Efficient German Language Learning: Is Anki the Answer?
argpar.se
argpar.se
I don't mean to shame the author, but I really do think this is quite sad, and the fact that this isn't even surprising is one of the things that I dislike about being a native English speaker. It's just too easy to get away with not learning the language somewhere. Not learning the language is not only isolating, but IMO rather weird / presumptuous if you're living there long term. Having lived in Germany for around a year and a half now, I am often a little embarrassed about speaking English in public (but that's also partially the Canadian in me not wanting people to think I'm an American), and I find learning the German language to be a quite enriching experience.
There's a lot of culture embedded in language, and it's really worth learning new languages, especially so that you can better understand and relate to the people around you in the country you live in. People often have different personalities in different languages too. You may find a new side of yourself when you learn German, and you may find a new aspect in some of your German friends.
So I can really sympathise with people in that situation; it’s not always choice.
In my case, I got my employer to allow me to attend classes during normal work hours; something which isn’t available to everyone I am sure.
And yeah, I'm much more understanding if someone just has functional, but poor German skills after a long time. Mastering a language is a legitimately difficult thing. But I find it rather difficult to not be judgemental towards people who have been here for a long time and don't seem to have made any effort at all.
I couldn't find any German courses that would suit me. I found out I can trivially solve all exercises just by pattern matching. I'd get maximum points on everything we'd be doing, yet I was learning nothing. I've been to many courses. I aced them all, I learned nothing.
I even found reading or listening very easy, and not because I understood the material. Thes exercises always asks for some sort of information to extract from the text or dialogue. "How many people were talking?", "where did Max go?", "what was the relation between the people talking?", etc. These questions are trivial to answer even if you don't understand the material at all. I heard 3 people (no idea what they talked about), some dude mentioned Spain (no idea what he talked about), mother and daughter were talking (no idea what they talked about).
Writing was also easy for me, at least as homework. Just use a dictionary, and lookup the grammar rules! Yet I don't remember the words or the rules after I'm done with the exercise.
The educational materials and the course organization have been totally hopeless for me. How do people learn this stuff?
Looking for any sort of advice. Also keep in mind that, just as the parallel comment mentioned, I have work and other life commitments to attend to.
Do you have any friends or family who speak German? Maybe a good start would be to try and get them to at least speak some basic German with you. Try to actually formulate German questions and try to think about what they respond with.
I know this isn't a great fit for everyone, but I find simply listening to German podcasts to be immensely helpful for me in internalizing the language and learning it in a way that's more organic than rote memorization / repetition. The Easy German podcast is really good and I strongly recommend it.
Common, no way this was easy. If you had to look up each word and look up grammar rules each time, it must have taken ages and ages. There is absolutely no way you could do this with longer texts which are part of pretty much all the courses I have seen later on.
> These questions are trivial to answer even if you don't understand the material at all. I heard 3 people (no idea what they talked about), some dude mentioned Spain (no idea what he talked about), mother and daughter were talking (no idea what they talked about).
That is beginner level questions. That is what you are expected to gather by the start, you do not need to understand everything. Later on, normal (not even good) courses add harder and harder questions, including tricky ones. I mean, even Duolingo was impossible to answer with pattern matching only, because the information you was quizzed on was indirect.
I did a mix of talking together with some basic grammar.
Right now I am super fluent in German but still make mistakes. Just the damn articles are a pain.
When I hear someone speaking Spanish, my native language, and says a 10 word sentence, everything correct except of an article, I immediately think "oh shit, that's how I sound in German!", haha. Because even if almost everything was perfect, it sounds off.
I could have written these words in German but it would have been much harder. As I said, I am much more fluent in German than in English although my English is waaay better. I can read a book and write things down; in German? Hard :o
Motivation is really important. I work at Lieferando/Takeaway (courier with the bigass ugly backpack) and I am in charge of showing the workflow to the new hires.
It doesn't stop to amaze me how many Syrians who fled the war can speak soooo good. There's all kind of cases.
Half of the people hate the country, complain about it and hate the language. So many of them have been here for 5-10 years and their German sucks or just basically doesn't exist.
No easy answer but you really have to like the thing and try to talk. Retrieval, retrieval!
But sounds like your retention and generative capabilities are underdeveloped because you're able to get away with so much through purely analytic hacks. Many gifted folks suffer from this -- they take so many shortcuts because its so frictionless for them to do so (and they are praised for it) but they end up not developing much deep comprehension (unless it's something that really interests them). This is why many gifted kids struggle with having the grit to do deep work beyond the quick solves. Some things just require work, no matter how smart one is.
Language production is what you might need to focus on, not "solving for" the language.
You might need to use the Feynman method to train your generative skills (which will also train your retention). The Feynman method is a forcing function to train comprehension.
I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it's certainly a valid observation. I lived in Japan for a while (and now have a reasonable level of sufficiency). Even though Japanese is about as different a language from English as you can find, these days, it's pretty easy to get by in Japan without learning the language at all. The locals will routinely "English" you, based only upon appearance [1], and pretty much everything of importance to daily life is subtitled in English as well. You can live a pretty comfortable life without any level of Japanese fluency, and you meet tons of expats who never bother, or who have atrocious language skills even after years of living there.
On the other hand, despite the incentive structure, learning the language isn't really harder because of any of this. If you want to learn, you will find a way to associate with Japanese people, read Japanese, listen to Japanese, and so on. You're living in Japan. It's trivial to immerse yourself, if you choose to do so.
Anyway, my point is that language learning is pretty much always about motivation, and maybe a bit of shamelessness. If you don't want to do the work, or you're too "shy", or uncomfortable, embarrassed, or whatever else, you won't learn, even if you live in the country and you're surrounded by people speaking it every day. Ultimately, the "I speak English, so it's harder for me" thing is just another excuse.
Yoda said it best: Do or do not. There is no try.
[1] White people speak English, according to the Japanese mindset. Sometimes, even if you are speaking to them in fluent Japanese.
I fully agree that one can still simply motivate oneself to learn and I have done so myself (though I'm still far from perfect, I think I'm quite good for only being here 1.5 years)
When I was younger I completely failed to learn to speak French because of embarrassment/shyness, so I do understand why people say that English is a crutch. I think part of the reason I was more successful with Japanese was that I was having more fun while I was doing it!
My fault for not being clear.
However, I'm not a native English speaker, the other languages I speak is Japanese and Swedish.
I suspect you'll find that between your knowledge of English and Swedish, you'll discover a lot of connections to those languages in German that may make it easier and maybe even fund to learn the vocabulary. The grammar will remain a pain in the butt, but at least once you get the vocabulary down, you can move onto more stimulating learning material than flash cards.
> However, I'm not a native English speaker, the other languages I speak is Japanese and Swedish.
Fair enough, Maybe I should just change my complaint to a complaint about the ubiquity of English. Or maybe it's just a silly complaint any way I slice it, but it just sometimes feels bad to me to see English everywhere (even though I am a native English speaker myself)
I think that's the plan, and also get a feeling that you're making some kind of progress. A couple of weeks ago I had a meeting with a German person that spoke Swedish, and I really stumbled my way through the little German I know. Very painful.
I hope increasing the vocabulary with example sentences will broaden that and give me somewhat of a confidence boost. You've got to start somewhere..
I was an Arabic linguist in the Army and used Anki, first at the start to ramp-up, and then later on to broaden my vocabulary, so I definitely think it is a good tool, but the 88 weeks of classes day-in, day-out with native speakers helped a lot more.
Anki (or diligent use of flashcards) is good for the vocab part of languages (and that's admittedly a big part of it), but the task of learning a language is much more holistic than people sometimes realize. They want to min/max, and I get that, but language is something innate in us so it's essential to realize how important immersion/interaction is.
This is where language learning usually plateaus. Assuming one is being constantly exposed to comprehensible input, the first 80% (by Pareto principle) is usually easy because they're high frequency patterns and the brain automatically picks up on what to pay attention to and tries to retain them. (pattern/word frequency)
But then there's the 10% of high-leverage phrases that native speakers use (which makes them sound native) but not quite often enough for our brains to pattern match. These are the hardest to retain because it's diminishing returns for our brains. (weak signals in training data)
This is where Anki helps: the SRS artificially boosts the signals for these phrases. (synthetic data)
I also use Anki for easy confused words/phrases -- in Portuguese, "rodoviária" (bus station) and "rodovia" (highway) are easily confused, but Anki's SRS prompts me to differentiate them. (discriminative learning)
If you can't learn german in germany, then you simply do not want to learn the language. Don't think anki will make a difference.
So I hope at least, this will lower the hurdle a bit. Getting a flywheel going so to speak.
My plan is to re-evaluate where I'm at end of January next year.
If this seems easier than the hurdle of learning German, it makes me think issue is more psychological than technical, eg maybe you find German people a bit intimidating or there are some socialization patterns you don't feel comfortable with.
Certainly Anki will help if you stick to it daily. But grinding unrelated vocabulary and sentences is also likely to feel fragmented and random until you pass some threshold where things start to gel in your head and you notice emergent patterns of word formation and sentence structure. You need more German friends and you should probably buy a bunch of children's books. Also listen to daily news broadcasts on radio or TV; newscasters are selected not just for looks but for perfect elocution.
* I'm exaggerating somewhat; Japanese is part of a family of related languages. That said, only native speakers and linguistics nerds care, because these related languages are only spoken within Japan or the surrounding islands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_Japonic_...
The explanation for that is that I used to study Japanese at Uni, and my wife is Japanese. So in some sense, it already is easier. Starting something from scratch is always a lot more difficult.
Some good other suggestions. I also thought of playing something like Broken Sword (adventure game fully voiced with text in german).
You might find it helpful in Anki to color-code things as you encounter them (you can do this very easily with a control and the digits 1-7), as well to switch Anki itself into German, so you have to read it to check your intervals, progress and so on. I grind Japanese for a couple of hours a night and the forced-immersion aspect helps me a lot.
You might also like this site which has graduated short readings in German that start out very accessibly - I was able to read the first few cold despite never having studied the language. I think it's very important to study vocabulary in some narrative/situational context because the filling-in and inferential processes you do with a text are very important; they help you invest a word with meaning rather than just assign it.
You don’t think so? Have you learned a second language?
Anki and any flash card system can be a small step in the right direction and that is huge!
If you already live there, forget flash cards, take a basic in-person course then just pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV, talk to that gas station employee in your broken German... Having actual conversations, no matter how broken, is IMHO way more beneficial than any app or course. And yes, I've learnt several languages (including German) this way. There's countless ways, but in the end it pretty much boils down to the willingness to learn it, not an optimal learning method.
Flashcards can be help, somewhat to learning foreign language. But they are not necessary nor able to teach you to communicate by themselves.
I agree. Far and away, the fastest way for me to acquire a new word is to use it incorrectly in conversation. My theory is that the emotion of social embarrassment makes it stick (there is some research associating strong emotion with learning).
Maybe there's something about the act of using the word that also adds to the impact, because similarly, if I learn a new word for the first time in conversation, I rarely forget it. Words acquired via flashcards or reading or whatever take ages to stick in my brain, and then I usually have to go through another learning process it be able to use them effectively in real life.
And Anki is a nicety but won't revolutionise your learning. In fact in the end I stopped using it and switched to just reading German books and watching German movies.
They live in English/Russian/Turkish/Arabic speaking bubbles. They are not isolated from people, only from Germans.
Their issues are poverty, violence, lack of education that makes it impossible for you to really earn money. The expats speaking English do not have these issues.
But the Türkendeutsche no longer are - not the under-50 set, anyway. Try ordering a Börek in Berlin sometime - the person serving you will answer in perfect Berlinerisch.
Socially/politically they might be in some kind of a bubble, but so are the rest of us.
Why? Well, obviously it still takes a lot of time and effort, factors which aren't altered by being in Germany. You still have to put in private practise (which isn't helped by being in Germany - you can do this anywhere) and you probably need to seek out classes or lessons (which isn't helped by being in Germany - you can do this anywhere). You might want to seek out people to practise conversation with, meaning other learners, who you can also find anywere, although there are probably more in Germany.
Also, my experience is that it's actually very rare that casual interactions with people e.g. in shops or restaurants is helpful - they either make no effort to help with your halting attempts to communicate (or worse: I've had some quite unpleasant responses from native Germans, even when I was trying my hardest to speak their language), or they try too hard to be helpful and immediately switch to English instead.
Of course, if a person was to move to Germany, completely immerse themselves by living amongst native speakers, while focussing on learning the language, then yes it would probably help. But for most other folks where the situation is less perfect, it still comes to interest and motivation, and being in the country is of relatively little benefit.
I lived in Mexico for years and was still surpassed by people who were there for six months. I had to fix a lot of quirks and setbacks just to begin the process.
For example, I couldn't understand people in English esp over the phone if they had any accent, and I never listened to lyrics of music (unintentional, I just didn't do it naturally).
I'd like to save some prompts and select among them when I start a voice mode.
- Do a German class: the biggest step up starting from nothing. If nothing else, listening to German 2-3 hours/week will help you
- http://germanforenglishspeakers.com/ for reference: essential grammar concepts
- Reading a book / watching a TV show in German: something you already know, so you won't get discouraged by lack of understanding
- Duolingo: just to have that 5-10 minutes every day. It won't get you to fluency, but it's a low-impact tool
Anki works. I learned German using Anki. I recommend reading texts and making a card whenever you come across a new word.
That said, the most valuable thing is just to integrate German into your life. If your use of German is limited to Anki decks, then you'll have to keep using Anki for the rest of your life just to remain fluent. I doubt you want that.
Instead, think about the things you like to do. Try to use German when doing those things. Try to make German friends and converse with them in German. If you like to read books, try to read books in German. Try to make German something that has real value for your life.
You will learn what you practice.
If you practice reading and speaking words, that is what you will learn. Unfortunately the language is not in its essence consisting of words (although that's a part of it), but sentences.
Also, the pronunciation is much more important than people realize, because it is extremely hard to re-learn a pronunciation you have learned wrong.
And this is why I love and have had pretty surprising results with Pimsleur.
As a testament, I did 7 lessons of Pimsleur Hebrew before visiting Israel for a conference. Talking to people in the elevator, I pronounced my "Ani lo mevin ivritt" with such a perfect pronunciation that they started talking to me full gas ahead.
I also did a few dozen lessons of German, and felt I improved my knowledge more than I did during 2-3 years of school study.
What I like with Pimsleur is how combines a number of very well thought out factors:
- It practices real world sentences that are useful in conversations from minute 1 - It drills down to the single individual syllable, to make sure you got the pronunciation right - The correct pronunciation and real world sentences and topic in turn makes it much easier IMO to pick up what people in the language are talking about (I overhear my languages I study a lot on the subway etc now) - It only requires 30 minute audio-based listening and practicing per day, which means it is perfect for a bike commute or daily run/walk. - The spaced repetition works really great
Flashcards or other learning tools don't hurt, but they don't contribute significantly to fluency in a language. When I went to Japan equipped with my vocabulary I learned one thing really quick, I understood nothing in everyday conversation. Learning vocab explicitly maybe turns you into a great scrabble player, but it's an entirely different part of the brain compared to being able to parse and engage in natural conversation. Same thing when people learned German with me, what helped them the most usually was just listening and trying to talk. Vocabulary and grammar comes naturally. In particular in German, sentence structure and order is often quite complicated and a bit arbitrary, you're never going to learn it theoretically.
I actually like Pimsleur quite a bit in particular for beginners because it puts a lot of emphasis on just listening to comprehensible speech. It can get you over this annoying starting point of not having any media available to engage with.
Great if you have 30 min uninterrupted time daily during commuting or similar (this is what I use my bike commutes for, although with bone conduction headphones so I can still hear the traffic, mind you).
I think it is what probably can get you the fastest to a level where you can start interacting with locals in the language.
Her books had more natural words and it really didn't matter if you misunderstood a few words or a sentence. Plus because they had been simply translated from English you kind of picked up on grammar that made sense (you could squint and kinda knew the English behind it).
Great literature was the worst to try and read and learn from. I wouldn't try reading anything highly regarded as good literature. Just too hard.
Long books are a grind - I would probably avoid Harry Potter for that reason.
Comics were really hard - too many contractions and fake accents; also local comics often implicitly referred to local culture I didn't know.
Yup, the value of simple vocal training part (combined with active listening, and occasional feedback on what one does day) seems to be greatly underappreciated. And the value of flashcard-based vocabularly training - generally overrated (beyond the very initial stages).
That said, it seems difficult to even get to A1 without some actual formal understanding of the basic rules of grammar.
Newspapers are targeted at a 6th grade level, so that's about right.
What helps is the common speaking vocabulary is about 2000 words. Not a tough goal to achieve. It'd be nice start to have a list of those words.
I feel that this must depend on the definition of "word". Are all conjugations of some root the same "word" in this sense, or does each conjugation count as a different word?
IIRC, the Duolingo word list was around 2000 words when I was still using it, and that just gave me unreasonable expectations.
Now I'm way beyond the top 2000 words, at least according to my Babbel and Clozemaster profiles — I can understand *most* of what's going on in the news or in real life these days, but I sure couldn't when I was only 2000 words in.
For spoken conversation, it was about 2000 words.
I suppose that the utility of 2000 words was dependent on who you were speaking with :-/ I've also read that newspapers and TV are targeted at a 6th grade vocabulary.
Anecdotally, I've found an unsurprising correlation between the number (and quality) of books read and vocabulary.
If I know only the present tense forms of words, can I even say that I know those words at all? Or do I know them at, say, 25% (to pick an arbitrary guess as to how often each tense comes up)?
Even ignoring verb conjugations or other grammatical variants depending on the language, a lot of common words will have a whole bunch of different meanings (and knowing all of the meanings of common words can sometimes be more important than learning more words that are less common) so looking at the number of individual words is definitely misleading.
The big schisms I see among other users tend to be sentence cards vs vocab cards, pre-existing decks vs build-your-own, and whether or not to include NL -> TL cards. Some people also favor cards with only TL and images. Personally I felt sentence cards did little for me, and I feel building my own deck is an important part of it.
From retrospectives from people abandoning anki, I get the impression that the most common problems are becoming too rigid (making it an exercise in memorizing the dictionary), and using Anki to the detriment of other forms of engagement with the language. I think that's one of the virtues of the build-your-own deck approach: it forces you to balance Anki with other forms of study.
One thing that stuck was watching Finnish movies in cinema with English subtitles, and having Finnish as my phone's system language. Also, in-person courses. I agree with others that consistent exposure seems to be crucial, but when work is entirely in English it is surprisingly hard to have constant exposure even when living in the country.
Just ask for the things you are interested in. First in text, then using the audio interface. Use google translate to create the questions and to understand the answers if necessary. Over time you won't need it.
In one or two years doing that every single day you are going to be fluent.
For learning German I used Anki long time ago. I used Michel Thomas audios. But ChatGPT is so powerful, I would have learned it way faster with it if I could use it years ago.
This seems to be more of a problem for smaller decks, say a dozen items. FSRS seems to do better with large decks where the statistic advantages come more into play.
As an Englishman who has been living in Germany for 3 years I sometimes feel like other expats are living in a totally different universe to me
Or maybe it’s just Berlin, where I, no joke, went into a major outdoors shop and the shop floor staff did not speak German
That said, it's probably still a valid approach even these days.
But for learning to actually use the language: books, documentaries, and ideally immersion.
(i’m bilingual, learned 4 languages as a kid, and 1 as an adult. i also speak german)
To kickstart it look up basic pronunciation, grammar, and some vocabulary (but don't get too hung up on it), from there on it's mostly exposure that counts.
Being mostly done, I'm at a low B1 proficiency in a year.
It is quite an astounding piece of learning software, overall. They have a music module that I've tinkered with a bit, but a phone is no substitute for a piano. Haven't looked at the math stuff.
I have no commercial ties to it — just a very happy user.
After trying a ton of ways to learn, I think what was most effective was some kind of structured learning combined with using the language to consume content. For me, that was listening to anime (weak learning) and reading untranslated manga (much stronger) and even some really easy light novels. The structured content was necessary for the initial hurdle, but still provided more learning than the Japanese content, but the JP content provided stickiness for the structured learning.
They're both necessary.
If I lived in Japan, that "Japanese content" would have been just going out into the world and interacting with Japanese people, sticking to Japanese as much as possible.
I went there for a couple weeks once, and I didn't use my Japanese much, but what I did use still sticks with me to this day. Doing that more and more would be incredibly effective.
So if you want Anki to be your "structured content", that's probably fine. And that deck is probably a decent one. I have a feeling a pre-designed course (such as Duo Lingo or a Learn German book) would be better, but motivation and sticking to it is more important than anything.
You just need to pick something and stick to it, and use it in real life.
A much more effective approach is to create vocab cards yourself as you find new words through your immersion. Immersion could be anything from watching content online, to reading, to conversations with native speakers. From here you can skip the 500 or so most common words because those will appear exponentially more frequently and don't really require spaced repetition if you are regularly immersing.
Also if you're not an engineer, or you don't want to fiddle with Anki plugins you can use Mochi [0] which has built in support for text-to-speech, dictionary lookup, transcription, etc.