What do you do when you’re traveling to Germany in two weeks?
At Pivotal I work on the Spring Data team, and our fearless leader is having us all converge in Berlin in just two weeks. Short of being über awesome, what do you do? Well, considering I’ve studied German off and on since high school, I thought it time to get back into my tools to […]
Progress Report: Learning German with Anki
After reading numerous articles on Hacking Chinese, I decided to dive into Anki. Anki is space repetition software. It lets you create any set of flashcards that you want, and then helps you review your deck daily in a more efficient manner. Thanks to the iPhone app, it has become very easy to stick to […]
In language, there is no substitute for vocabulary
In war there is no substitute for victory –General Douglas MacArthur This famous quote from Douglas MacArthur shows that in certain situations, there are certain intrinsic requirements that cannot be ignored. At one time in my career, I was a group leader. That meant I was responsible for soliciting and delivering annual peer reviews for […]
Day Two: Sprechen Deutsch mit meinen freunden @springone2gx #s2gx #german
So weit, ich habe mit Ollie Gierke, Christoph Stroble, und Michael Hunger in Deutsch gesprecht. Super! Das is sehr Spaß! In Amerika, wir mussen zwei Jahre im Hochschule lernen. Das ist schlecht! Niemand nur zewei Jahren lernen kann etwas. Ich habe drei Jahre im Hochschule gelernt, und das war vor 25 Jahren. Aber mit duolingo.com, anki, und dazpod.de, […]
Dem Tweet könnte ich verstehen!
»Der einzige Weg, ein wirklicher Meister zu werden, ist, immer ein Schüler zu bleiben.« – Zen-Weisheit #anfängergeist — Marcus Raitner (@marcusraitner) June 9, 2014 Today I saw a retweet from one of my German friends. At first glance, I spotted bits and pieces I could immediately parse. “Weg” is way. “immer” is always. “Schüler” is school goer, […]
Duolingo makes learning another language a hoot!
I’ve always wanted to be conversationally fluent in another language. I studied three years of German in high school, but that was 25 years ago. At one point in my life, I purchased a German newspaper and a German-English dictionary, hoping to go through it word by word. That was a bust. The speed was […]