How long it’ll take to become fluent in German is the question most German learners want to knowledge.
As a rule of thumb, German universities require proof of upper intermediate to advanced German language skills (level B2 or C1) for you to be able to study in German.
So, the answer of how long that takes is, of course, that it depends. But I won’t leave you hanging there, I’ll actually answer the question with German precision and show you how to learn German the fastest (and best) way using methods I’ve developed or optimized teaching thousands of students over the past 20 years.
Let me share with you the top 10 tips to learning German fast like a Blitz.
First things first: So, how long does it take to learn German?
There are two possible answers:
A. Here’s the only honest answer: it will take as long as it takes. That could be anything between 3 months and 3 years or never.
B. And here’s the answer you want to hear: it takes on average 9 months.
In order to understand these answers, you got to understand the question. The question above is extremely vague.
What does it actually mean to have learnt German?
For most German learners that means to have a normal conversation in German without struggle.
For some learners it means to be able to read a book or article in German without having to use a dictionary.
Others would love to be able to watch movies or series with or without German subtitles and enjoy the experience.
Then there are those who need to talk to the family of their spouse or want to deeply enjoy German humor.
Here’s one that will help you improve your relation to your mother in law: Es klingelt. Er öffnet die Tür. “Aber Schwiegermama, warum stehst Du denn draußen im Regen? Geht doch nach Hause.”
All lovely goals that will take their time to achieve. How long these moments are away from today depends on who you actually are. What’s your education, age, IQ, EQ, overall personality type, gender?, mindset, (intensity of your) motivation, diligence, consistency, life circumstances, which include your work situation, your native language, hours available for studying, languages you already have learnt, ability to learn new things, you capability to listen thoroughly, your ability to focus, mental as well as physical health, your environment and possibly a hundred more factors.
Now, before you drop the towel here, here are a few points that will put your mind at ease:
The German government keeps track of the performance of German learners in so called Integration Courses (IK). These stats show that after 7 months (or 700 lessons), roughly 50% pass their B1 exam. Standard language schools are likely to have slightly but not significantly better results. They assume that an average learner can get to B2 level – the level that would fit those goals above – in 9 months of intensive studying. They don’t publish their stats but my pretty gracious guess is that it won’t be more than 70% that reach B2.
Intensive means 4.5 hours of daily work on your German (weekends off) without any holidays.
That’s a part time job. The majority of German students will very likely not be able to invest that many hours daily over such a long period of time and therefore you can add quite a few more months to the total duration of your German learning if you have a job and/or a family to take care of first.
If this stresses you out or makes you want to despair, let me quickly share the good news with you: it doesn’t matter how long it takes until you are fluent in German as you can’t influence it much anyhow. The only problem that you might have is that you would like your German lessons to be over as soon as possible. If you enjoyed the German learning process, why would you want it to stop?
We have been trained to think of education (in this case language learning) as something that helps us achieve things but never as a process that is actually enjoyable.
Imagine having a child just to see it leave your house asap or making a child and thinking: let’s get this over with quickly.
Learning German is like having a child (just a lot less demanding at times). It’s something you will actually enjoy taking care of and to be around.
If you are not the fatherly or motherly type, replace child with car, stamp collection or your six pack.
How long it takes to learn German does. not. matter. at. all.
But I need to learn German by XY
But for those who like to make plans and maybe have to get to a certain level of German in a certain time here is how you approach this the German way:
Get the best materials out there – you know where to find them as you found this page already and work for a week while measuring your time. Let’s say from scratch until B2 you got to work through 80 lessons. And let’s say it takes your 1 week to work through 2 lessons. That would tell you that it’d take you 40 weeks to get to B2. Now that’s a very rough estimate and you also have to take into consideration that life rarely stays the same over a longer period of time.
B2 also will become a lot more challenging as it forces you to deal with a lot more abstract vocab and more complex sentence constructions. Hence B2 is estimated to take 1.5 longer than any other level before. That will get you 60 lessons (for A1-B1) plus 30 lessons (20 lessons B2 x 1.5) plus life does what it wants, safety deposit (10% = 9 lessons) or a total of 99 lessons to reckon with. That means in about 50 weeks or basically one year you should have reached B2 level. IF you work consistently and diligently 4.5 hours a day.
With SmarterGerman you’ll be reminded to check in on your goals and to adjust them regularly which will make the German learning experience a lot more enjoyable and realistic.
In order to achieve your dreams you need to stop dreaming and become a realist.
What was that – 3 months?
Well, while it definitely is possible to achieve such an outstanding result, it is not possible for the majority of people out there. I’d say it’s possible for 1% of German learners I’ve met. And that’s not meant to say that the people I worked with are stupid or bad learners. Extraordinary achievements call for extraordinary conditions. There was even a guy, Daniel Tammet, who was claimed to have learnt German in 7 days to a more or less fluent’ish conversational level but he was a savant (remember Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman?)
Unless you are a savant or life blessed you in many ways, it makes no sense to expect that you will get to B2 in such a short time. I just wanted to show you that what is possible is not really relevant in most cases and therefore it is wiser to approach the German learning game with much more realistic expectations. That will keep you in the game long enough for you to actually learn this beautiful language. If you expect to be fast but fail constantly you’ll drop out sooner or later and never get to tell your mother in law that hilarious joke above in German.
Here a little table for those unverbesserlich dreamers among you that love clear answers and numbers:
- Can you learn German in 1 month?
- How well can you learn German in 5 months?
- How long does it take to become fluent in German?
- German B1 exam in 14 days
Tip 1 — Take care of the #1 driver of your success
What do you think is the most important thing that decides your German learning success?
Take a minute or two to think about it. List everything that comes to your mind. No need to censor anything. I bet you won’t guess the answer I’m about to reveal.
Whatever you wrote: those are all good and valid points. They all matter to a certain extent. You did really well. Now, all these points are irrelevant if this one single thing comes into play and that is — drum roll — your health.
You are what you eat. Literally. If you eat food with no nutritional value, you can’t expect your body to squeeze anything of value out of it. If you don’t take care of your body, it will wither faster. The same goes for mental health.
I won’t tell you what to eat nor how to take care of your body or your mind. That’s for you to find out. If you get this point, you’ll start to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Follow that light and be well. Your German learning will thank you.
Tip 2 — Keep it real
Learning any language is like running a marathon (if you are more speedy) or maybe even better like a long and beautiful hike (if you are like me).
In my experience, many German learners are pretty ignorant in regard to how much work is required to become comfortable with their target language. While they know that it isn’t done in a couple of months, the total amount of work and obstacles they might encounter on the way seems obscured to them.
That’s why at SmarterGerman we love and offer frequent reality checks. If things are clear, frustration stands no chance and the hike remains a pleasurable experience.
Tip 3 — Embrace your mistakes
There are two major categories of mistakes in my experience:
1 | mistakes you are aware of
2 | mistakes you are not aware of
Only one of those types of mistakes can be fixed. Can you guess which one?
If you are aware of a mistake, you can fix it. To fix it you need to understand what went wrong. That’s where knowledge about the language like grammar is helpful.
If you are not aware of a mistake, you can’t fix it right away. The first thing that needs to happen is that you become aware of such a mistake. That could happen with help of another person or with intelligent software. That still doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to fix that mistake though as there is a reason why you have not realized that mistake yet.
It might be because you don’t really care. That’s often the case with learners who already live in Germany, get by pretty well speaking German, and do not really need to improve it any further. They might still think and say that they would like to improve their German but the truth is that they are tired of it already. There’s no motivation to go into the last 20% which require 80% of your energy. It’s really hard work to fix those last 20%.
By the way: it is totally fine not to fix those 20%. What is causing the real pain here is not the fact that one is shy of an immense amount of work that doesn’t really make a difference to the world but the fact that one lies about it because there is a “should” somewhere that we constantly hear whispering into our ears.
Kill that “should” and your German will improve massively as you’ll stop striving for perfection.
There’s this famous quote about Thomas Edison where in response to the question how he dealt with having failed 9999 times when developing the light bulb, he said something like:
– I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.
Tip 4 — What’s the best German language school or online course out there?
These days (Covid times for those from the future reading this article) online classes are the way to go.
Unfortunately, most language schools I’ve come across so far think that doing group classes on Zoom, or worse Adobe Connect, or even putting a camera into a real classroom filming a teacher working on a blackboard is online teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Group classes are riddled with disadvantages. The only advantage of their online version is that you don’t have to commute for an hour through your city any more. You are still stuck in time as classes start at a fixed time and you are stuck sharing one German teacher with ten or more other learners. You’ll only get 1/10th of a teacher.
If you are interested in finding out more about why most language courses at language schools are rather a waste of your time and money check out this article of mine.
So, these “online” classes are far from being the best option out there. They might be better than trying to study on one’s own as that bears the risk of wasting a lot of time with insufficient materials. But beyond that, I’d stay away from them especially if I was a complete beginner.
Maybe language learning apps have their own advantages and are the solution of the 21st century but I haven’t come across any free apps or platforms yet that I’d consider worth the time and money. Sorry, Duolingo, sorry, Babbel, sorry Rosetta Stone.
Here’s why German learning apps suck at least if you expect them to replace a proper German tutor or formal study.
So, what’s the best way to learn German online then? Well, that’s of course an online course that
- doesn’t require you to be anywhere specific at a specific time.
- It explains everything to you in clear and simple English
- and takes the burden of organizing your learning from your shoulders so that you can fully focus on enjoying your learning experience and process.
- It’s a course that doesn’t force you to sell a kidney – yes, Goethe, I’m looking at you here – just to get to B1. B2 is another 3,000 EUR, here in Berlin at least.
- It doesn’t make you believe that being instructed in a foreign language you barely understand is the best course of action for you
All this, as you will have guessed already, is provided with any course I ever made. All I did was put myself into the shoes of a new language learner and walked ten thousand miles in them over the last 20 years. The result will change your life.
Don’t believe a word I just wrote. Try and see it with your own eyes here. The 1st lesson is completely free and it shows you everything you need to see to understand what you are dealing with when learning German and why the above is nothing but the truth.
Tip 5 — Master German grammar essentials
I won’t go into detail here but once you have covered the following grammar points, you are fine and can focus on actually practicing your language skills:
- learn the gender of nouns
- understand German word order and how to read sentences even if you don’t get all the words yet (=where’s the verb?)
- understand German verb conjugation (=how does it change and why?)
- memorize the German irregular verbs (=2 hours and you are done if you use the SmarterGerman method)
- make sense of the German cases
Doesn’t look like much, right? And it actually isn’t.
If you want to learn the basics grammar rules quickly and in a very comprehensible way, why don’t you try my Online German Courses (I offer all relevant levels, A1-C1).
It doesn’t get any easier and clearer and with SmarterGerman you will progress faster than in a standard language school.
Tip 6 — Learn vocab quickly
Vocab is heavy on your long-term memory, as it is very abstract and therefore your greatest enemy if your goal is to learn German faster. The word “Kettensäge” (=chainsaw) e.g. doesn’t look like anything you have ever seen. That means you need to build a whole new connection in your brain instead of just adding it to any of the already existing stuff in there.
How many words do I need to learn to be speak fluent German?
Officially you are supposed to understand 2800 words to pass a B1 exam. But with my approach, you’ll be fine with less than half of that.
The good news is that you don’t have to understand every single word when exposed to spoken or written German. You can actually derive many meanings from the similarity of German words with their English equivalents.
I’ll teach you how to do this thoroughly in my Online German courses but if you want to get a quick overview of the vast amount of German-English cognates check out this article on Wikipedia.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to go through that list and remember anything. Check the free trial of any of my online German courses first to see how you can get all this information into your brain with a smile.
Also watch the two videos below. The first one will introduce you to core principles of learning vocab, the second one is a masterclass of mine that will cover this topic of learning vocabulary fast in far more depth.
Principles: AMA How to learn German vocabulary fast
Tip 7 — Learning the most common German words
A common approach to learning German faster is to start with the most common words out there.
You can easily find lists with the 500, 1000, 2000, even 5000 (although that’s ridiculous) most common words in German. The problem with lists is that they are very lousy learning tools.
Learning the top 100 most common words in German is actually something I think makes sense.
Unfortunately, even though there are already Memrise courses for that out there, these are being taught in an isolated manner. But as we are only talking about hundred max two hundred words, that’s “okay” for now. One hundred words should take you roughly a week if you invest 30-60 mins per day.
Tip 8 — Why you should try language learning with a story
At SmarterGerman we use exciting and funny criminal stories (A1-B1) or interesting articles (B2, C1) to teach every aspect of German.
Stories are engaging. We have been reading children’s books and stories to our children to pass on our experiences for generations.
- Stories draw you in, so you might want to learn German just to find out who killed that poor old lady and what their motives were
- It puts every specific word in a memorable context and therefore makes practicing vocabulary a whole lot easier and enjoyable.
- These stories come with audio which makes them much more powerful and easier to handle than working with movies.
The only exception from this rule is if you work with a lovely tool like Yabla. Check out this blog post of mine that introduces this platform to you.
Tip 9 — How to memorize and remember German grammar
Like in most other languages, there are things in the German language that simply have to be learnt by heart. And that is where most German tutors stop helping their students.
In order to learn German faster, one needs to make use of those powerful learning techniques that were made for exactly this purpose thousands of years ago.
You can learn things by heart with traditional methods like grammar drills. And that’s where their methods ended.
But SmarterGerman wouldn’t be called smarter if I was one of those German tutors. See for yourself how you can easily learn two of the most challenging topics every German learner has to cope with:
Remembering the grammatical gender of German nouns
Technique One: The Superhero Technique
Technique Two: Article Signals
Remembering the German irregular verbs
I’ve created an app to help you learn German faster by allowing you to memorize all relevant irregular verbs over one weekend. I’m not kidding. Try it yourself:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/german-irregular-verbs-wizard/id998051332
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartergerman.ivwizard_next&hl=en&gl=US
And here’s a way to make sense of something seemingly illogical:
Understand the principle behind the German adjective endings
Tip 10 — Prepare, prepare, prepare then practice, practice, practice
Like with many things in life, preparation is 80% of the path towards success, especially when you are trying to learn German faster.
Not only is it THE most demanding skill to master, and therefore simply overwhelming for almost every student if not done properly, it also comes with a lot of psychological baggage. Putting this to the beginning of the learning process is a fatal mistake which costs many learners a lot of energy and at times also self-esteem.
Speaking simply requires careful and thorough preparation. Free speaking is simply off the table for the first few months.
That doesn’t mean that a learner can’t prepare for the great moment of having a real conversation in the real German speaking world. And that’s exactly what we are doing at SmarterGerman.
We support learners to prepare their speaking skills step by step so that they can cope with the demanding challenge of forming and pronouncing words and sentences with their mouths (and brains) that were trained for decades to do this process in a completely different language.
Imagine having learnt a job for 20 years and suddenly you are put into a different department of the same company and have to learn certain things and skills from scratch. You’ll very likely manage but it will take you time and that’s okay. The same is true for speaking.
It. Simply. Takes. Time. You can’t pull the grass to make it grow faster.
The first lesson of any of our main German online courses will already show you how you can prepare your speaking skills all by yourself with the help of beautifully simple tools freely available on the internet.
On top of that you’ll also internalize the grammar so deeply that you’ll be able to speak proper (!) German without thinking of a single grammar rule.
And once you’ve got the hang of it, you can go out and practice, practice, practice and you will feel way less inhibited if at all which in the end will lead to more joy, more practice and more success.
Prepare now.
Bonus Tip 01 — Real Immersion
In your research you might have heard about “immersion” and how good it is for learners to quickly improve their German. Well, unfortunately that’s only half of the truth as immersion is a vastly misunderstood concept.
You can see that in almost any language school out there that tries to teach you German with the help of a native German speaker. That’s because they truly believe that this approach is immersion. Reality couldn’t be farther from it.
Immersion without understanding is worthless. I could expose myself to people speaking Japanese 24/7 until I die and I wouldn’t learn a word of Japanese from it. I might pick up repeated sound patterns but I wouldn’t get what they meant.
Just exposing yourself to German culture and native speakers will not help you learn German faster, in fact it will not do anything to you unless you do so within the framework of a thought through German learning system like SmarterGerman.
Language learners should still learn their grammar, vocabulary, practice all skills etc. But immersion can help you get a feeling for the sound and intonation of German which will benefit you in the sense that you will develop a feeling for the language over time.
At SmarterGerman we call that “Passive Listening” and it’s done while you do other things so that it doesn’t cost you any time or effort.
You don’t even have to live in Germany to experience real immersion. Just being here also doesn’t really guarantee that you’ll hear German more often than you already do in your home country. I don’t hear that much German and I’m a native living in Berlin, the Hauptstadt of this beautiful country.
If you want to find out more about “real immersion” check out this video of mine:
Bonus Tip 02 — Working with a language partner or tandem
One way to practice speaking German is to find language partners (native speakers or other language learners) to speak German with. Learning German in this way is called Tandem or a Language Exchange.
There’s a lot that can go wrong with this kind of exchange. Not that I’m against people meeting up and becoming friends but if your aim is to learn and speak German, then it doesn’t harm to be aware of possible pitfalls.
If you are interested in finding a tandem partner, I recommend this article of mine and of course, our brand new (Jan 2022) online Tandem Training created by my friend Alessio Bona to help you learn German faster.
Here is just a quick list of things to consider when following this approach:
- Prepare. Prepare the topic, the materials, the vocabulary, and practice on your own first
- Meet at a proper place. Calm and pleasant. You can also go for a walk if you are a bit more advanced but as you might want to take notes and read texts, a calm coffee shop or at each other’s homes would do a better job. Language exchange via Zoom is of course also fine.
- Stick to your time and less is more: Set a timer. The timer goes off and you finish your point. Work in 15 min increments (15 mins Deutsch, 15 mins English/ Spanish, or your native language). You can repeat that. 30 mins wear beginners out.
- If you don’t click, say goodbye. You can meet 2-3 times but if you really don’t find much to talk about or it already feels like a drag, mention politely that you didn’t click and say goodbye.
- Talk about real life stuff that you are actually interested in. It doesn’t have to be Kant or Goethe but if you talk about stuff you find in German textbooks you’ll eventually get bored.
That’s more than enough to start with. If you keep all these things in mind, your tandem might become a success.
Next Steps — Check out these free resources
- SmarterGerman Course Lesson 01
- Podcasts – Coffee Break German
- SmarterGerman on YouTube – over 85K subscribers enjoy our videos
If you want to explore more resources and read about funny German words, German culture, Germany as a country to live and work in, or anything else related to ways to study German efficiently, you can check out the SmarterGerman blog here.
FAQs about learning a new language at a fast pace and speaking with confidence
Here are some of the questions people ask about ways to learn German faster
How can I practice and speak German with native German speakers?
Utilize language exchange platforms or attend local German language meetups to connect with a native speaker interested in language exchange between two languages.
That’s a great way to practice the language and also a way to make German-speaking friends. Germans speak English pretty well but are also quite interested in learning new foreign languages.
How hard is B2-level German?
Although German seems difficult, it follows a highly systematic structure. If the course you’re using is well-structured and the language teachers do a good job, reaching a B2 level shouldn’t be difficult.
Summing Up: How to Learn German Faster
So, if you want to study the German language, the journey matters as much as the destination. Michael Schmitz’s insightful tips will get you on the fast track towards fluency.
With dedication and SmarterGerman, your path to German fluency becomes both enjoyable and achievable.