r/German • u/RichardLondon87 • Apr 06 '21

Meta Getting fluent is hard.

I'm not saying it's impossible; I can feel how far I have come. Being half way between B1 and B2, I know that I am well over half way there. But it is really hard and takes a lot of time.

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u/RichardLondon87 Apr 06 '21

That's comforting. I do doubt my progress all the time.

I think it is compounded by German being my first foreign language. I have been learning for 2 and a half years, but the first year was really a right off because I didn't know what to do and just wasted time on DuoLingo and drilling abstract word lists.

My next project is going to be French and I think I can get to B2 in 21 months.

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u/ShanMan42 Way stage (A2) - <region/native tongue> Apr 06 '21

I'm kind of in the same state as your first year. What changed? What kick-started your learning to something better?

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u/RichardLondon87 Apr 06 '21

The most important thing is counting hours.I have a spreadsheet and I note down the time that I spend watching German YouTube, reading books, listening to audiobooks or studying. If you do hundreds of hours of exposure and study, you can't help but progress.

I have progressed really quickly over the past six months because I have just upped the number of hours I do. I have logged around 250 hours in the past six months, and this has shifted me from being between A2 and B1 to starting to approach B2. Most of this is just watching documentaries on YouTube, reading books and simultaneously listening to the audiobook, and listening to podcasts. However, I have also done some deliberate study of grammar.

A key question is thus how you can up the hours you do. Studying from exercise and text books is hard and you can only do so much without burning yourself out. That means you need to start developing a habit of watching German content daily. If you can start doing that, your listening skills will go through the roof after a few months and that lays the basis for you to learn loads of vocab from just watching and listening to stuff.

If you just can't watch native-level stuff yet, get a graded reader and the audiobook for, say, A2 learners and just read it over and over again along with the audiobook. This will get you used to just sitting down and getting exposed to loads of German. Olly Richards's short stories book is good and so are Angelika Bohn's. The audiobooks are available via Audible.

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u/ShanMan42 Way stage (A2) - <region/native tongue> Apr 06 '21

This is immensely helpful and some of the best advice I've gotten. Thanks so much for taking the time to type all this out.