Verb Power!

Hallo!

This post will be about actually doing something.  Anything really.  Actually, it is about verbs.  Michel Thomas believed that verbs were the heart of any language.  I'm starting to think he was on to something.  One of my weak spots at the moment in German is verbs and it is kind of frustrating me a little.

Truthfully, I know about 150 verbs (according to my flashcards) and their conjugations.  Truthfully it isn't nearly enough.  I'm finding that (like English) German has several verbs that mean relatively the same thing.  I'm also finding that just because I learn one of those verbs doesn't mean that other people/books will use the one verb that I happen to have learned.  Weird huh? 

So what to do about it?  Well, I've narrowed by plan of attack to the essentials.  I need to know the infinitive of the verb and it's meaning.  I also need to know if it is irregular or not.  I also need to know the Past Participle and whether it takes haben or sein.  Really that's it.  Now, to my mind, a verb is equal to about 3 regular vocab words because of the additional information required.  Because of this, it makes sense that I would not be able to acquire verbs at the same rate as adjectives or nouns.  Typically, I like to add 10-20 vocab words per day to my list.  By this reasoning, it would make sense to add 3-6 verbs per day, right?  Sounds like a plan.

So, how do I do this?  I mentioned in a previous post that I had purchased a book called Barron's 501 German Verbs.  Well, in this book, they list 55 "essential" verbs.  These are the bad boys that you simply have to get down.  These are the most common verbs you will encounter and should be the 1st verbs you learn.  I reviewed those and found a few (about 6) that I was not familiar with.  So, I wrote them all down in my notebook, infinitive, meaning, Past Participle, the whole nine yards.  I reviewed them all and created an ANKI deck just for them.  I then went through the rest of the book and highlighted the verbs that I already knew (161 of them to be precise).  Given the overlap, I am left with about 334 verbs of the 501 most common. 

My guess at this point is that if I know the 501 most commonly used German verbs, I'm probably good to go.  I will absorb additional verbs as they come up, but 501 should be sufficient for my goals of conversational fluency.  So now I need to learn 334 verbs.  If I devote each day to learning 5 new verbs and I do this 5-6 days per week, I should be able to get this down in 12 weeks.  That's 3 Months of very manageable verb study.  I think I can do this.

My next issue is what order should I learn these in.  Alphabetical?  I would rather not learn them in alphabetical order as I may rely on that subconsciously to memorize them in that order (being that they are so closely related by spelling).  So, what then?  Random?  Random could work.  By importance?  I supposed I could type them all into a spreadsheet and evaluate their usefulness on a scale from 1-100 and learn them based on priority.  In fact, the act of typing them into a spreadsheet from the book could help to give me an overview of the new verbs so that I would be a little bit more familiar with them come learning time.  The drawback would be that it would take me several days to do this as I have a full-time job and a house full of kids.  I think random is the way to go here.

Ok, well I guess I will start today.  I do need to be very careful that I don't neglect any of my other vocabulary study or reading time. 

Thanks for reading!  Let me know what you think in the comments below.  Bis bald.

Tschüss!