@Obsttorte Thanks for showing support and also sharing your opinions that I can mostly relate to. I totally agree with you about focusing more on patterns for now as a beginner. But as of my personal experience, denoting the exact conjugated meaning of the words has helped me to get a sketch of how the patterns can appear, at least for the moment being.
For verbs, for example, when I learn new words I always write in what form of the words have conjugated into. Let’s say that I’ve learned “gehen” for the first time. I will save the corresponding pronouns of the word and the meaning of the word. So it’s LingQ would be like ‘[We, They, You(formal)] go / to go’. But I won’t try to memorize so hard, because I know I’ll forget it eventually and the difference from simply recognizing it for every encounter will be marginal. I consider it as a simple note, so next time when I encounter the word, I’ll be aware that the actions are done by people not by a single person. Of course, the pronouns will be the direct hint for me to notice but when sie/Sie comes in the head of the sentence, the first I want to look for is the conjugated verb. Now thanks to my saved LingQ, I can distinguish whether it’s “She” or “You” who is going.
Then, afterwards, I grasp the idea that most of the verbs that ends with “-en” express present tense representing plural pronouns(excluding 2nd person plural) or are in infinitive form. This goes on for the rest of the pronouns. And then, later on, I realize that most of the past tense forms for plural pronouns of the verbs also end with “-en”. Not to mention some of the past participle forms of the verbs that end with “-en” as well. I’ll also make/modify the LingQ for them too.
Similar to how my LingQs are made for verbs, I do it for phrases like “weit entfernt”, which is true and I agree that it’s intuitive and easy to translate by knowing the meaning of each words, and that’s what I do most certain too. But when the sentence gets a bit loose, I want to chunk it into several phrases and save the phrase words that serve as a joint into LingQ but not the whole phrase. So that I can recognize and read smoother than before with the notes I’ve made when encountering another sentence with similar phrases. It’s true that all the phrases that I make can be a cluster of mess eventually, but that’s only when doing SRS is what I think. I believe on the idea that it actually assists me to read texts more fluently.
To say that there are many effective methods for each personally, the best fitting one for me has been to note myself by discerning the difference explicitly. Probably because I’m learning German in English not in my native language(Korean), which is somehow far apart from both two languages when it comes to verb conjugations and prepositions and so on than that of English from German, and with English I can somehow write it in details with fewer annotations than with Korean. There may be more factors that made me choose one over another, but this one seems the most significant reason for me.
