German

Several of my colleagues have asked me for advice on how to learn German, and they didn't seem satisfied with the response "spend a boatload of time". In case it is of broader interest to a wider audience, here is the main body of a response I recently sent to a friend, listing various German learning resources I've relied upon. I don't yet have evidence on how useful my approach would be for other people, but I hope there is something of use here for other dedicated and self-motivated language learners.

1) Easy German - This has both German and English subtitles, though all the audio is in German. I'm a big fan of this and still watch it because I like the people that run it. I find it really valuable to see how real people answer questions in their own accent and using colloquial expressions.

I also recommend early on finding a clip (or maybe 5 minutes of a clip) that you like and would be ok watching many many times. Reasons for liking the clip don't have to be about the language: maybe you find some of the people amusing or attractive, or maybe the clip just has many cute dogs in it. The important thing is for it to be something you're up for watching a bunch of times at the outset and then many other times over the coming weeks at regular intervals. My reasoning here is that languages are extremely information rich such that a single short clip of real conversation gives you a tremendous amount of information about the sound of the language, the grammar, how people actually talk etc.

There are a bunch of other strategies you use to get even more out of the videos. You can repeat lines you like out loud to see how close you can mimic them. You can use the Youtube function that allows you to play back the video at slower speeds to try and catch subtleties in the pronunciation. You can make screenshots of phrases that seem particularly useful and/or informative about the way the language is used and save them in a desktop folder you occasionally look through.

2) Duolingo - I haven't tried the other apps, but I'm a big fan of Duolingo. Lots of people get frustrated with it, since they go in thinking it will be sufficient to get to speaking level (unlikely). But I think it has the advantages of being fun, encouraging regularity, and helping one get some good practice on some basic grammar. I've also started to use the app in a way other than it was intended, in order to maximize its usefulness for learning pronunciation. There are three tricks to this. First, always repeat any sentence that is said out loud, preferably multiple times until you get the rhythm. Second, for exercises where they want you to type the answer, use your phone's built-in German speech-to-text function and say it out loud. Third, look at the written words as little as possible in order to focus on the way the words actually sound, as opposed to how you think they should sound based on the text.

3) Tagesschau - watching the news is helpful, since the regional accents are minimal and you get a lot of context clues from the topics and visuals. In fact, for me at least, it can be deceptive how much easier it is to understand the news in a language than it is to understand even the most basic fragment of a conversation in real life. But it's still a very useful starting point, and at the point I got to Germany I wasn't yet able to even parse the words in order to try and translate them. My strategy for getting past this was to find a 1-2 minute clip without subtitles and to do my best to use Google translate to guess what was being said. Why use google translate, as opposed to the superior Deep-L? The answer is that Google has a function that allows you to save words you've looked up (you need to press the star thingy) and this is extremely useful. On the one hand, it gives you the opportunity to look back on words you want to know, and even to download a spreadsheet, if you're so motivated. But even if you don't do that, it's helpful to see that you've looked up a word before and thus to get the sense that even words that seem very obscure can come up regularly across many randomly selected contexts.

4) Der, Die, Das - Early on I made about 100-200 flashcards for common nouns. One one side was the English translation and on the other the word with the article with the noun as well as the plural. I then went through them until I would consistently get almost all of them right. This is time consuming, but the cards don't take that long to make and once you have them, running through them also doesn't take too long. The idea is just to have a stock of words whose genders you know automatically and also to get a feel for plurals in German. Once you've done that, then you can download the Der, Die, Das App which does this automatically for you, but without the plurals. Of course you can just do that right away and skip the card making, but I do think there are some advantages to doing the cards first.

5) Get a library card. In Munich, the Münchner Stadtbibliothek is something like 20 Euro a year, so it's totally reasonable. They have English books and films as well, so it pays for itself independently of the German resources. But of course it also makes it easy to take out as many German books as you feel like, whether they are intended for language learning or just ordinary German books that seem interesting. Of course, you might already have a bunch of German books at home, but the new shiny ones are always the most appealing and there's no harm taking books out, reading the first few pages or sections, and then returning them. Of course, with time you can understand them more easily and be more ambitious in how much you read. Another thing you can do is find a book you have read already in a different language, which will make it easier to infer the meaning of words from context, but still to pick up new words along the way.

6) One thing you should take out of the library is a German language textbook. More specifically, you should find a textbook that has a summary of all the grammar rules at the back and you should take photos of that (and probably ignore the rest). Over time I've become less of a proponent of spending lots of time explicitly practicing grammar. But there are certain things such as the way cases and genders combine that you do need to memorize. The good news is that although it is a huge cognitive load to properly use the cases in real time, the actual rules can fit on less than half a page and can be memorized in an afternoon.

7) Books in general. Reading is really indispensable for getting lots of vocabulary and a feel for the grammar quickly. The risk is that if you do this before you have a feel for the sound of the language, you can end up speaking German with a rhythm and pronunciation that native speakers will find baffling. The way to avoid this is to find a book in the library that you can get in both written and audiobook form and to at least sometimes compare them to calibrate the way you're reading the words in your head with how it sounds. For bonus points, if you find a passage you like you can try reading it aloud and recording it on your phone and then playing it back (repeating this until you see improvement). This is another one of those things that's really time consuming, but has a huge payoff even if you just do it for a single passage.

When I was just getting started, I bought a small 80 page Reclam book (one of those pocket-sized yellow books that are sold by the weight - I chose Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle) and just resolved to read through it for as long as it took. I also bought some mini index cards and wrote down every single word I needed to look up. This was ambitious, but it was fun to have a project and I was able to make it to the end. I only wish I had waited to do this until I had focused more on audio and pronunciation, for reasons just mentioned.

8) Dictionaries - it's useful to have some German dictionaries on your phone - both German-German and German-English. I was able to find some for free relatively easily. Both that I found have the ability to save words. I also at the beginning made heavy use of a large physical German to German dictionary (DTV Wahrig), which I liked a lot because it would often give examples of the word in context and a lot of useful disambiguation. Over time however, I've found the phone versions good enough and less disruptive for reading, and make heavy use of the save function.

9) I don't think they're making more episodes, but I found DaZPod useful for the sake of listening to short conversations designed for language learners and to practice getting the rhythm right.

10) I guess at some point it's important to start actually speaking the language in some regular context. There are German Conversation Clubs in Munich, which of course has a nice social component, though I could never get myself to go regularly. Eventually I just signed up for iTalki and asked for some credits as a birthday gift from my parents. In general, I think it's worth it to spend some money for the sake of conversation practice. I found that even a little bit of this made me more likely to speak with people in real life, and over time the latter has become easier.

11) Shows and Movies. If you have Netflix, there are lots of options for German shows and movies. At some point you might reach a stage where you can't follow based on the audio alone, but where you can if you have German subtitles. This is a useful intermediate solution for the period when you want to move away from English subtitles but you need some visual aid. As with books, it can also help if there's a show you've already seen in English. While lots of German dubbing is horrible, it's not always so. I especially like the German dubbed version of Brooklyn 99, which I think they did a good job with. Among German shows, my favorite is Der Tatortreiniger, which I believe one can get for free even without Netflix. This show often has the feel of a play, which means that you don't have a bunch of people speaking over one another, thus avoiding a source of difficulty when getting used to the language.

12) Youtube channels: Most of the youtube language channels I watch are only in German, so already presuppose some comfort with the language (though it's always worth trying out - perhaps with youtube generated subtitles - to see how it goes). My favorites are Deutch mit Rieke (for vocabulary/expressions etc) and Deutsch mit Benjamin (for pronunciation). Both of those people are extremely thoughtful when it comes to explaining subtle linguistic features. Otherwise, Deutsch Insider can be useful for certain features of the grammar (this video on hin vs her was extremely helpful for me) and Richtig Deutsch Sprechen can be also of use for very targeted practice of certain sounds. I suspect there are also many channels I don't know about, some of them in English and targeted toward more introductory stuff.

13) Podcasts: There are a lot of good German podcasts. Two that I like are 1) Geschichten aus der Geschichte and 2) Alles Gesagt. Both of them have a bit of a conversational feel. The first is a history podcast and the second an interview podcast.

Anyways, I think that's enough for the time being. I hope that it is helpful and not too overwhelming. Learning languages can be extremely difficult and I'm still not quite sure how it is possible for humans to do it. My general sense is that most language learning approaches emphasize the wrong things and that even if I haven't developed my own approach I hope this list gives some sense of the path that's worked for me. I don't really think there are any shortcuts in language learning, but there is a strong path-dependence such that it pays off if you can more quickly transform your brain into a machine that is able to extract more and more information from the parts of the language you're exposed to.

If you do get a chance to try out any of this, please report back about whether it works or how it can be improved.