Learning Maths, or other subjects in a foreign language

Hello dear reader.

As my exams become closer in time, I have to learn a huge amount of material. Because of that my language learning gets shortened. So what I have to do is trying to combine both, learning for school and learning Swedish and Turkish.

How am I doing that?

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 15 - 22 - Time

Hello Dear Followers,

I have realized that sometimes it is hard to understand certain texts I listen to. Sometimes I listen more than twenty or thirty times to a particular spoken text while reading until I understand all of the words. Even easy texts.

Especially when learning Turkish that is one of the main issues I deal with because it differs so much from my native language German. Almost no similarity.
The grammar could not be more different, the vocabulary and the vowelharmony are also entirely different from the germanic languages. And I have to get used to it.

90 Day Turkish challenge - Days 8-14 - Know Why you are learning your language!

Hello dear Reader.

In this article I will combine days 8 - 14, Because of a lack of Time, I deeply apologize for that. But I did nothing realy special in those days except listening and reading. Due to this I want to change my 3 month challenge towards weekly reports. I am doing this because I have to write my exams in two months so I will not be able to write dayli texts.

Today I want to talk about knowing your goals, know why you learn a language.
There are many people out there learning language. All of my friends had to learn either Spanish or English or French or Latin in school, I chose Latin. And some of them speak the languages really well. Some of them are even perfectly fluent there. But why is that the case?
Why are there some language learners out there who speak two, three, four or even more languages fluently or at a very high level like B2 or C1?

90 Day Turkish challenge - Day 7 - Going to the Supermarket

Hello dear reader.

On the 7th day of my Turkish challenge I have been at a turkish supermarket and wanted to order and pay in Turkish. So I went there and started speaking with the seller in Turkish. But I recently noticed that the woman was not able to understand me because even though I repeated my order three times she looked at me in a very confused way. Afterwards I switched back to German and told her that I just started learning Turkish and wanted to have a little conversation, but she told me that she could not speak Turkish since she is not from Turkey. After that answer we both had to laugh loudly. So I had to order my food in German before I left the market.

90 Day Turkish language - Day 6 - Textbooks

Hello dear reader.

I am so sorry for not writing articles the last few days, although I wanted to do so every day, but I could not since I was quiet busy those days and there was no internet connection available. In exchange there will be more articles the next days. And I combine some of those days.
Thank you for your comprehension.

I really love Books. I read a lot. So I love going to libraries. At my sixth day I visited the public library and chose some books about the turkish language. There was a textbook from "Klett", a German publisher. It took my interested and I decided going through that book.

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 5 - Turkish songs

Hello dear readers.

I love music. And I use it very often to learn another language. But I started recognizing that it is not always that useful.

When learning Swedish, I listen a lot to swedish bands and I decode their lyrics so I can listen to them while I am reading it. That worked perfectly fine with most bands. The same at learning English. But I tried the same with the turkish language and  I started having problems immediately.
On the one hand, there were great songs, but on the other hand, they had poetic lyrics. But what is the problem with poetic language?

90 Day Turkish challenge - Day 4 - What to do when you are busy

Hey Folks.

As I went about learning Swedish and Turkish, I soon recognized that I did not always have time to do so. So I had the Problem that there were days where I could not do anything. Sometimes I was at vacation with my Partner or with my Family or had visitors. So the only solution therefore was to do something in the morning or in the evening and even then I did not always have the time for it.

So I decided to share my opinion on this topic.

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 3 - Learn from Differences and Similarities.

Merhaba, Hello.

Today I did not have not so much time to actually learn due to I was at a friend's, but I had the opportunity to listen to a lot of turkish songs. I really felt in love with the Band Neyse. Their lyrics are easy understandable and the music style is great, if you like rock music.

I also want to talk a little

Afterwards I just listened actively to a dialog I had decoded on thursday. I want to show you an example of how a decoded text could look like in turkish and what advantage you get by doing it.

Turkish: Yeşil    zetin   var           mı? - Yeşil   zeytin yok. Siyah var.
English: Green  olives  there-is    mı? - Green olives no.   Black there-is. 
Normal: Are there green olives? - (There are) no green olives. There are black ones.

Did you realize the difference?
We have got a diffferent sentence structure (SOV instead of SVO) and we have got the question particle I allready talked about. You also need less words than in english. In the second sentence there is not even a verb.

Because of this difference you may need to write the correct english sentence below, otherwise you might loose the overview.

To think about differences and similarities of two language is very important for me. at the beginning when you want to speak in a new language, you have to translate the sentence from your own language into the new one.

Let us say you want to say:

"Hello, how are you doing?"

 in German. Literally translated it would mean:

"Hallo, wie ist du tuend?"

But in Germany, you would say:

"Hallo, wie geht es dir?"

Literally translated:

"Hello, how goes it you?"

So this is where it is good to know the differences between those languages, that you do not accidentally create a german sentence in the english way. But There are also many things languages have in common which make it ways easier to learn it. For example the word order similar vocabulary.

Many people who learn vocab-lists and grammar rules instead of sentences in context or with full texts have got the problem that they might mix the word order or the way things are said in two languages. I had this problem many times in English and still do, but for example in Swedish I do not.

So comparing structures of two languages will definetly improve your way of speaking and writing. There are several ways to do it. You can chose either single sentences or phrases or do it with whole texts. I use both ways, but more often I do it using whole texts or Dialogs. Thats why I love to decode texts with the Birkenbihl-method. And notice: your brain will do a lot of work for you! You do not have to learn dozends of rules by heart, but only listen and read. If you do so, your brain will automatically assimilate the structures.

After a while you will think in the way of the language you are learning. So you now do not have to translate from your native language to the new one, but you can directly create sentences. This is the point when you understood the language .

"I know all those words, but that sentece makes no sense to me."                                       - Matt Groening

Thank you for reading.
Best regards,
Alex,

90 - Day Challenge, Day 2

First disappointments and how to deal with it.

Hello Dear Reader.

Today I had been working with the first chapter of the languager Course from Cornelsen. I copied the first dialog down to my notepad. I translated every single word and noticed some really interesting things in the Turkish language. The grammar is completely different. For example have they got a question particle.

Engl:  Is there Bread?

Turk: Ekmek var mı? (Bread there-is "question particle")

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 1

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 1

Collecting Material.

Hello dear readers.

Today is the first day I am learning turkish. So far I started collecting material for learning it. First of all I went to the local library and borrowed two courses. First there is "Haya tatile! - Türkisch für den Urlab" (turkish for vacation) from the "Hueber"- publisher. Secondly there is "Lextra - Sprachkurs Plus Türkisch" by Cornelsen. Both are made for beginners.

90 Day Challenge

Announcement: The 90 day turkish challenge.

Hello dear followers.

I have decided to learn a new language from almost scratch: Turkish.
In chose to learn for 90 days to reach fluency. My goal is to have a decent conversation, to understand most of the radio, to read easy novels, to go shopping at a turkish market.

I chose 90 days because three months are a period of time where your motivation is very high. It shrinks naturally after those three months, so you will have the most succes within those 90 days. The inspiration for sharing my progress with you was given to me by the great Youtube-Polyglot Steve Kaufman. He did a 90-day Korean challenge and in my opinion that is so damn fantastic! Like him and many other Youtubers and Bloggers I want to do the same.

Language learning, doing sports and playing the Piano

Good noon, dear reader.

I say: Learning a language is like doing sports.

Certainly you are a bit confused now, but I will explain this statement later on.

First of all I want to say thank you to everybody who is reading this blog. When I started it, I did not expect so many readers and followers, thank you!

Duolingo - What I think about it

Hello dear readers.

Many of you might have heard of Duolingo, a completely free language learning app. It became quite popular in the language learning community and there are many reasons therefore. I personally did learn with Duolingo and therefore am going to analyse this website. Let me first introduce it to you, how it works, what services it provides to you and later on I am going to tell you what I think about, whether I would recommend it to you.

How to start using the language properly.

Hello dear reader.

If you want to learn a foreign language, your goal might be using it. For communication purposes. That is why humans developed language and what we use it for. But there are different sorts of communication and different ways to deal with it.

There are many problems you have if you want to start communicating in a foreign language. Take Swedish as an example. It is spoken by arround 10 million people mainly in Sweden and parts of Finland. So when you travel to the north and visit Sweden, you may be able to start some conversation in the bakery, the supermarket or with people you meet. But is that your goal? Maybe, but not always. So where else are you able to speak Swedish?

I will give you a few examples in the following article.

Assimil - Swedish with ease

Hello dear readers.

It has been a few days since I published my latest article since I was quite busy within the last days.

Today I am going to talk about the Assimil Swedish with ease course. I bought it about a month ago and studied quite a bit with it. I will tell you about it in three steps:

1. How it works.
2. What I personally think of it.
3. How to integrate it into your learning progress and combining it with other methods.

The benefit of listening

Good evening.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, there is a lot of listening in my schedule of learning a new language. I think that makes up a total of about 70% of my learning time I listen to swedish material. Or english ones when I learned to speak english. And there are several reasons to do so, and there are several ways how to do so!

How to use news or text books for language learning - The Birkenbihl method.

Hello.

In my last post I wrote about what material you can collect to prepare yourself for learning a foreign language. I will now show you with an example how to proceed. There are dozens of ways to learn a language but I am going to show you the way I am doing it.

Finding your Material for learning swedish

Good Day.

First of all i need to say that this article deals with language learning in general, but I used swedish as an example. At the end there will be swedish material, but you can transpose those tips into every other language you are interested in!

So you did just start learning swedish? Or any other language? So did you came across the point where it is hard to find any helpful material? You are not alone! I Had the same issues at the beginning of my studies. But to help you avoiding that step, I am writing this little guide.

Learning Languages.

Good evening.

When I was a young boy, I have only been speaking german. More precisely the swabian variety, which is quite distinct from the standard "Hochdeutsch". When visiting primary school in Germany, i used to learn English as subject in school. Sadly that was more a subject than a language. After 4 years of "studying", i was not able to communicate.