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| Then it wasn't really zero when you began the intensive course, was it? Even if you had the feeling you had learned nothing at the earlier courses, I bet you had. You heard new sounds, you heard the new rhythm of the new language, all this prepares the ground for the next step whether you were conscious of it or not. | |
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Slight exaggeration i guess. Earlier, despite attending all these classes i could not even have a basic conversation in German - hence i meant 0. Also, was always hesitant to speak in German. My first sentence was always 'Sprechen Sie Deutsch'. But true, having lived in CH for almost 6 years, was used to hearing German being spoken ...
Atleast for me this was a game changer cause it removed the fear in me to converse in German. That automatically meant i was practicing it more and improving .... i never felt that way after attending the regular group classes.
At work, i am very comfortable in German, but am all at sea when having a casual conversation - my vocab of normal words is crap and the subject changes too quickly and i cannot keep up.
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| If you learned German within 2 weeks, you either have an extraordinarily high talent for learning languages or your a miracle workers. I'm a linguist by education and I've never met anyone who actually benefited from those 2-week crash-courses. | |
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Without attempting to be modest at all, i truly believe it was the way i was instructed. It was very focussed and i was instructed not on the entire grammer but only the 30-40% a beginner needs to learn. Almost any class anywhere, one of the first thing they do is overwhelm the learner with tables of tenses and gender ... the beginning of the end for lots of us.