Hi everyone. As you could probably tell from
the title, this isn't an English tutorial.
Today I'm just going to talk about how I
learnt German. I even have my Germany
T-shirt on, but I don't think you can see...
Yeah?
Ich werde dieses Video auf Englisch machen,
denn die meisten meiner Abonnenten
schauen sich meine Videos an,
weil sie ihr Englisch verbessern wollen,
aber für diejenigen die mein Deutsch hören wollen,
sage ich ein Paar Sätze auf Deutsch.
Das ist streng verboten.
Das ist wirklich unverschämt.
Bitte beachten Sie beim Aussteigen die
Lücke zwischen Zug und Bahnsteigkante.
Falls ihr mehr möchtet,
könnt ihr euch dieses Video anschauen.
Den Link findet ihr auch in der Infobox.
As I said, I'm going to talk to you about
how I learnt German and basically
how I became fluent. I never
actually sat an official exam like the
TestDaF or something (I think that's
how you say it), but several years ago I
took some classes at the Goethe
Institute and they put me into a C2
class. Some time after that I also
studied translation and I worked as a
German to English translator, so I'm
assuming I reached a C2 level. Nowadays
my level's probably more like C1 because,
well... if you don't use it, you lose it.
On a side note, some people seem to think
that C2 means perfect or "like a native",
but no, it doesn't mean that. It just
means proficient. Now I didn't call this
video "how you should learn German",
because honestly I don't think that
there is one best way to learn a
language. With experience and hindsight I
also now know that there were certain
things that I could have done
differently and that I probably could
have taken more advantage of certain
opportunities, but everything's
easier in hindsight. So today I'm
just going to talk about my "language
learning journey", so to speak, because I
always find it interesting to hear how
different people learnt languages, and it
can be a way to get ideas for learning a
language yourself. At the end of this
video, I'm also going to do a sort of
mini-analysis of what I learnt about
learning languages, what I think I did
well and what I think I could've done differently.
Okay, so I'll start at the beginning.
I first decided to learn German when
I was in year 8. In Australia year 8 is
when you're 13 or 14. Basically I went on
a trip to Europe with my family, and when
we were in Germany I thought that it
would be cool to learn German. I had
already been learning French at school
and I was just starting to realise that
I liked learning foreign languages. Even
when we were in other countries, I was the
main person in my family who was
regularly reading through the phrase
book. I looked on a bookshelf recently
and we actually still have that phrase
book. Yeah... Do you remember these? I wonder
if I could sell it. As an antique. Anyway,
shortly after we got back to Australia I
said to myself: "Yes, I definitely want to
learn German." And it turned out that we
actually had some very old German
language textbooks at home which
a friend had given to my parents some
years before. I had a look at them,
I chose the one that I thought looked
the best (which was this one here)
and then I learnt German. End of video.
No, obviously not.
But I am incredibly grateful that we
had this book. I know it doesn't look
like anything special, but it gave me a
really good base in German grammar.
It's just called Introducing German and it's
by Keith Leopold. I actually Googled him
and apparently he died in 1999, so
I never had a chance to thank him, but I
would have liked to. I will say that this
type of book probably wouldn't be to
everybody's taste. It was published in
the 1960s and back then there was a much
bigger emphasis on grammar in language
learning than there is today.
But I like grammar
so that suited me.
Yeah, I'll give you an example...
Lesson one: Definite article. Declension
before a masculine noun in the singular.
Der Mann. Den Mann.
Des Mannes. Dem Mann.
Fun times.
Another thing that helped was that
even though parts of this book were
quite dry, it was clear that the author
had a sense of humour. In each lesson
there was a little story and even when the
language was quite basic, he often
managed to add something a little bit
funny. Each lesson consisted of some
explanations, a little story (that's the
vocabulary) and then there were exercises.
This book doesn't have an answer key so
I would do the exercises and then a
German friend of the family would
correct them for me, and he also
sometimes did a bit of speaking with me
and would help me with my pronunciation.
When I started, I didn't really have a
plan. I'd just turned 14, I didn't know what
I wanted to do with my life, I didn't
have a long-term plan for my German and
I didn't really know how to learn a
language either. As I said, I'd been
learning French at school, but I quickly
realised that the French classes were
pretty bad. To give you an idea of how
bad, I learnt more German in three months
from this book than French in two years
at school. And I wasn't even learning
German intensively. Like I said, I didn't
have a plan I just did a bit on the
weekends and sometimes in the afternoon.
I should also add that that was the year
2000, so we had internet, but the internet
certainly wasn't like it is today. There
was no YouTube, no Facebook and there
were hardly any language learning
materials. I don't think I even thought:
"Oh maybe I could go online and look for
some language resources." It was only a
few years later that I started looking
for things online and even then there
wasn't very much. But anyway, for the
next two years and a bit I just kept
using this book and I was able to
practise my speaking a bit with the
friend who I mentioned before. Now for
those people who criticise the "old ways"
of learning languages, in other words
people who say, "Oh it was just grammar
and translation and that was terrible,"
I'll just say those methods worked for
me, and I'm sure I'm not the only person.
I mean this book was basically just
grammar drills and translation. I'll give
you some examples. Put the following
sentences into the imperfect tense. Put
the following sentences into the future
tense. Translate into German. Answer each
of the following questions in a complete
German sentence. Obviously it wasn't this
book alone that got me fluent, but it did
give me a very good base in German
grammar. I think the problem with the old
ways is not that there was grammar and
translation. It's just that there was
maybe a bit too much of it. But like I
said in the beginning, I don't think
there's a best way to learn a language
and I know that people learn in
different ways. For example, some people
love learning grammar and
some people hate it. Okay so
after two years or so more or less
learning by myself, I started learning
German at school. In Australia high
school goes for six years (from year 7 to
year 12) and I actually changed high
schools halfway through. One of the main
reasons was because at the first school
I wasn't able to do any foreign language
after year 8. At the second school I was
able to do French for the last three
years and German for the last two years.
By that stage the language classes had
gotten a bit better. In other words the
work was a bit more challenging in year
11 and 12 than in year 7 and 8, but
looking back, I think they still could've
pushed us a bit more. It was still
relatively easy, particularly compared to
University which is where I took German
classes next. I'd say that in my last two
years of high school I was a very good
student and I was an independent learner
(I could learn things quite well by myself),
but I was very focused on exams, so I
wouldn't actually go looking for extra
work unless I thought it would help me
with the exams. One thing that I was very
fortunate to be able to do was to go to
Germany for six weeks during my last
year of high school. I certainly wasn't
fluent after that, but I was speaking
German most of the time, so my speaking
skills had definitely improved by the
end of it. One thing that I started doing
in high school was keeping a vocabulary
notebook, and I think I actually
continued to use this book for
the next couple of years.
Nowadays when I learn a language I still
write a lot down, but I don't do it
exactly in this way. Like, here... I like,
separated things a lot. In the beginning
it's masculine nouns, and then it's
feminine nouns, then the neuter
nouns, and the verbs, adjectives and there
are some expressions. Nowadays I just
write everything together. Sometimes I
write words and sometimes I write phrases.
Oh my God, I didn't know these
words... anrufen, anziehen.
And then I went to university in Sydney.
German wasn't my major.
I actually majored in
Government and International Relations,
so political science, basically.
But normally I had one German class per
semester. I really can't complain about
my German classes at uni. In hindsight I
think maybe they could have pushed us a
little more, but it was definitely much
better than in high school.
My degree was three years and during the
second year I sort of had a "mini-crisis".
Basically I just didn't really like my
economics and politics classes and I
thought: "All I want to do is learn
languages." I won't bore you with details,
but basically I didn't end up
changing degrees, I just decided to take
a break after the second year and go to
Europe for one year. I was very lucky
because I got a scholarship from the
DAAD, which is the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst (or the German Academic
Exchange Service). The scholarship was for
one semester and they also went through
the process of enrolling you at a
university, and in my case that was the
Humboldt University in Berlin. Even
though the scholarship was just for one
semester, I actually stayed a year, but I
had to finance the second part myself.
At the time Berlin was quite a cheap
place to live (that was in 2007), so that
wasn't too hard. I just had to use some
of my savings and get a part-time job.
I worked at a media monitoring company
doing summaries and translations of
German and French articles. Moving to
Germany was quite a shock actually. Yes,
I'd been there before, but this was the
first time that I was living independently
in a foreign country. I did
experience a bit of culture shock in the
beginning and it was also probably the
first time that I realised just how hard
German was... and yeah, that I still had a
lot to learn. I know that there are other
languages which are considered more
difficult, but nevertheless, I think most
people agree that German isn't super
easy. One of the reasons why it was such
a shock was because I'd always gotten
very good marks in my German classes in
Australia, so I just assumed that, you
know, my German was pretty good and
I wouldn't need to work too hard. I was so naive...
Um yeah, even compared to most of
the other exchange students who were
mainly European, my German was pretty
weak. I believe I mentioned this in my
other video, but I actually remember
crying about it. Like being on the phone
to my mum saying: "Oh my God, how am I ever
gonna learn this language? There are just...
so many words!" I know this might sound
really silly, but it was the first time
I started to realise just how many words
there were in English. And in most
languages, in fact. I mean, if you really
want to master a language, you need to
know a lot of words. My grammar and my
pronunciation were quite good, so I
probably gave the impression of speaking
German relatively well, but I still had a
lot to learn. My main weaknesses were
definitely my vocabulary and my fluency.
Basically I just didn't have a big
vocabulary and although my grammar was
quite good, I do have some
perfectionist tendencies,
so it would often take me a long time to
construct a sentence when I spoke. When I
first arrived, I actually enrolled in
literature and philosophy classes at the
university, but let's just say I was
being quite ambitious. Um... I went to a
few of the classes and I tried to read
some of the texts, but my German just
wasn't good enough yet. What was really
great, though, was that the university had a
wonderful language centre and they had
German classes for foreigners. So in the
first semester I mainly just took
classes there. In the second semester
I started going to some other classes as
well, but I don't think I went back to
any philosophy classes. I had studied a
bit of philosophy in Australia, but
reading Immanuel Kant in German was a
whole new ball game. Anyway, one of the
classes at that language centre was
vocabulary. They didn't specify what type
of vocabulary it was just called
"Vocabulary". But all we did in that class
was separable and inseparable verbs.
If you don't speak German, that's kind of
the equivalent of phrasal verbs in
English. Yeah, so imagine doing a class just
on phrasal verbs. It's probably for that
reason that I have a lot of sympathy for
people learning English. Particularly
when it comes to learning phrasal verbs.
If you don't speak German, here's just a
little example. This is the verb "to go".
It's "gehen", but you can add many many
prefixes to it, and most of the time the
meaning will completely change. For
example: abgehen, angehen, ausgehen, begehen,
eingehen, entgehen, mitgehen, vergehen.
And this list is far from
complete. A similar thing happens with
some nouns. For example: Gang. Abgang,
Ausgang, Hergang, Vorgang. And yes, all of
these things mean completely different
things. A lot of people think that German
is hard because of the grammar, and I
guess that's the case in the beginning,
but I personally don't think that German
grammar is THAT hard. Yes,
there are a lot of rules, but there
aren't a lot of exceptions to the rules.
So if you learn things well in the
beginning, it's not such a big issue.
Personally, what I think makes German
hard is the vocabulary. I've heard that
English actually has a bigger vocabulary
than German, but Germans tend to use a
bigger range of vocabulary in their
everyday speech. Oh and another thing
that can make German hard is that lots
of native speakers like to use really
long sentences when they write... which is
a lot of fun, particularly when you have
to translate them. But my impression is
that younger people are doing that less
and less. One thing that I'm very glad
I did when I was in Germany was live with
Germans. Even before I went to Berlin
I was pretty sure that at the university I
was going to spend quite a lot of time
with other exchange students, and so
I thought: "Okay, I should at least put
myself in a situation where I'm speaking
German at home." And I'm very happy I did
that because, sure enough, at the
university I was mainly spending time
with other Anglos (so other native
English speakers). At least in the first
semester. A lot of the people who I met
in my first semester went home in the
middle of the year so I had to make new
friends in the second semester,
and most of them were non-Anglo
Europeans, and I normally spoke German
with them. During that year I wouldn't
say that I was working on my German
really intensively. It was probably
because I didn't have a concrete goal
for my German, and I didn't know what I
wanted to do in terms of work later on.
It was only at the end of that year that
I thought to myself: "Yes, I would like to
try to become a conference interpreter."
And well, if you've seen my other video,
you'll know that several years later
I realised that I didn't want to do that.
But in any case, for many years that's
what I thought
I wanted to do. That being said I did
make some effort with my German. Like I
said, I lived with Germans,
I asked questions,
I looked up words if I didn't know them
(that might sound really obvious, but lots of
people don't do it) I kept my little
notebook, and I also tried to read a bit
in German. Nothing too complicated, but I
remember buying a couple of magazines
and I read a few novels. The main book
that I remember reading was The Devil
Wears Prada translated into German.
I think a lot of people get a bit snobby
with books and they think they need to
be reading serious literature, but
honestly, I think people should read
whatever the heck they want, and if
you're learning a language, I think it's
also best to start with books that have
quite easy subject matter. This was
before smartphones and before there were
a lot of online dictionaries, so I
actually carried around a paper
dictionary with me. I don't have it
anymore, but it was loved. After my year
in Germany, I didn't actually do that
much with German for the next few years
because I was mainly focusing on my
French and my Spanish. Basically I went
back to Australia for one semester, I then did
my final semester in Paris, where I ended
up staying for a year and a half. After
my stay in Paris, I moved to Madrid for a
year and a half and there I was mainly
focusing on my Spanish. I did take some
classes at the Goethe Institute because
I was worried that my German was really
suffering, but that was only for a few
months. I then went back to France and
because I was preparing to sit an
entrance exam for an interpreting
master's, I started studying German again
properly, but on my own. I didn't do
anything special... I just read news
articles, I sometimes watched the news or
documentaries in German, and of course I
looked up things that I didn't know,
wrote them down and revised them. That
might sound quite boring, but if you want
to improve your vocabulary quickly,
honestly there aren't a lot of options.
By that stage I also wasn't just
focusing on German. I had French and
Spanish, and I was also trying not to let
my English deteriorate too much. I know
that might sound a bit strange, but it's
actually not uncommon for your native
language to suffer if you spend a lot of
time exposed to other languages. It's
actually quite a common reason why
people fail interpreting exams.
Speaking of failing I did fail that
entrance exam that I mentioned. It wasn't
because of my English (there were other
reasons which I won't go into now), but in
any case, I didn't get into an
interpreting masters on my first attempt.
So I thought:  "Okay, well, I'll wait one or
two years and then try again." And shortly
after that I decided to do a master's in
translation. In case there's any
confusion there, interpreting and
translation are similar, but basically
translators write
and interpreters speak. Initially I
didn't want to be a translator - I wanted
to be an interpreter - but I thought
translation would be good "preparation",
and to be honest, it was. In the masters
you had to have French and English and
then one other language, and mine was
German. The focus of the master's was
financial and legal translation, which I
know sounds rather dry, but it actually
took my German to a whole new level.
At least in terms of vocabulary. It was
quite interesting because when I was in
Germany my spoken German was so much
better, but over time my comprehension
skills drastically improved, so it was a
bit like this. I think this video is
getting quite long and I honestly don't
have that much more to say. After the
translation master's, I continued to work
on my German as before, I eventually got
into an interpreting master's, but to cut
a long story short, after a few months of
the course I realised that I didn't
really like interpreting, and that I much
preferred teaching English. As I said in
the beginning of the video, I just want
to quickly talk about some things that I
learnt along the way about language
learning, as well as some of the things
that I could have done differently or
better, and some things that I honestly
wouldn't change. The first lesson was
that learning a language takes a really
long time. Obviously it depends on how
well you want to learn a language, but if
you want to become very fluent or
proficient, it usually takes a lot of
time and effort. When I first started
learning German, I was very naive and I
actually thought that if I just spent a
year in Germany I would come back
speaking like a native speaker. I think I
thought that because as a teenager
I met quite a few exchange students and
they all seemed to speak such good
English and I just assumed that they
could talk about anything and that they
understood everything. Obviously that
wasn't the case, but I was young and yeah,
I really didn't know much about learning
languages. The second thing I learnt was
that people often underestimate the
importance of vocabulary. Yes,
pronunciation and grammar are important,
but it usually takes a lot longer
to get a good vocabulary. Plus,
knowing a lot of words is the main thing
that's going to help your comprehension
and your ability to participate in more
interesting discussions. And now a couple
of things that I could have done better.
Firstly, I probably could have been a bit
more proactive when I was learning
German before I went and lived in Berlin.
I don't think I should be too harsh on
myself in regard to what I did in high
school, because I was a kid in a small
town, there was no social media... I guess I
did the best I could. But I think I could've
done a bit more when I was at
university. For example, I could've read
more books or watched more movies, and
just done more than what was given to me
in class. Another thing I could've done
in Berlin was put myself in more
situations where I needed to speak
German. I don't regret having English-speaking
friends because when people go
to another country normally learning the
language isn't their only concern.
You have to think about your mental
well-being and not getting lonely, and
I wasn't going to ignore someone simply
because they spoke the same language as me.
But I definitely could've gotten
involved in more activities. For example,
the university offered quite a lot of
sporting activities
and I'm pretty sure there was quite a
lot of cultural stuff going on, but I
didn't participate in any of it. In the
first semester, for something different,
I did go to a few rowing classes, which was
a disaster (that's a story for another
video), but after that I didn't think to
try something else. So that we end on a
positive note, here are a couple of
things that I think I got right.
The first thing was learning a lot of
grammar and doing a lot of drills in the
beginning. Like I've said, people learn in
different ways, so maybe that's not the
best way for everybody, but if you want
to learn to speak accurate German and
you're already a teenager or an adult,
I think it's hard if you don't do a lot of
grammar. The second thing was regularly
asking questions or looking things up if
I didn't understand something. I didn't
do it a hundred percent of the time
(you'll probably drive yourself crazy if
you do that), but if you want to improve
your vocabulary quickly,
I honestly think that's important. I also
found it helpful to write down new
vocabulary. I know some people who have
gotten very fluent in a foreign language,
sometimes even to native level,
who didn't do that, but normally those people
had a lot of exposure to the language
(more than I had) and it was usually over
quite a long period of time.
In any case, looking things up and
writing them down (as boring as it sounds)
helped me. That's it, guys.
I hope it was a little interesting.
If you have any questions or if you would
like to share your own language learning
experiences, please write them in the
comments. If you're new to my channel,
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