Listening and understanding what you hear is an important part of learning German if you ever want to be able to communicate with others in real-life. A good way to improve your listening skills is to listen but not just randomly. Many learners listen to podcasts regularly and that’s good for getting used to theContinue reading “How to work with podcasts and other audio material”
Category Archives: Study Tips
Worst things first
When do you eat your dessert? Before you eat your meal or after? What do enjoy more: first have free time and then work or first work and then have free time? What is more pleasant: walking downhill and then uphill or first uphill and then downhill? I’ll take a wild guess: you have yourContinue reading “Worst things first”
An unfamiliar way of saying something
Many things we say in German seem quite alien to learners, simply because in their own language they say it differently. What usually happens is that a learner will see the German version and register that it is different. When they use this snippet in speaking or writing, they will have to remind themselves thatContinue reading “An unfamiliar way of saying something”
How to study articles
First of all, you shouldn’t study the gender of a noun in the same way at all stages of our learning process. In the very beginning, you can go with the simple version: der Tisch, die Tür, das Bett. As long as you have an overseeable number of nouns to deal with, this works fine.Continue reading “How to study articles”
Which dictionary should I use?
Don’t use Google Translate. Seriously. Don’t use any of these translation machines. They work with snippets from sentences, translate them word by word and then put them back together to form sentences. The result is often completely incorrect German. Those systems don’t understand flections (changes to words based on gender and cases), and they don’tContinue reading “Which dictionary should I use?”
How to work with videos
Many people watch video courses – and especially language instruction videos – like movies. They press play, let it run through, watch it and when the course is done, they are done. Okay, there might also be some stopping, pausing and taking notes, but in principle it’s similar to watching a movie. Watching a videoContinue reading “How to work with videos”