How to efficiently learn German

If you are one of the few people who enjoys studying conjugation and declination tables, go for it. I did, but it didn’t really help me to get to any level of fluency. It’s nice to understand the "why" of der, die, das, dem, den, des, etc., but it’s never going to help you participate in a regular conversations with native German speakers.

How you can get from A1 to B2 in less than a year

Listen and repeat

Spend at least 2 hours a day listening to German broadcasts or recordings. Ideally, choose media that you can pause in order to give you the chance to repeat what you just heard. There is a wealth of movies, TV series, and documentaries that these German language TV channels offer online:

  • ARD Mediathek

    • Der Beschützer, a movie about an experienced BKA officer who is assigned to protect a key witness at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg. Lots of danger and excitement.

  • ZDF, e.g.,

    • Der Schwarm, a multinational series that you can watch in German with English subtitles.

    • Frühling: It doesn’t work without Katja …​
      In the Bavarian village of Frühling, everyone knows her: village helper Katja Baumann (Simone Thomalla). Whether milking cows or holding a desperate hand …​ Katja is always there to help. (Family series)

    • Nord Nord Mord, a crime thriller series in its 3rd season that takes place on the island of Sylt.

  • 3sat

It doesn’t matter if you understand what you are saying or not. This technique enabled my tutor, Larry, to master most of the European languages. dBefore I met him, he had worked at the United Nations as a simultaneous interpreter. He had C-level proficiency in all Western European languages (Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and the Scandinavian languages). He had also mastered Russian. After completing his US Army enlistment contract that included his training as a military linguist, he backpacked around Europe spending only 30 days in each country to master the local language. Prior to my acceptance of a DAAD Stipend to study at the Universität Siegen, his advice to me was,

Become a parrot. Learn the pronunciation, tone, melody, and cadence of each sentence. Practice, so that you can speak as fast as a native. Don’t worry about the meaning. You’ll pick that up later on from the context of the situation."

Isolate yourself from your native language

When I learned German, there was no internet. I moved to Germany and soon lived in a WG (Wohngemeinschaft) where English was never spoken. Less than a year later, I passed the Prüfung zum Nachweis deutscher Sprachkenntnisse without having ever attended the German language course for foreign students that the Universität Siegen offered as preparation for this exam. As my polyglot tutor, Larry, advised,

Avoid speaking English with others while you are learning a foreign language. Whenever I heard Americans while traveling around Europe, I would avoid them.

Which path will you take?

The natural path

You can follow the tried and proven path that requires practically no classes, no notes to take, and no grammar to be memorized. This is the path we all take when we learn our mother tongue. As toddlers, most of us were not reading, writing, or learning grammar rules from our older family members. We simply rattled off what we heard our older family members saying. You, however, have the advantage of accelerating this process because you can look up the meaning later on of what you have memorized.

The artificial path

Or, you can take uphill path. You can block off several hours a week for sitting in a language class where you will spend, at best, 10% of that time speaking the German that you’re hearing in class. You will struggle with dative and genitive cases, waste your time reading and writing, even though the primary goal is oral fluency.

If you choose the natural path, once you can understand the spoken language, reading and writing are easy skills you probably will have already picked up automatically along the way.