German language tips

German is one of the fastest-growing languages, with 120 million speakers across the globe. German is primarily spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Apart from these three countries, German’s usage is scattered. The German language has three types, High German, Middle German, and Low German. The standard German that is spoken and taught all over the globe is a mixture of High and Middle German. Most Austrian dialects are considered as the standard German. The Standard German did not develop from local dialects, rather it was artificially created by poets, philosophers, and scholars.

1. Use Word Frequency Lists to Learn the Most Useful German Vocabulary

Especially in the beginning, learning and practicing vocabulary is the main part of language acquisition. There’s no way around it. However, not all words are created equal. It’s important to concentrate on words that’ll give you the most bang for your buck.

In terms of language learning, the most bang means how likely it is that you’re going to use a particular word in everyday conversation. That’s where word frequency lists come in.

You don’t need to learn all that much for functional fluency. The 1,000 most common words in German make up about 80% of the written language. So if you concentrate on those first, you’ll make a big dent in the amount of German you’ll be able to understand. It’s the easiest way to learn basic German words that you’ll actually need in real life.

2. Make a German-speaking Friend for Constant Speaking Practice

Learning German online and by yourself can be a little isolating, and it can be hard to find someone to get direction from or to speak German with if you’re not enrolled in a German course.

What’s the solution?

Why learn German online, you need to make a German-speaking friend, of course!

Meeting a German-speaking friend is crucial for you to practice speaking and understanding the German language. Rather than just passively absorbing the language by doing things such as reading in German or listening to German, having a German-speaking friend forces you to use the language actively. You have to understand and respond—either verbally or in written form—to whatever you and your German-speaking friend are discussing.

Best of all, some German-speaking friends may even give you tips for pronunciation and offer to teach you a bit of vocabulary and grammar.

3. Learn German Syntax: Make Sure Every Word Has Its Place

Word order, or “syntax” as it’s known linguistically, is the sequence in which words must be placed in order to have a sentence make sense.

In English, for example, we know that most sentences have a subject (the doer), a verb (the action), and an object (the thing acted on by the verb). Take the English sentence, “the dog ate the bone,” for example. “The dog” is the subject, “ate” is the verb, and “the bone” is the object,

German, however, often has sentences with word orders that are different from English, and if you do word order in German wrong, you risk not being understood.

4. Learn German with Authentic Materials

Real-life German materials are important for learning German. They allow you to hear German as it’s actually spoken, including all of its pronunciation, grammar and the times when native speakers use informal language, slang and break the traditional grammar rules.

In fact, learning German with materials that feature real German speakers and real spoken German improves your understanding of the language, your pronunciation and your ability to produce spoken and written German with ease.

Lucky for you, you don’t need to move to a German-speaking place to get spoken, German. Authentic German content can be found all over the internet, and you can, in fact, learn German there for free!

For access to real-world spoken German on the internet, I suggest you watch vlogs or other videos on YouTube.

5. Learn German Prepositions with their Cases

German grammar is one of the trickiest aspects of the German language. One aspect, in particular, takes the cake as the most complicated: grammatical cases in German.

In German, the placement of a word in a sentence dictates what case it’s in. That means that a word’s definite or indefinite article changes whether the word is the subject, the direct object, or the indirect object.

Further, if the noun is an object of a preposition, this also changes the case of that noun. However, not all prepositions are followed by the same case: each preposition is followed by a different case and a different set of declination rules entirely

This means that memorizing the case with the preposition is a great way to save time and ensure you’re using the correct case with the following noun.

6. Strong & Weak: Learn Regular and Irregular German Verb Forms

As in English, German has two types of verbs. They’re referred to as strong verbs and weak verbs.

Weak verbs are regular verbs. This means that they follow regular, predictable rules for the present and past tense in German.

Strong verbs, on the other hand, are irregular and don’t follow the regular, predictable rules for conjugation.

This means that strong verb forms must be memorized separately in order to be used correctly. You should try to memorize these irregular forms when you encounter a strong verb.

7. Use German Culture to Learn the Language

Despite being a single language, German has many dialects depending on where it’s spoken. That means that the German spoken in Berlin is different from the German spoken and Munich, and those dialects are different from the German spoken in Hamburg.

Further, the German spoken in Austria and Switzerland is also very different from the varieties of German spoken in Germany.

Sometimes these differences can make it feel like you’re learning several completely different languages.

This can quickly make things very confusing for German learners.

While it’s most useful to learn Hochdeutsch (High German), or the Standard German often taught online, in classes, and in textbooks, you should learn a little bit about the German of any place you plan to visit. This means looking at samples of the language online, perhaps in videos, or reading about it, so that you know what particularities there are in that particular dialect.

8. Practice Nouns and Genders at the Same Time

Something that doesn’t come easy to many students of German is the fact that the language includes three genders for its nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. These genders are represented by the definite articles der, die, and das, and the indefinite articles ein, eine and ein.

This is further complicated by the fact that there are no clear-cut rules for which gender is assigned to which kind of noun, and if there appear to be any there is always an exception.

9. Learn Cognates: Harness the Words You Already Know

Languages don’t evolve in complete isolation. They mix in the same way as the people who speak them and are as intertwined as family trees. Everyone borrows from everyone else and German is no exception.

This is good news if you want to learn German fast because of cognates. Cognates are words in two different languages whose spelling and meaning is so similar that they’re easily recognized and understood.