improve my German

This is another goal that’s been on my 43 Things list forever. For years, I didn’t make that much progress. Every once in awhile, I’d fire up my copy of The Rosetta Stone (German) and work through part of a lesson. The problem was it was boring, deathly boring.

When I when was considering upgrading my laptop to OS X Lion last summer, I did an inventory of programs I had that wouldn’t run under Lion because Apple no longer was including a PowerPC emulator. My ancient Adobe Creative Suite, scanner software, and The Rosetta Stone fell into that camp. My copy actually included both Windows and Mac versions of the software. I could have run it in my Windows emulator, but I thought it was time for something more engaging.

Newer versions of The Rosetta Stone sounded better, but software seller does not provide an upgrade path and wasn’t very sympathetic. If you’ve ever looked at their software or bought it, you know that it’s quite expensive. Not pleased with their response, I decided to look for alternatives. I ended up buying a 10-lesson set of German from Tell Me More.

Like Rosetta Stone, you can sign up for online lessons, but it is more expensive than outright buying the software unless you are able to work through everything in a few months. Buying the software was expensive, but I found the variety of exercises and structuring much more interesting. There were crossword puzzles, videos where you became one of the actors, movies to watch, Hangman, dictation, multiple choice exercises, sentence reordering—all kinds of things. The speech recognition seemed better too and there were explicit exercises in how to make specific sounds, as well as doing entire sentences or words.

I’ve really been enjoying it. Since purchasing it in the summer, I generally spend at least 6 to 8 hours a month working through the material. While they do have a “test” to assess your current level, and mine put me somewhere around Level 6 (of 10), I decided to start with Lesson 1 and review things. I will say that having prior experience of German was helpful. I think if you were starting out with a blank slate, the “lesson” plan I was following would be difficult and you do need to repeat some of the exploratory dialogue exercises in order to see the full range of possibilities. I’m making good progress. I’m most of the way now through Level 2 and I have actually learned things I didn’t know before. One catch: I have to run it in my Windows emulator. They didn’t have a Mac version you could buy, although you can use the web-based version on a Mac (subscription only).

In another 6 months, I’ll see how far I’ve made it and take one of their formal assessments and see if I’ve improved or not.

I studied four semesters of German at university and then I lived in Switzerland for three years. I almost didn’t learn any German at all while living in Switzerland, because I was too shy to speak German with people I’d see more than once and people always wanted to practice their English on me. I never really lost my intention to improve my grasp of the language, though. To facilitate being successful at improving and retaining my German, I purchased the CD versions of beginning/intermediate German using the Rosetta Stone. This software presents everything in the target language, using audio, video, and text. It’s supposed to simulate the way people learned their first language. I actually quite like it, even though it’s a little on the expensive side.

I’ve had “improving my German” on my list of goals in LifeBalance for over a year. My goal was to do at least an hour a week. Since purchasing Rosetta Stone in November of 2003, I’ve completed two entire units at level one, comprising 22 total lessons, and I’m a quarter of the way through a third unit. Given that each lesson takes about an hour and I’ve had at least 54 weeks, I obviously haven’t been very successful at doing the hour a week. I’d like to improve my consistency at working on my German and then expand my skills to being able to read things at a Reader’s Digest level.