EPT
Best way to learn new language
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TechniQ.UK
United Kingdom391 Posts
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Jyvblamo
Canada13788 Posts
There are a bunch of learning courses / videos you can find online. Best bet is to immerse yourself in that language. ie; find a buddy who speaks German and try to have regular conversations with that person. | ||
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Warrior Madness
Canada3791 Posts
http://www.rocketlanguages.com/german/premium/ If you actually buy the software you're given access to a forum where you can practice these conversational skills with other people who are learning it. After you get these two things, join a german club, there are tons of them in the city. And you can also start learning the grammar of it, by picking up a german grammar book and practicing to read children's books like tin tin. (You will pick up grammar and syntax intuitively in the rocket series). | ||
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Wohmfg
United Kingdom1292 Posts
http://www.bild.de/ if you want to read the "news" in German because it's pretty simple German. | ||
Rekrul
Korea (South)17174 Posts
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Armathai
1023 Posts
Everything else is just a slow torture that will most likely end in failing. Sorry i can't give you study advice :S | ||
Chill
Calgary26003 Posts
Step 0. Have an interest. You won't learn if you don't have a reason to. Step 1. You will not learn a language practicing on your own and using internet resources unless you have ridiculous dedication. Also, most of what you learn will be wrong since you won't have active feedback correcting you. People swear by Rosetta Stone but my experience is learning like that doesn't work for me. Step 2. Get a tutor / take a class. This was very necessary for me. I needed some structure and someone with a plan walking me through new things to learn. If you don't do this then you won't have a sense of what to learn next. Step 3. Do language exchange. For me, this was key. It gives you real takling experience, and you can learn real expressions as opposed to text book expressions. You can also use this time to ask questions you may have formed about grammar, expressions, etc. Step 4. Practice! At the start, I had to plan my entire sentence in Korean and then say it. It sucked. I practiced writing everything in Korean, basically writing everyone's name in Korean. Eventually, you just start talking the language without having to think. At that point you can just have conversations with people in the language. Step 5. This part sucks, and it's where I am now. You understand the grammar, pronounciation, etc. but your vocabulary sucks. This is grinding time to beef up your vocab, and it's so boring and I'm so lazy that I'm just not bothering. | ||
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Rekrul
Korea (South)17174 Posts
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Corr
Denmark796 Posts
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Lovin
Denmark812 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + No seriously, good luck. It's just that I have to - according to the system - and I seriously have no passion to learning German because the country never interested me all that much (reminds me of Denmark) | ||
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a11
Germany303 Posts
Well, what I'd personally recommend when you are not acquiring German for business needs, is to not (fucking) care about polite forms in the beginning. I'm not sure, but it seems to me like they are mostly focusing on polite forms everywhere German is taught, and it's just rather unfortunate, because they are imho a bit harder to grasp, while on the internet nobody is using them. So these poor guys appear on German forums and you know in an instant their mistakes are neither typos, nor are they immigrants. So, well, if you're not planning on travelling to Germany anytime soon or contacting a German on a formal level, there's no reason to bother with polite forms. And when you have a grasp on the language, you'll be able to learn that really fast anyways. At last, for some trolling and stuff you can head over to krautchan.org, the local *chan. Of course the language spoken there isn't the finest, but they have an international board, too, and it seems to me that people that are learning German appear rather often there. Biggest German StarCraft-fansite is broodwar.de, you might have heard of that one. If you need a good translation site, use http://dict.leo.org/ (you would have found it by googling three seconds anyways, I suppose). They have a decent database and nearly everything that's not in there has been discussed on their forums, whose search results are also always linked. Good luck and have fun on your journey learning this nice language :D | ||
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wo0py
Netherlands922 Posts
Best way is to put a lot of time in it. | ||
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andeh
United States904 Posts
http://www.ielanguages.com/German.html and once you get a basic idea, goto german sites of interest (gaming: readmore.de) and just practice reading or practice conversational stuff by finding a e-penpal or sites like habbo.de. the more you use, the better you'll get | ||
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jonnyp
United States415 Posts
On February 13 2010 03:42 Chill wrote: Here's what I did: + Show Spoiler + Step 0. Have an interest. You won't learn if you don't have a reason to. Step 1. You will not learn a language practicing on your own and using internet resources unless you have ridiculous dedication. Also, most of what you learn will be wrong since you won't have active feedback correcting you. People swear by Rosetta Stone but my experience is learning like that doesn't work for me. Step 2. Get a tutor / take a class. This was very necessary for me. I needed some structure and someone with a plan walking me through new things to learn. If you don't do this then you won't have a sense of what to learn next. Step 3. Do language exchange. For me, this was key. It gives you real takling experience, and you can learn real expressions as opposed to text book expressions. You can also use this time to ask questions you may have formed about grammar, expressions, etc. Step 4. Practice! At the start, I had to plan my entire sentence in Korean and then say it. It sucked. I practiced writing everything in Korean, basically writing everyone's name in Korean. Eventually, you just start talking the language without having to think. At that point you can just have conversations with people in the language. Step 5. This part sucks, and it's where I am now. You understand the grammar, pronounciation, etc. but your vocabulary sucks. This is grinding time to beef up your vocab, and it's so boring and I'm so lazy that I'm just not bothering. lol Part 5, so true ^^. If you're on the internet frequently try finding a forum in German, you can also set your browsing language to German as well. Firefox (not sure about IE or Chrome or the others) might even have a German version you can use. Little things like that help you stay in contact with the language on a daily basis and are really helpful in retaining comprehension (and soaking up vocab, there's just so many nouns and verbs xD lol). | ||
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LiminalMadness
Germany88 Posts
First declare a goal for yourself: learn spoken language first( for conversations ) or written language ( for reading newspapers etc. ) Find lists of the 200 - 500 most used words in that language in either written or spoken. Let someone who has good skills in that language translate you some basic sentences that go through all the terms and basic verb conjugations so you get the basic grammar down. And then learn the words from those lists. Once you can build sentences for most tenses with those words expand your vocabulary by buying a book in that language in a field you are interested in etc. And get yourself a tandem partner at a local college/university/blabla -------------- Might not be a good way for you, but worked for me way better then all those textbooks. | ||
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FoieGras
Canada270 Posts
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Lexpar
1813 Posts
Good luck :D | ||
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Disregard
China10252 Posts
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Achromic
773 Posts
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asel
Germany1605 Posts
also being active on forums that are held in this language helped me a lot - but i guess your german has to be at least decent in order to stay unbanned ;o | ||
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