hey, I just wanna share with my experience. I never used Russian and spoke, but I was listening a lot. Like movies and songs, everything in Russian. I even started to recognize accents when people started to talk in Russian. I understand to believe in this methods, after 12 years brainwashing in school is hard, but it is working, and it’s a proven fact !
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@PeterBormann : what you wrote about writing is absolutely true. However, a second language learner can definitely speak and write more or less in the same way and it would be more than enough. If you speak clean and correctly and if your writing is, let’s say, email well written standard, not too formal or too emojis, I would say it is ok. From there you can only progress but as writing per se, it would be already better than the average of any population.
I’m very ok with ultrasummarizing. Does Blinkist really work? To be honest, there are always more and more books nowadays that are just fluff, lots of nonsense pages or chapters just to sell and maybe only 1 idea inside that it is worth it. Too many copycats or remakes of the same ideas with other names just to make them sound new.
If Blinkist works, I would become a fan!
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Well, I talk and write differently in German depending on the communication situation.
That is, I talk differently to
- my sister
- my nephews or other family members
- my colleagues
- my boss
- clients
- my doctors
- lawyers
- friends
- acquaintances
etc.
Many things change here, esp.
- the pronunciation (high German / dialect)
- vocabulary
- the length of the sentences
*code-switching (esp. between German - English and German - Spanish) - the topics
- the innuendos
- the connotations and associations
- the jokes, etc.
Ditto for the texts I write. That is: I write differently to
- clients
- other Internet users
- family members
- my boss
- my colleagues
- the German tax office
etc.
Or to put it differently:
Neither oral nor written language (networks ) are “homogeneous entities”. Instead, natural languages are networks of networks of… and layers of layers of … (phonetics, morpho-syntax, collocations / idioms, discourse structures, genre-specific conventions, etc.)… and, esp., native
speakers, can handle all these “nuances” as accomplished artists do.
Mutatis mutandis, this also the case with advanced non-native speakers.
“it would be more than enough.”
That’s just a beginner / intermediate “misinterpretation” where folks think that the tip of the language iceberg “is” the iceberg 
This low level of language processing might be ok in some private contexts. However, it is
not acceptable in the domain of knowledge workers because the stakes are “much” higher…
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See for yourself (you can read a few book summaries for free, for ex.
on your mobile device): https://www.blinkist.com
Or you could use other summary websites such as:
However, sometimes it’s sufficient to ask your fav Gen AI for a summary containing the most important points
That said,
I wouldn’t use this approach for scientific texts, prose or poems, but it
often works quite well for problem-solving non-fiction texts.
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@PeterBormann I agree on what you replied about writing, which I understand very well. Although I’m a bit more opened and flexible on the last part, with different interpretations. But that’s ok, I can live with different concepts and always learn if this helps to push myself beyond mediocrity.
Thanks for the other link as well, I didn’t know it all. I’ve bookmarked them both and I will definitely consider to import something of it on LingQ as soon as I’m done with the material I have. With the new Whisper thing I’m becoming a fan of Podcasts again because now it is faster to have the transcript, and probably I could prefer podcast+Whisper compared to book+TTS. Quality audio as priority + modern text and very dense in words/time spent.
Talking about podcasts and German, any suggestion for this thread? Thanks. Link here > Welche Podcasts würdest du zum Anhören auf Deutsch empfehlen?
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At least in my professional life the statement, “He writes like he talks,” has been an insult. I assume there is a similar insult in German.
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Yes, but I would also say that is different. Writing like talking is not the same than talking like writing (if you know how to do it properly). Because usually the average population writes very badly and I don’t think it is a “guilt” neither. Many people of my parents age have dedicated their life to work very hard and were also very poor when they were young. Life was very different even few decades ago. I don’t blame them if they don’t know how to write properly and/or talk average.
For young people that have a university degree might be a different story. Still we have many of them that don’t know their own native language very well but have important university degrees. Weird society we have.
That’s why I would say it was enough before. When I was in France, my writing at that time was definitely better than the average male population of the country. I was basically a C2 and I think it is ok for a second language learner, especially for a person that wants to manage more languages. I think that an healthy compromise is ok, depending on our goals.
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Yes, you hit the mark of the mark with that statement 
“I think that an healthy compromise is ok, depending on our goals.”
Definitely. And it always boils down to, well, “preparation and training”
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If I read the same article on LingQ with 500 words 5 times does it count as 500 or 2500?
Becuse I nearly read every article about 5 times.
Well…if you take a speed reading course you can easily 10x your reading rate…as Woody Allen quote goes:
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.
It involves Russia."
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While I didn’t get it done in a year, I just read my millionth word in LingQ in French.
For me, that million words means that I can read about anything in French and make good guesses at unknown words from the context clues.
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