A current project of mine is learning German. It's an awesome hobby (read about my progress here). Below are a bunch of resources that I've found really helpful and/or enjoyable to engage with. I'll try to update this as I go : )
Books
- Probably the most enjoyable thing I've done in my German learning journey to date is just get reading. I'm 10 books into Andre Klein's Dino Learns Deutsch series. I bought the full bundle, including the recordings and flashcards, and have found it to be amazing value. Andre has written a lot about the power of reading for learning, and his own story of how reading helped him to master English is super inspiring too.
- There are heaps of other books that I've found engaging and fun to read at an A1 or A2 level. These include Heidi, Münchhausens Abenteuer, and Kopftuch. More good books found at this link.
Blogs
- Andre Klein's Learn out Live is a fantastic blog (in addition to his books mentioned above). There's too much good stuff on here to summarise here, but if you're looking for a good place to start, here's an excellent link. When I want something German, I often just search, ‘*thing that I want* Andre Klein' and more often than not a great blog that Andre has written will come up. Make sure you sign up to Andre's newsletter!
- Universe of Memory by Bartosz Czekala is also great. Start here
- My only German Learning (but not German specific) blog so far is this one, Make the most of any language exchange: From recording to flashcards. This has been a super effective learning method for me. Very fun also!
Audio and YouTube
- You can't look past EasyGerman on Youtube if you're keen for some engaging real-life conversations and vocabulary! They also have an awesome podcast.
- Coffee Break German is also a fantastic podcast I listen to a fair bit
- I absolutely loved watching this film on YouTube. It's totally at the A1 beginner level, so even those quite new to German can watch and enjoy it.
Films
I've only just started to get into German films as a way to engage with German and strengthen it. I have a huge list of films that I plan to get through, but so far I've just watched and studied one in any sort of concerted way. That is:
- Das Leben der Anderen (trailer) <– Absolutely fantastic film!
- See Andre Klein's list of film scripts here. Next one I'll be watching is Sophie Scholl (read her Wiki page if you haven't heard of her. Super inspiring young woman from Nazi Germany).
Online courses
- I've only done one online course so far but it was excellent. It was by Laura Bennett. I did her free online course first and it was so good I couldn't resist signing up to her German Foundations course too. It really has helped me understand grammar at a very basic level, but I still have much consolidation and learning to do to build on these basics. (This is the course that I mentioned in my podcast with Harry Fletcher-Wood).
Language Exchange Partners
- There are differing views about when in the learning journey to start talking. I'm not sure what or who is right in this respect, but I personally think that it's a great idea to just start talking early because language learning is about communication and there are a lot of communication skills besides just vocab and grammar that are necessary to actually communicate in another language! I used My Language Exchange to find a language exchange partner when I started out and we just completed our 37th language exchange last Sunday. You'll hopefully also find that you don't just learn a language, but also gain a friend!