I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch

I'm slowly learning German ... for fun, believe it or not. 

To limit my time commitment I've been mostly studying with lessons on apps or in-person supplemented by YouTube, ChatGPT, DeepL, blogs, an ancient CD-based box set that my well-meaning parents bought in a charity shop, subtitled German-language films and ... Peppa Wutz.

 

I've pushed ahead in some areas, for example by completing Babbel lessons all the way to B2 even though I'm nowhere near speaking at that level, and starting again at A1 even though I'm well past it. Being exposed to the advanced content can give some useful context, and redoing the basics can cement understanding, reinforce learning, and make connections that were missed the first time around.

What I wasn't doing was rote learning verb conjugations, grammatical structures, or vocab lists. And that was fine for a long time, at least until I got good enough to have simple conversations on limited topics using basic sentences and found that I couldn't express myself as clearly or precisely as I wanted to.

So I decided to invest a little in more formal learning. 

I tried reading but nothing inspired me. German has many rules to apply in many situations but with many exceptions and none of the material I found described that in a way that crystalised it for me. Different authors focussed on different aspects and I felt that I needed to distil something out of them that I could use for myself. 

So I tried writing those dry tables of articles, pronouns, and adjective endings, and attempting to memorise them. That also did not work for me at all. I couldn't find motivation to do it, representing the exceptions was tricky and, afterwards, the information didn't come back to me easily, if at all.

However, an advantage of writing it down, and it being on paper, is that it provides scope for rich annotations. I could juxtapose related items, layer colour and side annotations on top, and filter for only the things that I felt were relevant to my precise need.

But it wasn't enough. 

So I tried creating visualisations, just like I would at work or in a talk when I have a complicated topic to get my head around. Finding the right representation of the space can unlock understanding and aid retention and, after quite a lot of experimentation I was able to make it work for adjective endings.

The sketch below combines regularity in the form of the tables with a decision tree for choosing the right table and some side notes for exceptions and other patterns.

That worked for me and, as I was struggling with conjunctions, I made another sketch to help me remember the different syntactic structures and examples of Konjunktionen, Konjunktionaladverben, and Subjunktionen:

I probably made five different iterations of each of these before I got to one that I felt was right. No doubt that process aided my learning as much as the finished article helps my recall. What I'm looking for is something that I can imagine later, that contains a low-friction route to the information that I need.

Take the conjunction image. There are three classes, represented by their initial letters because that's enough of a reminder. The letters stand for the conjunction in the syntax reminders, for example H, K H  means Haupsatz, Konjunktion Haupsatz. The sentences on the left highlight the key grammatical elements and the conjunction words on the right are grouped in ways that make sense to me — I aligned before, after, and during because they are semantically related and if I can remember what type of conjunction one of them is, I can remember all.

It was my teacher Caro's reaction to the sketchnotes ("Sie sind etwas ganz Besonderes!") that made me think they might be worth sharing. Not the content, particularly, unless you happen to be learning German and have the same failings as me, but as a reminder that learning is not linear and that it's fine to find your own way.

That last point is key in my learning in general. I find that I learn better when I make connections between areas of the subject matter. Rote learning fails in that respect for me, learning by doing, cross-referencing doing with book work, cycling through both, reflecting on my problems, and revisiting and reworking material tend to serve me better.

The soundtrack to this post is I wish I could Sprechen Sie Deutsch, and I do wish that, but I'll settle for the progress I've made in the way that I've made it for now.
Images: Discogs, Amazon 

P.S. I hadn't thought about I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch by FSK  in years until I started this post and only found out while writing that it's a cover version.