Over the course of nine months, I have been able to teach myself German to what I would consider a late-beginner. I can safely assure you that it is a very rewarding experience. You too can actually learn German to this level almost completely online; here’s how I did it:
- Read the Wikipedia articles on German, German grammar, German orthography, and German phonology. Even if you can’t put any sentences together at this point, you’ll have a basic understanding of it.
- Find the Pimsleur German level 1 audio course. You can probably find this in a public library.
- After you’re about five or six lessons into Pimsleur, start the deutsch-lernen.com course. Once you’ve done the “German Course for Beginners” lessons, do the online Deutsch Welle “Deutsch Interaktiv” course (it’s all online from this point on). Use German.About.com alongside to build vocabulary and grammar skills.
- After you feel you have a basic conversational grasp, start using german-grammar.de and the available exercises. Gradually abandon Deutsch Welle if you feel it goes too slowly for you.
- Watch some videos on Lingorilla; you should already be able to understand about half the words they say. The same applies for the Fokus Deutsch series provided by the Annenberg Foundation.
- Start looking for more complicated texts and audio. The Deutsch Welle website has TV in German (you won’t understand all of it but you’ll be able to at least get the gist of what they’re saying; may or may not work in the US). Also take a look at Euronews, which is available internationally.
- If you don’t know any German people who would converse with you, find a conversational partner on either MyHappyPlanet or Language-Exchanges (The Mixxer). This way, you’ll (virtually) meet an actual German person who you can speak with and practice your German. A large portion of the population can speak English, so if you don’t know a specific word, they can probably tell you what it is.
- Try reading a bit of “The Little Prince” in German (Der Kleine Prinz). You can probably find it lying around on a PDF online somewhere. It is an easy-to-read story and, since it’s been translated to so many languages, easy to study by comparison (I did this by comparing a German translation to the French original; sometimes I didn’t even need to look in a dictionary to find the meaning of a word).
- Find some more advanced texts on the German Wikisource. Look for more enjoyable works, such as Brothers Grimm fairy tales, rather than books on 18th-century politics.
- From this point on, advancing your German skills online will be harder. Spend about $25 and buy “Teach Yourself Improve Your German,” which is considered by some to be a great intermediate course. After that, try to travel to a more prominently German area, watch more television and movies in German, read newspapers in German, and/or buy more advanced German courses, such as “Teach Yourself Further German.” If you’d like, learn a specific dialect of German, such as (but not limited to) High German, Swiss German, or Austrian German.
Here are some basic tips you should keep in mind while studying German by yourself:
- Native fluency can only be obtained by living in a place (not necessarily in a foreign country, though) where the language is spoken.
- Learn formal Standard German (Central-High German) first. Swiss, Austrian, and Low German each have their own idiosyncrasies, as well as slang/overly informal German.
- When studying (that is, spending more than a few minutes on) a text in German, have two highlighters with you: one for words you have don’t understand and one for words you understand but wouldn’t be able to produce off the top of your head (for example, you might see the word “die Kopie,” understand that it means “the copy,” but not have previously known that word).
- German has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. When studying vocabulary, write the nouns in different colors: blue for masculine nouns, red or pink for feminine nouns, and green or gray for neuter ones. (See a previous post – about two posts back – for a video with an explanation.)
- Get a basic idea of German grammar, history, orthography, phonology, geographic distribution, etc. before beginning it. It will be extremely helpful.
- Declension (the changing of a word’s form depending on its function in a sentence) only gets hard with adjectives. Don’t worry, though, since there are only four easy declensional cases in German, and they only show up with adjectives (including articles) and pronouns.
- You can’t learn a language overnight. If you do a bit of it once or twice a week for about a half hour to an hour each time you do it, like I did, you can get to an intermediate level in a bit less than a year. If you want to get yourself ready in about three months, dedicate at least an hour daily to the language and get “Hugo German in 3 Months” to accompany your online studies.
- Yes, both German and English are Germanic languages, but English has a lot (and by this I mean *a lot*) of Latin and Anglo-French influence – overwhelmingly more than Germanic influence, except for grammar, so you won’t find as much similarity as you could possibly expecting. If you want to learn something much closer to English, take a look at Frisian and Dutch.
Here are some resources to which you should always have easy access:
- The English Wiktionary and the German Wiktionary (sister projects of Wikipedia) – both have entries in German and English, which is great for translating more accurately between two languages. The German Wiktionary tends to include verb conjugations as well, which is great when you want to check what the Präteritum or present participle of a strong verb is.
- WordReference.com – Sometimes the Wiktionaries have way too much information or don’t contain a word. In this case, using WordReference can be a lot simpler.
- Google Translate – I’d recommend using this one only when you wrote something in German and want to see whether it’s at least vaguely understandable by a fluent speaker of German. Don’t take it way too seriously, though, since it ìs machine translation.
- A notebook – Have a notebook in which you can see the progress you’ve made over time. Sometimes it will seem astounding how just a few months back you knew so little.
- DieZeit.de – very good (but sometimes too advanced) online newspaper
- Deutsch Welle – another very good online newspaper, and this one offers courses and radio shows for varying fluency levels.
- Linguaphiles Community and How-To-Learn-Any-Language Forum – there’s a great friendly bunch of helpful polyglots at either of these places; make good use of them.
To determine your level, try this basic test: read a random advanced text in German. Count how many words there are total in three of its lines and divide that by three; this is the average words-per-line value. Multiply that by the number of lines in the text you’re reading; that’s an approximation of how many words there are in the text. Read the text and mark all of the words you don’t know. Subtract the number of unknown words from the number of total words in the text, divide this new value by the number of words in the text, and multiply this value by 100. Now you have the percentage of words that you understood in this text. Use the following scale to see at what level you stand in your knowledge of German:
- Less than 40% – Beginner
- 40 to 65% – Late Beginner
- 65 to 85% – Intermediate
- 85 to 95% – Advanced
- More than 95% – Native fluency or very close to it.
You can generally consider yourself to have an advanced or near-native level of fluency if you can read a novel and miss up to two or three words per page (even native speakers sometimes don’t understand all of the words of novel).
Disclaimers: I am neither endorsed by nor affiliated with the mentioned organizations, websites, etc., with the exception of those owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Remember that different people have different language-learning abilities and that the aforementioned methodology that worked for me might not work for everyone.
The Ackademie 
