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16
I took the Zertifikat Deutsch two years ago at the Goethe Institut Berlin. It was pretty tough for me since I was just starting out, but did manage to pass with a good grade with some work.
Since Takkat already provided some resources for you, let me give you some advice which is specifically tailored to the Zertifikat Deutsch.
The following advice is ...
13
Try the Deutsche Welle resources. There's a free 30-lection course going from A1 to B1. In addition, there's a ton of resources for all levels up to C1.
12
According to this PDF its pretty much the best and biggest list you can get for free. The PDF looks quite interesting.
On the data source:
Neben Angaben zu absoluter Häufigkeit, Häufigkeitsklassen,Grammatik,
Sachgebiet, Kollokationen (häufige Wortkombinationen) usw. findet man
hier auch die „Wörter des Tages“, die aktuellsten Begriffe aus
...
12
Here are some places where you can download such lists:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/germandict/files/
A list of German words as plain text file
with slightly more than 1.2 million entries (including inflected forms).
The format is one word per line, alphabetically ordered.
Korpusbasierte Grund-/Wortformenlisten
10
Die sind zwar eher scherzhaft gemeint, aber die Langenscheidt Lilliput Wörterbücher sind glaub ich gar nicht so schlecht. Zumindest sind sie sehr preiswert. ;-)
Es gibt davon Deutsch -
Badisch
Bairisch
Berlinerisch
Fränkisch
Hessisch
Kölsch
Plattdeutsch
Ruhrpott-Deutsch
Schweizerdeutsch
Schwäbisch
Sächsisch
Wienerisch
10
From the Goethe Institut there are some ressources for the B1 exams free for download from here:
http://www.goethe.de/lrn/prj/pba/bes/gzd/mat/deindex.htm
There you will find
A sample exam for candidates
Samples for examiners
MP3 audio file for listening comprehension tests
Various regulations, other informations and a manual
8
In most recent Linux distributions there are two files:
/usr/share/dict/ogerman
/usr/share/dict/ngerman
These contain a list of line-separated German words. ogerman is for the old-spelling and ngerman is for reformed spelling. On my system, ogerman contains about 76000 words, while ngerman has about 330000 words.
It may be needed to install a package ...
7
Es gibt jetzt anscheinend eine eigene Adresse (Domain) für die Wörterbücher:
http://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/
Rechte liegen beim Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische Erschließungs- und Publikationsverfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften an der Universität Trier.
7
Just some suggestions from my side:
Listen to German radio, there are tons of radiostations that broadcast online. My personal favorite here is MDR, but feel free to find your own channel/station.
Go to YouTube and watch some short clips from German popular TV-shows like "Wer wird Millionär?", "TV Total", "Genial daneben" etc. If you are lucky you can find ...
7
Deutsche Welle is the best possible page for German language learners, I know no other news agency that would do so much for teaching German worldwide.
On the same page you are referencing in your question there is also a video section called "Deutsch Lernen mit Videos" (s. picture) where you can find 161 different short video clips tailored for beginners.
...
6
Neben Klemperers LTI finde ich immer noch lesenwert Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen von Dolf Sternberger, Gerhard Storz und Wilhelm E. Süskind. Kriegt man derzeit nur gebraucht, fürchte ich.
Allerdings »endet« das Buch 1967 mit seiner dritten Auflage; wie aktuell das heute noch ist, muß man eben selbst einschätzen.
Zufälligerweise korrekte Daten aus der ...
6
Try Google NGrams. The German corpus is not as good at the English one, but starting with the 19th century, it's fine. You can not only use this to get diagrams comparing the usage of words (or up to five words in sequence), but also download the entire database.
6
Wiktionary has dedicated categories:
German verbs
German strong verbs
German class 1 strong verbs
German class 2 strong verbs
German class 3 strong verbs
German class 4 strong verbs
German class 5 strong verbs
German class 6 strong verbs
German class 7 strong verbs
German weak verbs
etc.
6
Wiktionary has some, and so does the Duden. However, they are usually not present in dictionaries since German almost universally follows a fixed set of rules for pronunciation so there is generally no need to indicate it explicitly (except for loan words).
6
There doesn't seem to be such a site yet. There certainly isn't one with critical mass, like GL&U has, otherwise it would (almost per definition) be easy to find on google. There might conceivably be a tiny forgotten one hidden away somewhere on the internet, but if it's so small that google searches won't pick it up, it's unlikely to be of any use to ...
6
You can download the German Wiktionary from here.
For an example, here's a part of dewiktionary-20121115-pages-meta-current.xml.bz2 I downloaded a week ago:
<title>Haus</title>
<ns>0</ns>
<id>1119</id>
<revision>
<id>2726902</id>
<parentid>2709434</parentid>
...
6
On this Goethe Institut page, there's a cute Flash game (Spiel 03: Memo-Spiel) that does what you're looking for. Found it by searching on ""memo-spiel" bild wort lernen wortschatz", if you keep looking you may find more. Tried the search with "Memory-Spiel" instead of "Memo-Spiel" but got only links to articles not games. Possibly "Memory-Spiel" is ...
5
Since most phrases in youth language are very temporary, you won't find an up-to-date resource (even online). Also the well-established publisher Langenscheidt already failed to collect such phrases.
Therefore, I would recommend that you just ask if someone uses such phrases. If you insist on hearing some phrases before you travel abroad, try to get in ...
5
The German part of about.com has a selection of dual-language texts. You will find them on this page. Note that not all of the texts are available in two languages, look for the ones marked dual-language.
However, they are not all elementary, but for example Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten should fit the bill. It even comes with German audio.
5
Unfortunately I can't really recommend any German tv shows, as I am not satisfied with the program on German tv. But I could point you to Deutschlandfunk, which has transcripts for some shows (see this answer).
On the other hand I don't believe in the need for a text to read along if you have already some knowledge of a language. I don't really have any ...
4
I will try to split your question into three parts and answer them separately.
Some general remarks: unlike in English dictionaries, it is rather uncommon for German dictionaries to provide any phonetic transcription. Most German words (more than 95%) are just read according to simple rules and you don't need a special IPA case for every word. Duden, one of ...
4
Not really a way of studying German in the classical way would be to read books in German instead of English but more a way to practice your already learnt skills.
If you're not that comfortable at understanding or reading German you could start out with books for children or youths.
This can be a good way to extend your vocabulary and not to forget the ...
4
One style guide I can absolutely recommend is Deutsch für Kenner by Wolf Schneider, a German journalist and language critic. The book is both witty and clearly structured. (Note that it takes a firm stand and is by no means a neutral guide; some even call it arrogant.) Important to know: You'll need a good knowledge of German to really enjoy the book.
If ...
3
For me, learning English grammar worked out best by reading English books. I developed a feeling for the right grammar. It really kind of hurts me, when I hear a wrong English sentence. I'm not perfect, I know. But I think, I've got quit a good inner "ear" for English grammar.
I can only give you the advice to read as much German text as you can. Even if you ...
3
I found Canoo.net a valuable resource for German grammar. For example, see Flexionsklassen for strong/weak verbs.
3
Google's NGramViewer also offers the raw datasets for download. The datasets also contain the number of occurences of the word (and for combinations of up to five words) in any given year. This may be useful for statistics on how differend word usages evolved; it's used all the time on EL&U.
3
The largest etymological resource for the German language is the DWB, Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, or just Grimm for short. It is, however, not suited for learners of the language, and is sometimes even hard to understand for natives. If you're just looking for a quick explanation of the origin of a word, it's also not the best one.
...
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