If you're new to this website, Hi, I'm Ollie. I'm a teacher, podcaster, and Amazon bestselling author who is obsessed with, and loves all things learning. This is the intro article to what I hope will become a series of blog posts tracking my progression from beginner to fluent German.
Learning languages is amazing. It’s pretty much my favourite hobby.
Why I love language learning
There are two main reasons I love it. The first is simply the learning process. As someone obsessed with how learning happens, there’s nothing else that I’ve done in my life that has helped me to understand learning better than undertaking the challenge of language learning myself. As a teacher, it helps me to stay connected with my own students, and stay in the learner’s mindset.
Secondly, language learning opens up opportunities for interacting and connecting with thousands, millions, or almost a billion (if you learn Mandarin Chinese) people in a way that would not be possible otherwise. As an example, in January of 2014 I set a goal to learn Mandarin Chinese in a year, and booked a flight to China for that December. After that year of learning, my travels in China were far more rewarding than I could have ever hoped. In the past, I'd only ever been able to connect with the locals by smiling, nodding, and usually buying something off of them. Now I was striking up conversations with street vendors, talking to construction workers in train stations as they were heading home to see their families, and even getting spontaneously invited back to people's houses to share a meal with their family and friends. The effort I'd put in to be able to communicate with these Chinese people in their own language was far exceeded by the welcome that they extended to me in response.
Hitting walls with language learning
But language learning isn't all beer and bratwurst.
Some time in July 2020 I began learning German. I did this as another learning challenge, but also to be able to better communicate with family I now have in Germany, my new German PhD supervisor, and because I find the country, history and culture super interesting (and the beer too, especially this one).
From July 2020 till July 2021 I’d been doing bit of German most days, and using some of my existing study techniques to learn (read about what I did here). But by the one year mark, I was feeling like I’d hit a bit of a wall. No longer a part-time uni student, and now a teacher with numerous other responsibilities and commitments, I didn't have the 2-3 hours a day to spend learning German that I invested into my Mandarin learning.
I had made progress. I could carry out a basic conversation in German, so long as my conversation partner was very patient, but I would be embarrassed to try to write something, because I know it would be absolutely full of both spelling and grammatical errors. Further, my level of German left me totally lost when listening to German radio, watching a German TV show, or reading a German newspaper.
Here’s a sample of my language level at this one year mark. Here I’m trying to say something like, ‘When I was 13 I went to a summer camp that was run by a Christian organisation. It was fun and I started going to church after that.’ I get the message across, but it’s an absolute mess!
I knew that if I wanted to get to a point where I feel comfortable watching TV, reading articles online, and writing emails in German without taking five to ten years at my current rate of progress, I needed to find a better way.
Finding inspiration
In my search for more effective ways to learn German, I happened across a pretty inspiring article by Bartosz Czekala entitled, How To Learn German From Scratch To a B2 Level In 5 Months. After reading it I thought to myself, ‘I've got to try this guy's approach’ and ended up taking the plunge with his online course. As I worked my way through the course, and saw the rate of learning that Bartosz himself had achieved, and how clearly he'd laid out a roadmap, I started to get excited.
I wrote to Bartosz, gave him a little background info and asked, ‘Do you think I could get to B2 level in one year?’
Bartosz replied, ‘I can say that your goal is realistic. One year should definitely suffice?’
And hence this journey began. My goal is to reach B2 level in 12 months. I'm starting this challenge on September 20th, 2021. Let's see if I can do it!
Baseline
To work out how much I know, and how much I need to learn, I figured it would be a good idea to establish a baseline.
To do this, I downloaded a flashcard deck containing the Top 4047 German Vocab with Native Audio Sample Sentences, and, working from the most frequent words, recorded which ones I knew and which I didn’t. I looked through the first 1800 most common words (i.e., stopped when I didn’t know most that I was encountering) and found that, of these 1800, I knew about 600 words. I then looked at my own flashcards and saw that I had around an additional 250 words there. On top of that 850 or so words I probably know another several hundred that aren’t captured in any of these flashcards, so I’d estimate that my baseline German vocabulary is somewhere around the 1000 word mark, give or take 10-15%
The Goal – B2 Level
The goal is to reach a level of German that allows me to email and speak to friends and family in German, engage in German media and books without subtitles or translations, and also speak with German educators on education topics. Looking at the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, this suggests B2 level, which is described as:
- Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialization.
- Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
- Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
The required vocabulary for this is about 4000-5000 words. This means that, to reach this goal within a year from my current vocab of 1000, I need to learn around 10 new words per day (plus make some serious progress on my grammar).
I'm going to start by following Bartosz's advice on setting up and reviewing flashcards for rapid learning as set out in his online course and see how I go, I'll try to blog monthly to report on my progress and my learnings. It's going to be a long road, but I'm sure the year will pass by super quick. I'm aiming to blog monthly to share my progress and learnings.
Wish me luck!
Next article coming soon.