6 EFFECTIVE GERMAN LEARNING TIPS

hi everyone and welcome back to another video so I actually skipped class to film this video so I hope this video is worth it in the sense that you all will enjoy it and that you all find the content useful so today's video is going to be about the six effective German learning tips that I personally found useful when I was learning German at the intermediate level so I am still learning German but these tips were very effective for me as a beginner to intermediate learner but before we jump into the tips please feel free to check out the video I made about how I got full marks on the test off and also another video I made of me speaking in German the links will be in the description below so the first tip I have for you is to have the right motivation or at least a strong motivation of learning German this is probably the most important tip I have in the video because if you don't have a strong motivation you're not going to force yourself to push through once the grammar gets hard or once you're struggling to construct sentences like it's not enough to think that a German is cool I want to sound cool so I want to learn it no that's not strong enough motivation so what I've noticed when I was learning German at my university was that people who are taking German and majoring in German for the sake of the degree and they were learning they were studying and everything and that's okay but what I found is that a lot of them never got past b1 and after graduating they didn't have any aims or intention to use it further beyond the university so they probably forgot everything they learned before not everything but you know if you don't practice the language it will slowly deteriorate don't get me wrong I think it's great that they decided to explore new culture and learn a new language but I'm saying like realistically if you don't have intentions of using it beyond your studies you're not going to get past a level of fluency that you'd like to have or a level of fluency where you can construct sentences and be halfway fluent so for me personally I probably started learning like everyone else um I thought it sounded really cool because I really liked listening to Lama shine and I found the lyrics just so cool and so beautiful and that was the initial motivation I didn't have any plans to move to Germany or whatever that was just the initial motivation it wasn't until I did a winter exchange in Germany until I found out that I really wanted to improve in the language because I really wanted to come back to at least live here to see how life was like here and so that I can communicate with the people in their native language in German you might be thinking that most German people speak English anyway so you can still communicate with them but you know that's not the point um if you speak to them in their native language the communication is just so much deeper and so much more different so for me that was the motivation that was pushing me to learn even though I found it hard I found it hard to construct sentences I always had the goal of coming to live here I didn't want to be living in Germany and not speaking language because that would make me feel really disadvantaged and I don't want to be this advantage so that's the strong motivation that I have to keep learning German to get to a level where I can speak to everyone without struggling a lot my second tip for you is to speak to people who don't speak English and also to people who don't speak your mother language this is the best way of immersing yourself in the language because then you only be thinking about German hundred percent of the time so my experience was that when I was learning German at my old University and speak to my fellow German learners in Cantonese when I had questions or even after school when we had a chat it was always in Cantonese because to be fair with a1 it's kind of like hard to speak to each other a 1 a 2 level you can't barely create sentences that didn't really help us learn German because we just go back to the Cantonese but luckily when I did a German language program in I made a friend who was Russian and she didn't speak English and we had around a 2-level of German and we befriended each other I didn't speak Russian so the only way we could communicate was to speak through German and after 8 months into our friendship we decided that we wanted to do another language course again in Germany so we basically planned the whole trip out we plan another two-month trip in Germany during her summer holiday to stay at a host family and to learn German at a German language school in Cologne and we coordinated the trip everything in German and we only had around a to 2 b1 level so that was really helpful for us so you know I I get it it's really extreme to try to find someone who can't speak English that's probably very rare and also someone who doesn't speak your mother language like it's probably you're probably not gonna find one easily so my tip for you is if you know someone who speaks German you can just request them to talk to you in German because you know what I'm studying right now and my course is fully in English so all the Germans there they can all speak English fluently so what I did was I asked my friend my German friend to speak to me only in German so that I can improve my German and that works out really well for us my third tip for you is don't use text books as your primary main resource of learning German I mean yeah textbooks are great textbooks are necessary when you're just starting out when you're a beginner you don't know the grammar you need textbooks to learn the grammar the cases how the gender works you need textbooks for that there are a few textbooks that I use that I found really useful when I was building my foundation and there are also some textbooks that I used that helped me get full marks on the tests off the links will be in the description below however you shouldn't rely on textbooks so much after you reach like b1 because the thing is textbook German is different from spoken German exactly like how textbook is not a representative of how people actually speak English and view life so my tip for you is to rely on other sources - like books or YouTube videos or TV shows or any other resource that's not so formal so you can learn how people speak German in real life so for me personally I found YouTube to be a really good resource of learning German because I found some vloggers that I really liked watching and they speak obviously in the normal speed and they speak to their friends not in textbook German style they speak how normal people speak basically yeah you need to be a pretty intermediate you need to be past the beginner level to be able to understand the vlogs or its able to grasp what they're saying but that's another problem another thing I really like about YouTube is you can find German youtubers for any topic you like so if you like tech there is a youtuber for that if you like gaming there's so many German gaming youtubers if you like vlogs there's so many vloggers just do your research and you'll definitely find a YouTube channel you like I think even as a beginner there is a channel called easy German or something and you can see how people speak German but slowly so not as fast as the vloggers so that would be my third tip for you all tip number four is to find German music that you really like and to listen to the German music you really like so let me tell you a little secret the real reason the first first initial reason why I started learning German is because I really loved listening to the band called a vom Stein I really liked the lyrics they were so beautiful to me but I didn't understand a word of it so when I went to university I had the opportunity of joining a course it wasn't that expensive so I joined the course to learn German and then from that I did a winter exchange and everything my motivation all changed after visiting Germany for in real life for the first time but my first first motivation was always the German music uhm listening to vom Stein made me really want to learn German the great thing about Rammstein is that's the lead singer keep renunciates the words really clearly and slowly and he pronounces it in hoc toys so that's really good for German learners that's how I really improved my pronunciation was to mimic how the lead singer of lamb Stein pronounced seats the words in the song so that's how I improved my pronunciation so I know not everyone likes to Rammstein it's you know it's acquired taste it's really heavy you know the lyrics are inappropriate so not everyone is into that but my point is if you find a band you're emotional about that brings out your emotions when you listen to the music if you find a German band that does that and if you keep listening to the music it will really help you with your listening skills and it's a fun way of learning German you're not reading a textbook so that would be my fourth recommendation to you all my fifth tip for you all is to keep a diary or a journal or whatever you like to call it and writes in it every day I don't do this anymore but when I was around a1 to b1 level I used to keep a diary and write every day I wrote a few sentences every day in German and I know this sounds really time-consuming to write something down every single day yeah it's it sounds time-consuming but it doesn't have to be you don't have to write pages you don't have to write paragraphs if you like you can just write two to three sentences a day you don't know what to write you can just try to scribe what you did during the day or probably some random thoughts that you found important the point is if you're constructing sentences yourself you learn more words than compared to if you read it because when you're trying to build your own sentences you're trying to actively retrieve a word and to look up a word and to look up the meaning of the word and this way you can retain the words easier if that makes sense if you're writing about what you're doing every day the mundane things for example you're going to learn the words that people use commonly every day so in that sense I found keeping a diary in German very useful if you're serious about learning German you're going to have to write in German anyway there's no way avoiding it so be it an exam there's a written component in the exam or maybe you want to live in Germany later you always have to write emails in German that's just the way it is like everyone understands English but people have to communicate in Germany in German so there's no way of avoiding writing in German why not just get the practice sooner and once you have the habit of creating sentences it will come easier to you when you speak to so I find this a really good way of practicing German so my 6th and final tip for the video is to learn the noun with the gender if you know what I mean this tip was so useful for me when I was trying to accumulate more vocabulary because you know how um if you know the noun if you don't know the gender of the noun you have to guess it and if it's wrong your sentence is wrong so it's not good if you want to learn German just do it correctly don't be lazy about it learn the correct gender so I forgot who told me this tip it might have been my first ever German teacher basically someone told me when you learn the noun learn it with the nominative gender so for example if you come across the word bread which is what um you don't learn it as bought because it's not complete you should learn it as dust port because that's is the gender of bread you kind of repeat it to yourself or write it down in notebook in some point in time it will just start to sound right to you like if you say D bought it will sound super wrong so this is kind of how you learn the genders of the noun without going through dictionary and painfully trying to write down every word that's not effective that's boring that's really hard so always always learn the noun with the gender so that you can associate the gender with the noun if that makes sense so my final words for this video is that no you're not going to learn German super fast even if you follow these tips like that's not how it works it takes time to learn a language it's not realistic to think that oh I'll learn the language in a few months it doesn't work like that it takes practice and I see you're not gonna learn a language really fast unless you're taking an intensive German course in Germany full time and you're living here and you take the course for a year and then you reach B what B whatever B to in a year or something I mean in that way of course you can learn it pretty fast but if you're not living in Germany or if you're not in the position to learn German full-time you can't learn it super fast that's just not realistic but you know do things daily watch youtube videos daily write in your diary daily and then you'll build the foundations and also it's super important to be confident of the German grammar foundations like you have to build your foundations before you can go further into the grammar so make sure you understand how the cases work so like dandy dust and the genders and how the nominative the dotted and the genitive case is how all of them works make sure you understand that before you move on if not you're going to be having a hard time and the last thing is that it's really important to find a balance between learning reading and listening and also learning writing and speaking the difference is that if you're reading and listening the whole time it's your passively learning it because you're not constructing the sentences yourself you're kind of just receiving it so if someone's speaking you're just listening to the to the German and if you're reading you're just reading the German that another person wrote so you're not actively constructing the sentences so you need to find a good balance you need to make time for writing and speaking because when you're writing and speaking you're making the sentences yourself you're using your own brain and you're trying to construct sentences together and this is really important like who cares if you understand German who cares if when someone speaks German you understand it and if you read German you understand it like it's cool but like you've nothing to show for it if you can't speak it or if you can't write it like you still need to communicate with other people in German so you really need to spend time on writing and speaking I hope I'm not sounding rip but that was really important for me that I could construct sentences myself and not just say oh I can read German but you know there's nothing to show for it so yeah guys don't neglect writing and speaking so I hope this video was motivating for you and I hope you found this video useful I wish you the best of luck in your German language learning journey however cringy that sounds leave a comment down below if you have any German learning tips that you find effective or efficient and that you'd like to share to others if you're interested you can also check out my previous video of the bad experiences I've personally had with DHL because of my bad luck have a good day and have a good weekend whenever you watching this video have a good one and I'll see in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: More Yin Than Yang

Views: 73,595

Keywords: moving to germany, moved to germany, moving germany, germany blog, living in germany, germany student, more yin than yang, How to learn german easily, How to learn german for beginners, German learning tips for intermediate, German learning tips for advanced, Tipps zum Deutsch lernen, How to learn german efficiently, Efficient German learning tips, effective german learning tips, efficient german learning tips, learn german smarter

Id: IL2HI3t8mL8

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019