What You Need to Know to Understand German Faster: when you decide to learn German, you want to make a little bit of progress every day. But often, you don’t know how to make progress towards fluency. There are lots of techniques and promises in the language learning world, and it feels like you have to spend years finding what delivers.
What if you could cut the questions and simply focus on the best methods for learning German?
In today’s article, I will share with you three surprising facts from my new course How to Learn German Faster. Knowing these three tricks alone can save you hours, and I hope that you’ll be checking out the course reading to learn how to truly learn German much faster.
Vocabulary Works in Chunks, not Words
There is no way around learning vocabulary and it’s one of the most challenging tasks when learning any language. But when you understand the power of learning in context and in chunks, you will finally start putting words together so that they make sense.
This is why I recommend you throw out the classic wordlist. Instead, focus on learning your word in context. The German word Bank for example is best learnt as bei einer Bank arbeiten (work at a bank) and auf einer Bank sitzen (to sit on a bench), which helps you recall the correct meaning much quicker.
There are great vocabulary tools out there, and in How to Learn German Faster I have included videos to guide you through the full technique and learn it step by step.
Understand German: the Difference Between Passive and Active Listening
Most German learners would like to have a conversation in German at one point but real life rarely provides us with ideal conditions for conversations. So instead, many learners focus on listening and understanding more. They spend hours with audio courses and radio shows, and wonder why progress won’t come.
The trick here is that you have to know two types of listening:
Active Listening is more than just listening. This step requires your full focus, and you will need a text and its recording to work with it. In active listening, you are following every word, sound and sentence to grasp an audio piece’s full meaning.
Passive Listening describes those times when you are listening to native German speakers. This will familiarize you with the sounds of German, help you distinguish the words from each other and follow the language at natural speed. Focus on environments with natural atmosphere, so that means you should avoid the news and audiobooks.
Listening is Step 5 in the Learning Cycle, which is my biggest tip. Check out the free trial of any course of mine to try out this powerful way of learning German-video for a first insight.
Think About the Learning Cycle
At the heart of How to Learn German Faster, I am sharing the exact details of the German Learning Cycle, a simple and reliable system for learning faster and remembering better. If you usually sit down and try a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and feel like you’re not getting anywhere, the Learning Cycle is going to be exactly what you need.
You are going to learn exactly how to follow this cycle. There is a version for beginners and a special level for advanced learners, and my videos will show you exactly how to build this into your daily life.
This course is based on the knowledge I share with private clients who regularly reach level B1 in just 3 months, and it is now available in the smarterGerman shop.