This is a short article that details the German learning that I did prior to starting the beginner to fluent German challenge.
The main point of this post is to give a bit of background to the study that I did prior to the challenge starting.
Earlier learning
- Grade 8. Did German class. From this, as an adult, I could still remember how to count to about 20, say my name, and say where I come from.
- 18 years old, went to Germany and learnt a few sentences like ‘One beer please' and ‘How do you say … in German.'
- 20 years old, listened though about 30 Pimsleur German audio tapes.
Starting in 2020
- I started my German learning in a more serious way in mid 2020, shortly after covid lockdown here in Melbourne stated.
- My first point of call was Jack Chakerian's ‘Prolist'. Which is five pages of words that Jack suggests provide the keys to quick communication in a new language. I typed these words out, translated each word using Google sheets using a translation formula, then used a complex method of multiple Anki decks (totally unnecessary in hindsight!) to try to learn these 300 words. This was a good start
- For the first couple of weeks after this I played around with a few different websites, then ended up getting a low level subscription to germanpod and used it for ‘sentence mining' . I liked germanpod because I found out a way to download the audio from the website and make flashcards out of them. This was ok, but I only did it for a few days then ran out of steam with this approach.
- After a couple of weeks, I set up a language exchange on mylanguageexchange.com. And quickly learnt how to turn my language exchange recordings into flaschards efficiently, and this gave me a really big learning boost, and I kept it going pretty consistently for almost 20 weeks.
- About same time as German language exchange started, I started the 4000 most common German words Anki deck, 3 new cards per day. But this didn't last long, because I found it pretty unmotivating, and also the contexts meant nothing to me.
- At about the one month mark, I started trying to do some reading in German. The first book I read was Heidi at A1 level. This was super fun and it was great to feel like I was ‘reading' in german. Spending 15 mins per night on this it took me about three weeks to get through it.
- About 2 months in I had a lull and was finding it hard to get motivated to study, so I tried to find a few German bands and songs that I liked, and studied lyrics for a while, that was helpful.
- Started reading geregs diary in about week 8. Gave up after 2 weeks.
- Read Münchhausers Abenteuer (A1 level version) from about week 10 to 13. That was a lot of fun, It's a very comical book!
- Week 13, or so I felt like my grammar was starting to hold me back, started searching around a bunch of websites, eventually settled on a book. Started doing exercises and making Anki cards on grammar, but didn't really find this working, so stopped.
- From there for the next few months I mainly just read through Andre Klein's series of Dino Learns Deutsch books. I got held up a bit on books 4 and 7 if I remember correctly, then again at 10 (as there was a big jump in difficulty to each of these), but this really improved my vocabulary too.
- July 27, 2021, I signed up to Germanpod for a one year subscription (but cancelled after about a month)
- Shortly following that I signed up to the grammar short course by German with Laura to sort out my Grammar after watching one of her videos on youtube. The course was really good, but I'm yet to watch the last few videos and do the practices that Laura recommends following that.
- In August 2021 I signed up to the online course Vocabulary Labs, and that started my current German learning challenge!
To find out where my learning went from here, read this next post in this series about my German language learning : )