to understand them fully without listening to how native speakers use them. If you work on your accent and perfect your grammar, all you need do is incorporate some modal particles and you might pass as a German!

This is a guest post written by Ed Langley on behalf of Codex Global language translation.

And then I sort of stopped.

It seems to happen to the best learners (and me, too, and I’m certainly not one of the best). I’ll be doing great, and then something will knock me off course. Sometimes it’s easy to hop right back on and keep going. Other times, “things” keep getting in the way, day after day; and like any habit, the further away you get from it, the harder it is to start back up.

I was doing well with Read More or Die, and had worked through a German book in relatively short order. I had just been connected with a Russian pen-pal via eTandem. Then I had company at my house for a few days, so I shelved my studies for a bit so as to avoid looking like an antisocial language geek. After that, life just kept getting in my way, I lost the habit (obsession?) of working on my languages, and here I find myself, nearly a month later, having done more or less nothing. Awful!

So, it’s time to get back to it. My current short-term plans include:

• continuing the active wave of Russisch ohne Mühe
• getting back to writing to my German tutor and going over his corrections
• touching base with French, which I’ve largely neglected lately in favor of Russian

I also need to look a bit more at Rocket Italian, as they offered me a free subscription to their basic Italian course in return for a review, but more on that later.

(And yes, I’m well aware that I just said Italian, which is / was a language that was not on my list. If you all don’t know that I suffer greatly from wanderlust, I’m not sure what blog you’ve been reading. Gimme’ a break.)

While it started on the 1st, it’s not too late to sign up. There were some people on the HTLAL forums who seemed reluctant to take part because they knew they couldn’t read hundreds of pages in their foreign languages in one month, but that’s sort of missing the point. It’s not about “winning” (there aren’t any prizes other than bragging rights), it’s about reading. Some friendly competition is a good way to kick yourself into gear.

If you’re interested in taking part, check out the Read More or Die challenge blog. You’ll want to follow TadokuBot on Twitter to see updates, and you’ll probably want to follow lordsilent as well, who’s behind the challenge.

1. I really do hate the verb “tweeting.” Oh well.

After seeing an excellent response to a question about the active wave, I took a look in my Dutch book to see what it had to say:

Use the following procedure in the second wave of your study:

1. Read the lesson, repeating each sentence once. If you have the recordings, listen to them carefully.
2. Cover the Dutch text and try to reconstruct it, looking only at the English sentences. Make an effort to do this both out loud and in writing. This is the most important part of the second wave!
3. After you are finished, uncover the Dutch text and carefully correct any errors you have made.

After each new lesson, you will be told which earlier lesson you are to review in this precise way. This second wave of your study will lead to an active and, in a very short time, spontaneous knowledge of Dutch.

This is a bit clearer than some Assimil courses, but it still has nothing on this wonderful response provided by lingoleng at the HTLAL forums (reposted with his consent):

I can only give some hints, but what you do should really depend on your own needs, not on anything else.

Second wave wants two things, both are very easy to understand:

- repetition
After two or three months, however long it took you to get to lesson 50, you have forgotten many words and phrases of the previous lessons. So you have to refresh them by going through the old lessons again. Very simple, no problem here.

- activation
After the reading and listening of the first wave you start producing sentences, speaking and probably writing. Again, very simple concept. How to do it? Everything is allowed and possible, it depends entirely on you and your needs.

Look at the English text of the first lesson. Try to translate it without looking at the German text. A piece of cake? Not as easy as you expected? Oh man, I don’t remember anything at all? Well, whatever, no problem at all. Of course you use the written text in the book as a tool for correcting your translation, what else? You can use the audio just as well, but this is not as easy, and not necessary. (Just listen to the audio on another day, never a bad idea.) But you have to check if your sentences are right. That’s the most important thing, of course. What if you’ve made a mistake, or two, or it is all nonsense? No problem again, that’s why you do the repetition, look at what is wrong, say the correct version several times, and go on.

Next sentence a complete failure? Well, who cares, you are learning the language, that’s why you do it. If you write your first try and make a mistake, or several, no problem, but in this case you write the correct version twice, or three times, now you’ll know it. For a while
Assimil says you can listen to the audio before starting your active work, so you can do this. Or you try to get it right without a previous short time reactivation, but as repetition is one of your primary goals it is not so important whether you get it right without listening before, these are all minor details.
. . .
You see, what I propose is a little bit different than only remembering the phrase by heart. Learning by heart is not a bad thing, really not, but only if you understand what you remember. So if you have the automatic reaction: Oh, I remember very well what was written on this page, it was the strange and very queer expression “Haben Sie Hunger”, no idea why and how, but this is it,- you get a point in a multiple choice test but not as many language points, I guess.

To make a long post short: You want repetition, and you get it. You want active skills, and you have to work for them. And the exact procedure is not a law, do what you want to do, or have to do. A third wave, or even a forth one, may be what makes the difference between a successful language learner and a less successful one, but I would never confess that I ever needed a fifth wave, not me.

I really liked his answer, as it shines a bright light on an issue I think some people might run into with Assimil courses: they see the active phase as a “test” rather than a process. They go to their active lesson, read the English, and if they don’t come up with the perfect foreign language equivalent right away – panic! There’s no need to be so harsh on yourself. With the active wave, unless you have a photographic memory, you’re going to make mistakes, and that’s fine; the whole point is to see the material again, and to start playing with it in your mind. If you’re moving bits of the language around in your mind, trying to produce something, it’s worthwhile, even if many of your attempts have errors.

It’s basically a bit like highlighting words on a page, and then magically pulling all of those words off the page to instantly put them in a list, at which point you can do whatever it is you want to do – add definitions to the list, look them up and add them to Anki, etc.

Here’s how to do it (and please note, unless someone knows a workaround, you’ll need Microsoft Word near the end):

1. Take whatever you want to read, copy it, and paste it into a word processing app. Google Docs will work fine for the initial steps.

2. Select all of the text (Ctrl+A in Google Docs), and remove all formatting (Ctrl+). You can also find Clear Formatting under the Format menu.

3. Go through the article, select any word you want to grab, and underline it (Ctrl+U). You can also bold it, or change it to a particular color. You can use whatever you want as your word marker as long as you’re consistent.

4. Unfortunately, there’s only one program that I’ve found so far that does the next step easily: Microsoft Word. I’m using Microsoft Word 2007; I’m not sure if older versions of the program have the option needed. For the fourth step, copy your marked up text and paste it into Word. Then, select one of your underlined words, then use Select Text with Similar Formatting.

This will select all of the words you marked up.

5. Copy the selected text in Word, and then paste into your word processor of choice (I usually head back to Google Docs at this point).

Rather than the words showing up in a list, they’re automatically formatted in a list, one word / expression per line.

Hopefully, this is a bit easier and quicker than highlighting a word, copying it, going to your text editor, pasting it, and then going back to your article.

(If anyone knows of an open source application that has an option like Word’s “Select Text with Similar Formatting,” please let me know; I checked out Open Office’s Find and Replace options, and didn’t see anything that worked.)

I’ve been trying to decide on how I want to rearrange my language learning schedule. While I’m making progress, certainly, I’m not entirely happy with my haphazard way of hopping from one language to another. Some languages tend to get lost in the mess, and as of late, French has been suffering quite a lot – not to mention poor Spanish, which seems to have wholly vanished from my studies. I’m not frustrated enough to slash any more from my current list, but I’m going to have to put my current list into some sort of overall structure to please myself. I’m just not entirely sure how I’m going to do that.

Somewhat ironically, in poking around in my archives, I discovered that I faced a similar dilemma back in June of 2009 – actually, the exact same dilemma: how to handle trying to learn multiple languages at once (while outright ignoring the oft repeated advice, “don’t! Stick to one at a time!”).

Did I settle on a system? Yes – the system that Geoff (Confessions of a Language Addict) recommended to me over a year ago. That is to say, no system at all, or, as he put it: “… if you don’t need to know any of these languages, you’re best off setting your studies by inspiration than a schedule.” As he also said, it’s not particularly efficient, and I’m not going to win any “learn a language in 6 months!” contests, but I’m enjoying myself and making progress, so I’m happy.

Occasionally¹, I’ll go through a phase during which I feel like I should be doing more with my language learning – be more efficient, be more devoted, etc. Whenever I’ve hit such a phase, I’ve tried to bring more structure to the table. And, every time I’ve done this, I ultimately end up burning out and doing a whole lot of nothing for a while. As many people (even I) have said, if language learning is a hobby, it certainly shouldn’t feel like work.

In line with my new devotion to rather haphazard learning, I’ve been continuing my slow, slow plod through Russisch ohne Mühe. Whenever I finish this Assimil course, I may very well be eligible to be entered into the Guinness World Records for the longest amount of time taken to finish one language course. Seriously. I’ve been working through this course off and on for at least a few years now (largely off, I will admit, as I’ll work on it some, and then it will be shelved for a long time). I’m now up to lesson 70, and am now opting to actually follow Assimil’s advice: do a lesson a day, and if I’ve forgotten material in a lesson, so be it. I can always review it later, but the show (course) must go on! No more getting hung up on one lesson for a week.

How are you all doing in your studies?

1. Apparently once a year or so!