After writing in my last post my critical opinion about the use of learning German, I promised to share my tips about how to actually learn some German.
After visiting Hamburg a couple of years ago as a tourist (touché at all you Berlin-fans, Hamburg is a pretty cool city as well!) I noticed that Germany is an interesting country that would give some good perspective to my studies. So I applied to a university in Hamburg for an exchange year – without knowing any German. In the end, I ended up moving to Germany. After just one and a half years of living here, I would speak pretty good German. So good, that I could write job applications and do job interviews in German – and actually get the job. Many people ask me how did I learn it so good. Here are some tips how I learned to speak German.
1. Get on it intensively. After making the decision that you want to learn German (or any other language), take a hard core intensive course in it. “Lack of time” is no excuse. I took my first course in German when I was working full time, and every Monday to Friday evening I spent 4 hours at the course after work. Fun? No. Useful? Yes.
2. Go out there. The best way to learn German is going to Germany (well, maybe Austria and Switzerland will do as well). You need to hear the phrases over and over again. In learning German the best tactic is the tactic of exhaustion; after hearing a phrase often enough, in the end you will remember it. You can learn German in a non-Germanic-country, but because we tend to have our popular culture mostly in English (the internet, movies, music, literacy…), we are often lacking the German input.
3. Introduce yourself to Til Schweiger. In case you can’t go to Germany, get involved with the German culture. Movies are a great way to do this. What I did was, that I watched German movies or tv shows with subtitles. I would simultaneously hear German and link that with the translation. It doesn’t feel that efficient, but unconsciously you are learning the language as you watch some quality German entertainment.
4. Study, study and study. After a couple of intensive courses, don’t just leave it to that. You will be needing professional help in learning the grammar. If you are still studying, take advantage of the supply of the German courses at your university (that’s what I did). The teachers are very qualified. In addition, you get a lot of useful study material. Community college courses are good as well, if you are not enrolled at a university. To learn the whole grammar I took altogether six courses in German. And what is more, don’t just sit at the lectures. Be active and do your homework as well.
5. Challenge yourself. This is a boring tip, but a very useful one. Do small exercises for yourself regularly. Use short German texts for this (e.g. newspaper articles, instruction manuals or short stories). First of all, make direct translations. Translate each and every word of the text correctly using a dictionary and a grammar book. This is super efficient, although translating one sentence takes 15 minutes. After that, pick all of the words from the text which are new to you. Write them down one below another as a list, and then write the translations next to them one below another. Then, try to learn every word on the list. It actually doesn’t take that much time.
6. Repeat. Repetition is not only useful in German techno music but also in learning the language. Repeat words. Repeat a word you learn out loud to yourself. Repeat it again. Actually, repeat it 10 times, despite the surrounding people looking at you weirdly. Also, write words down. I used to carry a piece of paper with me, where I would write down words I have learnt or words I need to check in the dictionary when I get home.
7. Don’t panic. Words like Streichholz, Schlittschuh or Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung may seem intimidating, but don’t get depressed. First of all, German is full of compound words; chop the compound words to smaller parts, and it all makes more sense (for instance: Schlitt + Schuh = Schlittschuh). Secondly, learn to pronounce the basic sounds: sch, str, g, v, w and h. They are always pronounced the same way, and when you can pronounce them you most probably can also write them. Knowing the prononciation also helps you understand some words which are similar to the English language – when they are written they look completely strange, but correctly pronounced they sound exactly like their English counterpart (like Haus or Eis, for instance).
8. Speak German. Pretty weirdly, for me this task was the most difficult one. It took me about six months before I started to speak German. I kind of could had spoken the language before that, but I was too embarrassed. On the other hand, it takes some time before you can build sentences which make sense. Don’t let that discourage you. Wait some months, observe the language although you don’t speak it, and at some point you can start. Also, when you listen to people, try to notice some phrases they use often, and find out what they mean (for instance, I noticed that “genau”, “schönen Abend noch”, “Darf ich bitte mal durch” and “das ist geil” were pretty frequent in the common language).
9. Be all like a German. Change all your electronics’ preference language to German; use your mobile phone, computer and tab in German. Especially if you are in Germany, do things that the Germans do: watch Bundesliga (in German), read the menu in a restaurant in German even though it would be in English as well, relax every Sunday evening by watching Tatort – even though it wouldn’t make much sense first. Fill up your brain with German – like I said, it’s the exhaustion tactic which works out the best.
10. Learn the grammar. What makes German difficult, is the grammar from hell. Or that’s how it feels like at the beginning. Before learning German, I already spoke English and Swedish as foreign languages. German made those languages look like children’s play. But the truth is, German is a very logical language, almost a mathematical one – there are very few exceptions to the rules (this all adds up to the German mentality, which is very mathematical and efficient as well). There is no shortcut in learning the verb conjugation or the declension of nouns (yes, the horrible accusative, dative and genitive). You need to learn them by heart. But when you learn the declension tables once, you have already got pretty far.
11. Concentrate on essential things and save time. A couple of hints concerning the verb conjugation and noun declension; in nouns, you only need accusative and dative at first, so leave genitive for later. In verbs, nobody really uses the simple past tense or the pluperfect tense in the common language, so leave those out at first and just concentrate on the present tense and the present perfect tense. In subjunctives, learn Konjunktiv II, but don’t even bother to spend any time learning Konjunktiv I – it’s useless in the common language.
12. Do not care about die, der and das. This is a thing that made me very confused. How can I decline the nouns if I don’t know which gender the words are? The answer: it doesn’t matter. More important is, that you learn the declension of accusative and dative, i.e. the noun cases. If you decline die Badewanne accidentally as masculin, it’s just like whatever – people will understand you. It’s just great if you decline nouns, although you would mix masculin with feminine or neuter with masculin. I was told that it is very important to learn every word with its article in the first place, but in the end I found that a bad advice. If you follow the advice 2 (“go out there“), you notice you will learn a lot of words without ever hearing the articles (that is, because you hear them already declined). Don’t worry about it. At some point you will start to get the feeling about the genders of the words, and you start to know if they are die, der or das. But it takes a year or two before that happens. Which is ok.
13. Learn the word order. The word order of the German language is not very complicated. Google the instructions, and learn them by heart. Basically, main clause has a direct word order (subject before predicate) – unless it’s a claim sentence or a question, in which case predicate is always the second word. Subordinate clause has an indirect word order – which looks mostly like this: conjunction + subject + movable word + predicative. If you don’t know what conjunction or predicative (grammar words) are, learn it. You need them in every language.
14. Cheat. Before becoming a pro in German, you will need to be creative and cheat. Every time you don’t know a word, describe it in other words or with your hands or body. Also, don’t care about saying an English word somewhere in between every now and then; Germans often understand English. Don’t hesitate to build words yourself – as I said, German is a logical language, and sometimes you actually end up building a real word accidentally. There are also a lot of words in German which are almost exactly like in English. When you know English, you probably know what E-mail, einchecken, chillen, gambeln or Liste mean, for instance. And don’t hesitate to ask people what words mean or why something is said how it’s said. Sometimes (mostly) even the Germans themselves can’t explain why they say things how they say them. In fact, after getting good at German I have noticed how much Germans make grammar mistakes in their language. And that, is just another proof, that German is a difficult language, and even being mediocre in German makes you an Übermensch.
just walk along 