How To Learn German Language In 30 Days

How I Learned German in 30 Days

This postal service is my summary of an experiment I started in January 2015: Learn German language in 30 days.

Earlier starting, I feel obliged to list a few disclaimers:

"I learned German" means I tin can have basic conversations in German, every bit well equally understand German fairly well (both written and spoken). I have definitely not learned how to speak High german perfectly.
I practise non claim originality of everything in this text; I've been heavily inspired past the writings of other linguistic communication learners such equally Barry Farber and Benny Lewis.
My native language is Norwegian. This gave me somewhat of an advantage as it is linguistically closely related to German.

If you want to acquire a language as rapidly as possible, you should go along reading. In addition to giving some general tips, and hopefully inspiration, I've created some resources that I'll share in this text which volition help you acquire German fast.

I spent about 30–60 minutes daily in my 30-twenty-four hours menses, so the fourth dimension investment wasn't huge.

Now, let's become started.

5 principles of effective language-learning

I had an hypothesis that there are 5 of import principles for finer learning a language. One of the purposes of my experiment was to test if these were whatsoever practiced. The five principles are:

Set a clear goal
Speak from solar day 1
Focus on frequent words
Immerse yourself
Proceed track

Below I'll explicate exactly how I used these principles to larn German language.

ane. Set up a clear goal

I followed the Objectives and Central Results (OKR) approach for setting a goal. My overall objective was to acquire every bit much German as possible in 30 days. More than specifically I wanted to accomplish these fundamental results:

Learn the 1000 most frequent High german words
Larn 10 German songs past heart
Exist able to have basic conversations with my German friends

1 and 2 are nice because they're measurable, but the well-nigh important key result to me was number 3, which was a bit also vague. In order to make it more tangible, I booked a ticket to Berlin, and decided I should be able to spend the whole weekend with an sometime (High german) friend, speaking just German.

Also, one time I had decided that I would really go through with my plan, I basically announced to the whole world that I was going to learn German language in 30 days. The purpose of this was purely psychological, as I then would accept to stick to the programme in order to not look like a complete idiot. In fact, throughout my 30-day period, people kept asking me "how's the German language report going?". To which I could always respond "Sehr gut, danke!"

(I also secretly decided I would tape a video in Berlin speaking in German language, which I did at day 29, but I'll spare y'all the clumsiness of the video I eventually posted on Facebook.)

2. Speak from day 1

I believe one of the biggest mistakes you can make when learning a linguistic communication is to postpone speaking until "you're gear up". Language learning is like going to the gym: if y'all want to build muscles, anything other than exercising is just procrastinating.

Specifically what I did to speak from day 1 was to observe some friends who either spoke German language, or wanted to learn High german. I then told them that I would be online for 30 minutes on announced.inevery twenty-four hours at 8pm and gave them my own custom URL. I told them I would love to exercise German with them there. I managed to go 5 people to join in full. None of them were native High german speakers, though some were already fluent (which I constitute to be critically important!), and some were just starting out like me.

In lodge to be able to stay in our target language (… German language), and not revert back to English language or Norwegian, I created a Crook Sheet containing essential phrases. This sheet prevented me from getting blocked and generally proved incredibly useful in our online conversations.

Following the "language is a muscle" analogy, I also repeated out loud anything I heard or read in German when studying on my own. Compared to only passively "receiving" (listening, reading) German, I think this really makes a difference for strengthening those German synapses in your brain.

3. Focus on frequent words

If you're not familiar with Zipf's law, yous might be surprised to hear that but the 100 most frequent words account for about fifty% of all spoken words in German films. Take a moment to reflect on this astonishing fact. This basically means that every other word you hear in a German film is a word from that height-100 list. The obvious conclusion? Y'all need to know those words!

Analogy of Zipf's laws borrowed from this presentation.

I plant a listing of the most frequent words in German language subtitles here, and created my own GoogleDocs spreadsheet with the 1000 virtually frequent words. These words account for ~75% of all words in German subtitles. My simple task and then was to fill out the "pregnant" cavalcade for every give-and-take before my xxx days had passed. In other words, I had to learn nigh 30 words per twenty-four hour period. I made heavy use of cognates from English and Norwegian in society to learn them, and I exported the words I had learned to Anki near once a calendar week then I could make sure I didn't forget them.

The frequency listing is one of the things I did that worked all-time. It served equally a nice anchor that I could centre my learning around.

To test my vocabulary in the real globe, I sometimes tried reading German language newspapers or books, highlighting words I didn't understand. After reading a folio or paragraph, I would count the words I knew vs words I didn't knew, then compute the ratio words known / total words in text. Towards the terminate of my study flow, I would clock in at effectually 80–85% — cognates or context helping me push above the 75% I got from the top-grand list.

iv. Immerse yourself

Inverse my Facebook linguistic communication to German. Watched lots of Yabla videos.

But the thing that worked all-time for me was my Spotify playlist with 10 German songs.

Once I had learned the lyrics of these songs, I could play them whenever and be exposed to High german anytime I could listen to music. I even recorded myself singing and playing these songs on the guitar. Once more I'll spare you the embarrassment.

Picking the lyrics upwards from only listening to the songs is hard, and then I would study the lyrics separately before trying to memorize anything. I used Lingq, which meant I had the lyrics bachelor on my iPhone, and I could easily runway which words were new when studying a new song.

five. Go along rail

My Top chiliad Words spreadsheet was great for knowing roughly how many words I knew at any given point. Since I had the frequency of each give-and-take, I could compute the total "mass" of German that I knew — non merely the full number of words — which I constitute to exist quite motivating.

I also kept a simple diary in Evernote listing my activities per twenty-four hour period. In the end at that place was only one twenty-four hours when I didn't do anything at all.

Other

I followed a course chosen RocketLanguages, but I but completed the first iii modules.

On day 27, I started Duolingo and managed to test in at level 10. Not bad!

I well-nigh didn't do any grammer study, which I call up was a good conclusion since I only had xxx days, and had no ambitions of speaking perfectly. Ane thing I would have liked to do in society to larn the German cases, though, is a set of four sentences of the type "The human gave the volume to the male child" — i judgement for each gender + plural. Memorizing these four sentences would and so probably accept been a lot easier than trying to remember a case table.

Conclusion

Having concluded the experiment I would say I reached my goal.

I learned the thou most frequent words (and probably some more that I didn't track).

I learned x German songs past middle.

And finally, I went to Berlin and had a great weekend with my friend Daniel — in German. He even taught me how to wing a kite:

If you want to do a similar practice yourself, here'southward a table summarizing my approach:

That's it! Either this gave you some inspiration to outset your ain 30-twenty-four hour period language adventure or you call up I'm insane. In any case, permit me know what you think of my experiment!