How I’m Learning German.

Can’t wait to go to Berlin!  While I was in the shower this morning, I counted to 100 in German!  Wooo hooo!!

Even though I spent A MONTH in Paris and A MONTH in Morocco (where the unofficial second language is French), I feel as though I already know WAY more German than I do French, and I’ve never been to Germany or any German-speaking country.

As I mentioned last week, I’m kind of obsessed with the blog Fluent in 3 Months, which features unconventional language-learning tips from Benny Lewis, an Irish guy who speaks 8 languages and is on his way to learning two more. Well, a few weeks ago I purchased the Language Hacking Guide.  This guide has so many ideas for surrounding yourself with your target language and truly immersing yourself in it as much as possible, so that you can learn very quickly.

Although I’m still too scared to follow Benny’s #1 piece of advice (see below), I’ll show you all the things I’m doing right now and hope you’ll share what works for you!

First, I dare you to watch this and not have the song in your head all day…

Toll, ich nehme es!!   hahahahaaaaa

Anyway…

Things That are Working for Me

• Heavy use of Google Translate!  I’m always looking up something on there.  Sometimes I’ll put in a word I already know, just to hear how it’s pronounced.
• German in 10 Minutes a Day.  This little workbook is okay by me.  Lots of colorful illustrations, fill-in-the-blanks, games, etc.  At the bottom of each page there are “free” words (aka cognates) to learn, which makes me feel good.  :)  I have been chugging through it for at least 10 minutes every day, though usually it ends up being longer than that.  It has flash cards, little German stickers to place all over the house, and a menu guide–can’t beat that!  Though I wish the order in which the material is presented were slightly different, I’m very happy with this overall.  It came with a CD-ROM, but unfortunately I can’t use that because my laptop runs on Ubuntu (Linux), not Windows.  Hmph.
• Making posters to put all over the house.  Okay, so far I’ve only made two–one for kitchen/food-related stuff, one for greetings/conversation starters, etc.
  Unfortunately I don’t know how great they are as learning tools… after a while they start to become invisible.  I have to remind myself to recite what’s on them and try to make different sentences.  However, I would like to make laminated cards for the shower–as you can tell, I consider showering to be “wasted” time that could be spent learnin’!   ;P
• Plain old-fashioned flash cards, using index cards.  On the German side, I also include pronunciation guides and always say the words aloud (whispering to myself) as I read the word.  I don’t know how practical this method is in the long-term, though… the stack is getting bigger and bigger!  I just downloaded a flashcard app for my phone called StudyDroid… I’ll see how that works out.
• Speak in a Week German, Week One.  Just because I needed an audio study tool.  Gotta learn how to pronounce all these new words!  I’m not saying Speak in a Week is the greatest but I like it for now.
• Listening to German radio.  Here is a list of different radio stations–so far I listen to Antenne Düsseldorf and Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) but I haven’t been through the whole list yet.  The downsides are: a) the DJs sometimes speak sooo quickly, and b) it’s often difficult to avoid the American music in English!
• I actually prefer the online commercials, like this one, because the announcers speak more slowly and use simple words like neu (new) and lecker (delicious) and there are words/pictures to go with what they’re saying.
• Watching German movies…not often enough but a little.  Andy and I just watched Soul Kitchen the other day, and thought it was cute.  German TV has yet to hold my interest, but here and here are two lists of stations.
• Taking a pocket dictionary and phrasebook with me everywhere, and using them when the urge strikes.
• Casually perusing different sites such as:
  • BBC Languages German: a nice little course for beginners.  FREE!  I particularly like the “Cool German” section, which gives you some slang.
  • Suite 101′s German Language Phrases for Beginners
  • Frommer’s German Travel Phrases

You like all those links?  Of course all of this stuff is just a way to stall the main event, the #1 language-hacking tip: ACTUALLY TALKING TO GERMAN-SPEAKING PEOPLE!!

So far my idea to make a weekly pilgrimage to the German bakery up the street isn’t working–when I ask the ladies there a question in German, they answer me in English.  While I’m glad they understood me, I don’t yet have the guts to request that they only speak to me in German.

I’ve joined MyLanguageExchange.com, but so far the people who have written to me only want to be pen-pals, rather than chat live via Skype.  When I search for people to talk to, I never seem to find the “right” person.

Who is the right person?  Well, let me tell you that when I was in Paris, I met up with a Spanish woman at a cafe for a face-to-face language exchange.  As soon as we began speaking, it was clear that she was already fluent in English, and that my struggles to string a sentence together in French were quite boring for her.  Quite humiliating, indeed.  I ended up spending an hour listening to her chatter away in English, feeling like an imbecile.  And she made fun of Cincinnati, my hometown!  That chick was  a winner.

Sooo, the right person for me–at least in my mind–is someone whose English is as bad as (or worse than) my German, OR someone who does okay in English but is extremely patient and won’t monopolize the conversation.  Where is that person?  :P

Yeah yeah yeah, I know… I need to get over it.

Anyway, I want to also share three things that haven’t worked for me.  Feel free to disagree with me…

Things That Haven’t Worked for Me in the Past

• Rosetta Stone (RS).  Now, I did once date a pilot who learned Spanish using RS.  He’d speak Spanish for me and it sounded as though he was fluent but his accent was HORRIBLE–he sounded like an American dude reading a menu from a Mexican restaurant!  No rolling r’s, nada.  I tried the French version and it bored me to tears…I didn’t even come close to finishing it.  Andy still insists on buying the German version one day (if he finds a used one or is ready to cough up nearly $500 for a new one) even though I try to dissuade him.  If you like wasting time looking at pictures and putting together little sentences like, “The boy eats the red apple,” or “The man buys the coffee,” be my guest.  Even then, I would suggest using RS in conjunction with other learning tools.
• Any course that only engages one sense/skill.  I’m against “audio-only” courses that you listen to in the car.  Words are often spelled differently than they sound, and sometimes people talk so fast that you’re thinking they’re saying one big word when it might be three little words, etc.
• Expensive Language Schools.  I’m not against spending money to learn a language, but I don’t agree with spending big bucks on ONE thing and ignoring everything else.  When I lived in Cincinnati, I worked with a French tutor, one-on-one, and paid several hundred dollars to do so… but I didn’t have the internal motivation to seek out other learning tools.  Once you pay that much money, and you go to these LONG, BORING ASS classes where it’s all grammar grammar grammar, it’s easy to think, “This is all I need to do!  I’ll just go to class, do my homework and I’ll be fluent in (my target language) in no time!”  But it doesn’t work that way.

So now you get an idea of how I’m spending my time these days.  :)

**Do you have any other tips for learning a new language?  What do you think of my methods?**

*** By the way, if you watched the above video, “Wieviel” is incorrect, it’s actually two words: “Wie viel,” which means “How much.”