So you want to learn German – So dass Sie wollen Deutsch lernen #9

Welcome back for another installment of So you want to learn German…

Pinterest is actually a pretty powerful tool for organizing ideas, collecting thoughts and saving things for later projects. It can be used to promote your art or business. Authors use it to showcase images that bring readers deeper into the life they lead, without getting too personal.

It is not as social as most of social media. You search and pin web images to boards, organizing the haphazardly. You can’t rearrange the order, or, at least, I haven’t found a way to do this yet. Please don’t tell me if you have, because I will waste days of my life reorganizing the thousands of pictures into some kind of picture book story that no one will understand there is meaning to the layout but myself.

Pinterest can and is being used as a learning tool. It’s not the front runner for teaching anyone anything, but it does provide and interesting format in which to view the information you’re seeking. Needless to say, there are people learning German, like me, all over pinterest, and there are educators.

My profile is based off a character from my newest novel. Several of the boards therein are geared toward writing and my life as an author. The format, overall, follows the structure of this blog. If you scroll through the boards, you’ll see some familiar names on the albums. Naturally, to expand my reach across the net and provide interconnected content, it all corresponds to the blog in some manner, like a secondary interface from which to view my commentary and thoughts in pictures. Learning German was included.

The search that I underwent to provide secondary content to augment what I write on the blog about learning German, yielded some lessons, tips, tricks, graphics, culture, and images of Germany. It’s an amazing resource, in fact. Sort of like an online version of flash cards. You can scroll through and be visually reminded of vocabulary. There is even help with the grammar, which can be pretty tough at times. It’s simply not clear, and there are many instances when rules don’t apply. The duolingo app does a poor job of explaining any of it, which I have mentioned before. If they could have a short reading before each lesson that deals with grammar, something that could be referred to, but doesn’t load again once the section is complete, it would be a really powerful tool. Totally understandable that it doesn’t exist. Who is going to write all that content? They provide learning for several languages, which means the format would have to be carried over all of those. The grammatical rules of all those languages all vary extensively. So there is no repeated information that can just be auto translated and moved over. That’s a lot of work. Considering the app is free, unless sponsors throw them a ton of money, that won’t happen any time soon. I love the app, regardless. It’s a great tool and has improved my skills immensely in a few short months.