Tag 06 - Wiederholungstag

Tag 06 von 60 - keine neuen Bausteine, keine neue Grammatik. Nur Wiederholung. Zwei Stunden.

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Today adds nothing. No new chunks, no new grammar, no new sounds. Every sixth day of this course is review only, and that is not a rest day dressed up as a lesson - it is the part of the schedule that decides whether the first five days survive.

The reason is simple arithmetic. Five days at twelve chunks a day is sixty chunks, and sixty chunks met once each are sixty chunks on their way out. The forgetting curve is steepest in the first week, which is exactly where you are standing. A sixth day of new material would add twelve more items to a pile that is already leaking. A sixth day of retrieval stops the leak. The schedule needs the gap more than it needs the material.

So the shape of this page is different on purpose:

1. There is no Aussprache section. In its place is a longer shadowing block - ten minutes instead of five, same audio.

2. There is no Neue Bausteine section. In its place is Was du jetzt kannst, a checklist of the whole week grouped by what each thing is for.

3. The drills are the usual four types, but every item is pulled from Tag 05, Tag 04 and Tag 01, which is where the review curve says you are weakest today.

4. The speaking block is twenty minutes, not ten.

5. The paper block is a Goldlist day: twenty-five items, by hand, dated, not to be touched again for fourteen days.

How to run this page

Same rules as every other day: top to bottom, every answer out loud before you type it, nothing saved. But today, resist the urge to look anything up. If a chunk will not come, let it fail, press Zeigen, and let the failure do its work - a failed retrieval followed by the right answer is worth more than a clean copy off the screen. The whole point of a review day is to find the gaps, not to feel good.

1. Aufwärmen - zehn Stück aus Tag 05

Cold, no warm-up, no scrolling back. This is a measurement, not a lesson.

2. Shadowing - zehn Minuten

No pronunciation theory today. You have had five days of rules about vowels, umlauts, diphthongs, consonants and stress, and rules are now the thing you have too many of. What you are short of is time with the sound of the language in your mouth.

So: ten minutes, not five. Set a timer and do not stop early.

1. Minutes 1 to 3. Let it play until you reach a stretch of greetings, then press the ten-second loop. Do not speak. Just listen to the same ten seconds coming round again and again, and follow the rise and fall with your hand in the air like you are conducting.

2. Minutes 4 to 7. Keep the same loop running and speak along, about half a second behind the voice. Do not read anything. If you lose the thread, wait for the loop to come round and rejoin - that is exactly what it is for, and the counter tells you how many passes you have done.

3. Minutes 8 to 10. Turn the loop off and let the audio run straight through. You will not keep up cleanly. Keep going anyway - the goal is to copy the melody and the rhythm, not the words.

What ten minutes of shadowing is actually for

Not comprehension. You are not supposed to understand it, and checking whether you do will wreck the exercise. Shadowing trains the muscles and the ear: where the stress lands, how long a German vowel is held, how a sentence falls off at the end. Those are motor habits, and motor habits need minutes, not explanations.

3. Was du jetzt kannst

Everything from Tag 01 to Tag 05, grouped by what it is for rather than by which day it arrived on. That regrouping is itself the exercise: you learned these as five separate days, and you will use them as one set of tools.

Go down the list and tick the last column honestly. Tick it only if you can produce the German from the English, out loud, with no pause. Recognising it does not count.

Funktion	Das kannst du auf Deutsch sagen	Tag	Sicher?
begrüßen	Guten Morgen, Guten Tag, Guten Abend	01	[ ]
begrüßen	Hallo	01	[ ]
begrüßen	Tschüss, Auf Wiedersehen	01	[ ]
begrüßen	Wie geht es Ihnen? / Danke, gut / Und Ihnen?	02	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich heiße Ravi	01	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich bin aus Indien / Ich komme aus Indien	01, 05	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich wohne in Hamburg	01, 05	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich bin Student / Ich bin müde	02	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich arbeite in Hamburg	05	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich studiere an der TUHH / Ich mache einen MBA	05	[ ]
sich vorstellen	Ich lerne Deutsch	05	[ ]
fragen	Wie heißen Sie?	01	[ ]
fragen	Wo ist der Bahnhof? / Was ist das?	02	[ ]
fragen	Sind Sie aus Deutschland? / Sprechen Sie Englisch?	02	[ ]
fragen	Entschuldigung / Ich verstehe nicht	02	[ ]
fragen	Was kostet das? / Wie viel kostet der Kaffee?	04	[ ]
fragen	Haben Sie Zeit? / Was machen Sie?	04, 05	[ ]
Zahlen	eins bis hundert	04	[ ]
Zahlen	Das kostet drei Euro / zwanzig Euro / Das ist zu teuer	04	[ ]
Artikel	der Mann, der Bahnhof, der Kaffee, der Zug	03	[ ]
Artikel	die Frau, die Straße, die Milch, die Stadt	03	[ ]
Artikel	das Kind, das Haus, das Wasser, das Büro	03	[ ]
Artikel	Nomen werden groß geschrieben	03	[ ]
Artikel	ein, eine / kein, keine	04	[ ]
Verben	sein: ich bin, Sie sind, er ist	02	[ ]
Verben	haben: ich habe, Sie haben, er hat	04	[ ]
Verben	wohnen, kommen, arbeiten, lernen, machen, studieren, sprechen	05	[ ]
Verben	das Verb steht an zweiter Stelle	05	[ ]
Verben	Er arbeitet nicht	05	[ ]

If you ticked fewer than twenty

That is normal on day six and it is not a reason to slow down. It is a reason to be specific: write the unticked rows into your Fehlerliste tonight and they will come back at you in the Wiederholung block on Tag 07, 08 and 11 whether you want them to or not. What you must not do is go back and re-read Tag 01 to Tag 05. Re-reading feels like studying and is almost useless here. Retrieval is the only thing that moves these.

4. Drills

The same four Foreign Service types, but today every single item comes from Tag 05, Tag 04 or Tag 01 - yesterday, two days ago, and five days ago. That is the review curve doing its job: the Tag 01 items are the oldest and the most fragile, and this is the last easy chance to catch them.

Substitutionsdrill

Replace the word in brackets and say the whole new sentence.

Konversionsdrill

Change the sentence as instructed. Say the whole new sentence out loud before typing.

Antwortdrill

Answer as yourself, in a full sentence.

Übersetzungsdrill

5. Wiederholung - die ganze Woche in 60 Sekunden

This is the big one: twenty-seven items spanning all five teaching days, shuffled, on a sixty-second clock. You will not finish it in one run. That is the design.

Run it three times. First run to find out where you are. Press Mischen and run it again to beat your own number. Then leave it, do the rest of the page, and come back and run it once more at the very end of your two hours - that third run, after an hour of other work, is the one that actually tells you what stuck.

6. Text und Hören

Twelve lines, and not one word in it is new. Every chunk here came from Tag 01 to Tag 05. That is the payoff of a review day: five days ago you could not hold a conversation at all, and this is a real one.

The setting is a café in Hamburg, the kind of first meeting that actually happens - someone sits down, you exchange names, and within a minute you are explaining what you are doing in this city.

Anna: Guten Tag! Ich heiße Anna. Wie heißen Sie? Ravi: Hallo! Ich heiße Ravi. Anna: Wie geht es Ihnen? Ravi: Danke, gut. Und Ihnen? Anna: Danke, gut. Sind Sie aus Deutschland? Ravi: Nein, ich komme aus Indien. Ich wohne in Hamburg. Anna: Und was machen Sie? Ravi: Ich studiere an der TUHH. Ich mache einen MBA. Anna: Ich arbeite in Hamburg und ich lerne Deutsch. Ravi: Wir lernen zusammen! Entschuldigung, was kostet der Kaffee? Anna: Drei Euro. Das ist nicht zu teuer. Ravi: Ja, genau. Einen Kaffee, bitte!

Work it in four passes:

1. Read the whole thing aloud, both parts, twice.

2. Cover Ravi’s lines and say them from Anna’s cues alone.

3. Cover Anna’s lines and say those from memory. This is much harder and it is the useful one, because Anna is asking the questions.

4. Close the page and tell the same story about yourself, out loud, with nobody prompting you. Aim for eight sentences. Where you stall, that is a Fehlerliste entry.

7. Bidirektional - zurück ins Englische

These are the same eight sentences you translated into German on Tag 04, and today the arrow points the other way: the German is given, and you produce the English. Going back the other way after two days is the whole trick - you are not testing vocabulary, you are testing whether the German has become something you can read directly rather than decode.

Type the English, press Vergleichen, and then read both versions out loud. The gap between your line and the model is the lesson.

8. Sprechen - zwanzig Minuten

Double the usual. Ten minutes is enough to rehearse a couple of set pieces; twenty is long enough to run out of them and be forced to improvise with what you actually have. That is the point of doing it on a review day - you have a week of material and no new crutch to hide behind.

Stand up. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Do not sit down and do not stop at the first long silence.

Du bist eine neue Kollegin in Hamburg und wir treffen uns zum ersten Mal in
einem Café. Ich bin Anfänger (Tag 6, A1). Sprich langsam und nur mit diesen
Wörtern: Guten Morgen, Guten Tag, Guten Abend, Hallo, Tschüss,
Auf Wiedersehen, Ich heiße, Wie heißen Sie, Wie geht es Ihnen, Danke gut,
Und Ihnen, Entschuldigung, Ich verstehe nicht, Sprechen Sie Englisch,
Sind Sie aus Deutschland, Wo ist der Bahnhof, Was ist das, der Mann,
die Frau, das Kind, der Kaffee, die Milch, das Wasser, der Zug, die Stadt,
das Büro, Einen Kaffee bitte, Was kostet das, Das kostet, Das ist zu teuer,
Ich habe Zeit, Ich habe keine Zeit, Haben Sie Zeit, Ich wohne in,
Ich komme aus, Ich arbeite in, Ich lerne Deutsch, Ich studiere an der TUHH,
Ich mache einen MBA, Was machen Sie, Wir lernen zusammen, Ja genau,
Nein danke.

Stelle mir nacheinander alle diese Fragen: wie ich heiße, wie es mir geht,
ob ich aus Deutschland bin, wo ich wohne, was ich mache, ob ich Zeit habe,
und was der Kaffee kostet. Warte nach jeder Frage, bis ich geantwortet habe.
Maximal sechs Wörter pro Satz. Wenn ich einen Fehler mache, wiederhole den
Satz einfach richtig, ohne Erklärung, und stelle dann die nächste Frage.
Sprich zwanzig Minuten lang und wechsle nie ins Englische.
Fang jetzt an und begrüße mich.

Minute twelve is the real exercise

The first eight minutes will go fine, because you are running the dialogue from section 6 with small changes. Somewhere around minute twelve you will run out of prepared material and start building sentences from parts. That is the only bit of these twenty minutes that teaches you anything, and it is the reason the timer is not ten.

When you stall, say Wie bitte? or Ich verstehe nicht and keep the German going. Switching to English ends the exercise even if you switch back.

9. Auf Papier - Goldlist

Diktat. Set a ten-second loop on the shadowing audio from section 2 and let it repeat. Write down any eight German words you hear, by hand, without pausing the audio. Then check the spelling against this week’s pages and correct them in a different colour. The corrections are the data - which sounds your ear is still mapping to the wrong letters.

Satz des Tages. Write, by hand and from memory, the full introduction you would give a stranger in a Hamburg café. Six sentences: your name, where you come from, where you live, what you study, what you are doing, and one question back to them. Then check it against section 6 and mark every difference.

Fehlerliste - Wochenrückblick. This is the weekly version and it is the most valuable ten minutes on the page. Take the Fehler page in your notebook and copy out every error from all six days, rewritten correctly, in German only. Do not copy the English. Do not copy your wrong version. You are handwriting the correct form, once, for every mistake the week produced.

Then draw a line under it and start a fresh Fehler page for week two. The old page is not thrown away - it comes back on Tag 12.

Genus-Farben. Add this week’s nouns to your colour list if they are not there yet: der blue, die red, das green. The twelve from Tag 03 plus Zeit, Frage, Problem, Euro and MBA from Tag 04 and Tag 05.

Goldlist 2.

This is the second Goldlist page of the course. Goldlist 1 went into the notebook on Tag 03 and is still sitting there untouched, exactly as it should be - you do not open it today. It comes up for distillation on Tag 17, and this one on Tag 20.

The method is slow on purpose and it only works if you do not cheat it. Same strict shape as Tag 03:

1. Open a fresh double page and write today’s date at the top, plus the word Goldlist and the number 2. You will need that date in fourteen days and you will not remember it otherwise.

2. Write twenty-five items by hand, German on the left, English on the right, numbered. Pick them from this week: the ones you failed today, the ones you ticked nervously in section 3, and a few you are confident about so the list is not all pain. Do not repeat anything that is already on Goldlist 1.

3. Say each item aloud once as you write it. Once. Not three times - once. The writing is slow enough to do the work. Do not rush, do not abbreviate, and do not use a screen.

4. Read the whole list aloud once when it is finished, slowly, top to bottom, without stopping.

5. Close the notebook and walk away. Do not test yourself, do not reread it tonight, do not photograph it, do not put it into an app.

6. Write in your calendar, 14 days from today: Goldlist 2 distillieren.

Steps five and six are the entire method and they are the ones people cannot do. The claim behind the Goldlist is that a portion of what you write and say once, unhurried, settles into long-term memory on its own - and that testing it early interferes with the settling rather than helping it.

In fourteen days, on Tag 20, you come back to this page and read it once. Whatever you still know, you cross out. Whatever has gone, you copy onto a new page - that is the distillation. The claim is that roughly a third will have stayed without any review at all, which means the list shrinks from twenty-five to around seventeen. Write the date now and the schedule will do the rest.

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Weiter: Tag 07 - Fragen stellen - die Satzmelodie, Ja/Nein-Fragen mit dem Verb zuerst, und die Verneinung mit nicht.