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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Structured Thinking 101: Clarity Through Storylines (39-slide PowerPoint presentation). Clarity is critical in business communication of all kinds, yet difficult to achieve. To add insult, clarity is necessary, but not sufficient. Powerful professional communication must also deliver an insightful message, while often prepared in collaboration with others and under great [read more]
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By the end of the 20th century, German had finally secured the status of a world-spoken language. In most schools globally, its study became mandatory, and the teaching methodology began to develop by leaps and bounds. Not everyone could afford to attend courses, which provoked the emergence of the first method of self-study of the German language. Subsequently, many authors have attempted to create an effective German language learning program on their own, but we will focus on the eight most popular ones.
In this way of learning German with tutors, the basis is not the classical model “from theory to practice” but the reverse, more natural perception system. It is very similar to how we learn our native language. The author cites an example of how young children learn to talk – after all, no one explains the rules for constructing sentences, cases, and parts of speech. In the same way, Igor Yuryevich Shekhter suggests studying German.
The essence of the modern method of learning German lies in the fact that from the first lesson, students are given a specific task, for example, to learn about the profession of the interlocutor. Further, all students play the so-called “etudes,” where they try on various roles and try to solve the problem. Because communication takes place between people with approximately the same level of language proficiency, the fear of using foreign speech disappears, which occurs when communicating between a teacher and a student.
This technique of the German language consists of three stages: at the first, lexical units, words and expressions are given, and only then, in the second and third, the use of grammatical and syntactic structures is corrected. The system has repeatedly confirmed its effectiveness and is currently one of the most successful from the point of view of educational psychologists.
Dr. Paul Pimsler has developed a unique system of thirty-minute lessons designed to perceive information and its reproduction. Two people in each class are native German speakers. Thanks to this and a unique memorization technology, any student learns up to a hundred German words and expressions for each lesson. The essence of the study is the sequential execution of tasks spoken by the announcers.
The undoubted advantages of the technique include its mobility – you can perform audio tasks anywhere:
The downside will be the lack of a quality pronunciation test and mastery of knowledge.
Ilya Frank is the author of an original methodology for learning German based on reading specially adapted literature. Small fragments of the text are submitted with consecutive translations in brackets. So one hefty sentence is divided into different phrases, and as soon as the reader finishes reading the words, the translation is immediately given in brackets. In this way, it is possible to compare the original text and the translation and fill in the meaning of those words that were not known before. The exact text follows after the entire fragment is read in parts with translation, but without the “crutch” – the Latin analog.
Using the method of Ilya Frank, the student subconsciously learns the meanings of new lexical units and ready-made patterns of using and constructing phrases. The main disadvantage of the methodology is that the accumulation of only passive knowledge of German-adapted texts does not carry exercises for applying the acquired knowledge. It is worth using the methods of learning German, according to Ilya Frank, as an additional means of increasing vocabulary.
The last technique on our list will appeal to those who spend most of their time at the computer. A specially designed computer flash program gradually immerses the user in a foreign language environment, just as children immerse themselves in the world of adults. The stages are designed with a tendency to gradually increase in complexity, the student progressing from simple to complex. First, individual simple words are offered for memorization, then more complex lexemes are given, speech constructions are introduced, and syntax and grammar.
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