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Well it is November 2019 already and after having been in a German classroom for the last while learning German I can safely say we have a few things to learn when it comes to language learning.
1) The Germans use accusative, dative, nominative and genitive to describe the four cases. 2) The sentence structures are explained as formulas so there is not guessing or feeling - it is simply - this takes this or that takes that and that's it. 3) No other language is used in the classroom other than 'the target language' being taught. It is 100% immersive and everyone gets a chance to speak the language. 4) The structure is the same daily - we read out our homework, everyone gets a chance to read aloud, we do listening work, the teacher explains some grammar briefly and we practice the sentence structure of that grammar in pairs speaking to each other. Simple but effective! We are encouraged to go to language cafes and speak from the very first day. It is the most refreshing and confidence forming things to speak a language that you have only spent a short time learning. I have watched a lot of films and TV series in German with German subtitles, played Memrise for learning vocabulary and Duolingo the odd time - the really rare time! The biggest difference though has to be that I am fully immersed in the classroom. The moment I step outside I speak English even with colleagues. Today I completed an entire day fully in German in a work setting and this has been truly remarkable considering I had 2 words (Hallo und Danke!) when I landed in 2017 and also working in an all English environment! I've recently spoken with German teachers in Ireland and passed on my resources to them with the thoughts - if only I had learnt Irish in this fashion. I also found a research document from UCD regarding the comparisons of Irish and German with 'verb am ende' and the cases that Irish has like nominative and accusative. IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE and IS SO LOGICAL! Please feel free to share my resources that I have used to learn German and it also outsides the classroom structure too. We could probably spent a fortune on getting native speakers over and language assistance but at the end of the day it's a case of getting all students to speak --- DAILY - they usually have 5 lessons per week allocated! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dpkj6dx5Rm971ZBKZ6tI89ud1Zs0_Eav1XZmnI4UTnE/edit?usp=sharing |
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