How to Get Really Good at German: Learn German to Fluency and Beyond

LEARN LIKE A POLYGLOT

When it comes to learning foreign languages, people want to learn fast. They want to save time. People want quick results, and they want to be able to speak fluently in a short amount of time.

But how long does it take to become fluent in German? The answer depends on your definition of the word fluent as well as your personal goals. Are you looking to visit Germany and learn a handful of words and phrases before departing? Do you want to be able to hold a basic conversation with strangers in German? Is your plan to work a job that requires German proficiency at the professional level?

When you understand how to learn a language fast and effectively, you will be able to meet all of those goals and go even further than you had previously imagined. Faster language learning methods and techniques do exist, and they can help you get to your goals exponentially faster.

To find these techniques and strategies, polyglots or people who speak several languages can offer us some important insight. Interviews, news stories, and viral videos with millions of views make these people out to be language geniuses, but if we look more closely at their stories rather than their abilities, the real truth begins to surface. They often struggle intensely in learning their first foreign language, but something finally clicks within the gears of their minds. They learn that first one and go on to easily learn three, four, or even more.

Also, they mostly all ditched school as a primary means to learn a language. Foreign language classes teach you about specific languages, but they do not teach you how to actually get good at a foreign language. After lectures and lengthy explanations, you are left to your own study devices to review massive amounts of vocabulary and grammar so that they hopefully stick in your head.

We don't know any better as first time language learners, so we memorize vocabulary and phrase lists, do workbooks, reread old dialogues, and repeatedly listen to the same audio tracks found in our coursebook CDs. It can be extremely boring at times, but if you are studious enough, you will finish and graduate.

Even upon graduation, however, you will find that school alone does not train our minds to understand the wide variety of vocabulary, sentence structures, and seemingly blazing fast speed that native speakers use in real life. While classes do offer several benefits for a hefty fee, they aren't enough. To truly reach an advanced level in a foreign language, you will need to become an autodidactic (self-taught) learner.

The Language Learning Bubble

Most polyglots weren't always good at learning foreign languages. It's a skill that they develop with each new language they take on. This is why the first one can be such a challenge for everybody.

Without that language learning skill and experience, trying to learn and memorize thousands of German words, phrases, and grammar structures can seem like the ultimate test. And then, native speakers spit all of this out at seemingly a bazillion words a minute. It certainly sounds like a lot of hard work and study will be needed.

It's hard to argue against the value of hard work. It creates high-quality results. It pushes people to do what they need to do. It gets things done. But in the case of learning a foreign language, hard work can be somewhat misleading.

Rereading, rewriting, and re-listening to the same vocabulary, sentences, dialogues, and short stories may work well enough to pass your school exams, but they are not very effective means to store new language in your long-term memory. They are also tedious and not very fun ways to learn.

These simple methods may put new words into your short-term memory, but if you hope to be a fluent German speaker one day, you'll need to store these words into your long-term memory and be able to recall them with ease. You'll need to instantly recognize them whether they are written or spoken.

All of this is possible and relatively easy to achieve, but traditional learning and study is not how you get to this point. While some initial study is recommended to learn and acquire the basics of German grammar including simple vocabulary and phrases, traditional learning and studying becomes less and less effective as the number of words and phrases you encounter increases.

Polyglots teach us that it is far more effective to learn and retain these thousands of words and phrases through extensively reading and listening to native materials. You get really good at German or any language not by reviewing and mastering a few hundred pages of grammar rules and vocabulary lists but by reading thousands of pages and listening to thousands of hours of native German.

Many language learners, however, do not freely read and listen to native materials, and it's easy to understand why. It's completely overwhelming in the beginner and intermediate levels. On a single page of anything written in native German, you'll find more words that you don't know than words that you do know. And it's extremely difficult to listen to native German for very long when you really can't understand anything that is going on.

Nothing is broken down nor explained in native materials, so it's very easy to understand why language learners gravitate towards mostly language learning materials. In traditional learning materials like coursebooks or classes