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Comment by ofou | Hacker News Reader

Learn to pronounce German sounds accurately, and then read the entire Harry Potter series out loud. By the time you're halfway through, you'll be well on your way to fluency. Many focus too much on understanding meaning, but what's crucial is also training your mouth and larynx muscles to form the sounds naturally. Understanding comes pretty much from context alone. Use a dictionary sparingly.

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This may get you into a solid B1 or even B2 level, but to go beyond everyday language and reach true professional proficiency and an understanding of language registers and nuance, I would say a dictionary of the language in the language is an important step along the way. I recommend the Düden - Deutsch als Fremdsprache

Duden is written with an “u”, and not an “ü” :) [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden

I found Danielle Steel books translated to Spanish to be great as a first introduction when I was learning Spanish... Disclaimer: I've got zero interest in romance stories or her writing.

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.

This is similar to “shadowing”, where you listen to the text recorded in the native language and try to speak it as close to in sync with the audio as possible while reading.

Many focus too much on understanding meaning, but what's crucial is also training your mouth and larynx muscles to form the sounds naturally.

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.

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