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Comment by Alex-Programs | Hacker News Reader

r/languagelearning and r/german have some good advice in their wikis.

You'll find a lot of people encouraging comprehensible input, where you try to receive as much German as possible while understanding about ~90% of it and letting your brain kinda "work it out" the "natural" way.

It's quite cool, and I've made a tool built around it (https://nuenki.app, which selectively translates websites to give you comprehensible input as you browse the web). I'd recommend pairing it with other methods - Anki is effective but miserable, and proper grammar reading (the subreddit has some good links) can have a very high ROI.

I quite like the Easy German youtube channel. They have some clips from Austrians - and that's something to bear in mind, as Austrian German and Swiss German are quite different to the High German ("Hochdeutsch") (edit: see the reply; I'm wrong here) you'll generally be taught.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzv_FDh4N2o

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My German peaked during an exchange, where after a few weeks of it "washing over" me I was using the language more naturally, even if still making frequent errors. Equally my French peaked when I was working around lots of French tourists, so I'm very onboard with this exposure-based approach.

Nuenki is pretty much what I was looking for - plus it's a good shove to make switch from Safari to Firefox (a change I've been meaning to make).

I've heard of Anki as a learning tool, but not tried it. What makes it miserable?

I'll be sure to checkout the Reddit and YouTube links too. Thanks for the help internet stranger!

> I've heard of Anki as a learning tool, but not tried it. What makes it miserable?

I'm a bit biased here. I used it prolifically for years in order to optimise my learning (school, not languages) so that I could compensate for a concussion. I heavily burnt out of it and I've not touched it since.

Nevertheless, if I were to say something more objective, it's that it's very dull. Other learning methods have you going over either somewhat-engaging content or intellectually stimulating learning (e.g. reading about the complexities of grammar).

Anki is just... word. think. click. feedback. repeat. repeat. repeat 200 times. repeat tomorrow.

You can do the whole thing with the space bar and 1-4 on your keyboard.

You can make yourself do that, but be wary of it souring you on the language or burning out.

> Nuenki is pretty much what I was looking for - plus it's a good shove to make switch from Safari to Firefox

I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback etc.

I'd like to add Safari support, but Apple makes it pretty difficult to publish as someone who doesn't have a Mac or lots of money to spend.

Good luck with your German!

Small nitpick from an Austrian - Austrian German is Hochdeutsch, it's a pluricentric language with three distinct centers - Austrian, Swiss and German German are equally valid versions of Hochdeutsch.

That being said, German also has hundreds of distinct dialects - from Viennese to Platt.

I didn't know that! Thank you. I've always heard "Hochdeutsch" used to describe the "standard form" (based on German German) online. I stand corrected.

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