Hallo! So I was reviewing my flashcards yesterday and skimming the frequency lists and I have my vocabulary up to a little over 1000 words in German at this point. I think that (combined with my mid-level grammar grasp) cleanly puts me at a low-intermediate level. I am guessing a very low B1 level.
This, of course, led me to my next question for myself: "What can I do moving forward to avoid hitting a wall at the intermediate level?" I have been fairly active on several language learning communities and forums over the last few Months and a common theme seems to be hitting this barrier between intermediate and advanced level. The internet is rampant with stories of people plowing through the beginning stages and hitting that 1000 word level that usually seems to signify some sort of intermediate understanding and they can't get past it. Some of the prevailing thoughts seem to be that this happens because there are so many language courses and guides for beginning a language but very little exists to take the learner beyond the B1-B2 stage into the C levels.
My plan? READ. Yesterday I ordered 3 books in German from Amazon.com. What are these powerful works of German literary genius that I ordered? Well, I'm glad you asked. Truthfully, 1000 words and limited grammar will not have me reading newspapers or advanced literary masterpieces. So, I went with the level that I feel like I am at (actually I aimed a little high, but that's ok). I ordered The Little Prince (one of my favorite books in French), Where the Wild Things Are, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (all in German of course). My plan is to move through them with a good dictionary and flashcard the main words that I do not understand. And when I get through them, I plan to read them again with no dictionary. I also have all of them in English, so I can try to follow along a little bit if the sentence structure gets too heavy for me.
Once I finish these books twice? I think I will be ready to tackle newspapers, maybe some popular magazines and things like that. I really think that traditional courses will no longer be as beneficial as they have been up to this point. I'm ready to go native!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Tschüß!
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