Tips for learning German

If you want to learn German, you should remember that it's a difficult language. Most people who have learned more than two languages find German to be a language whose difficulty can be classified as high.

Considered from a grammatical point of view, German is complicated, and from a pronunciation point of view, it's easy. In this article, we'll take a closer look at one of the most important languages in our day and age.

The German language is of Germanic origin, and therefore most of its words have nothing in common with Spanish, which has a Latinate origin. Our native language, then, won't help us too much when learning German. However, if you've studied English in the past, this will help you with learning German, since the language of Shakespeare was also of Germanic origin, and many colloquial terms in German and English are similar:

House (the English noun), Haus (the German equivalent)

Can (the English verb), kann (the German equivalent)

Grammar

Remember that German grammar is very difficult when compared with Spanish grammar, the result being that though verbs are easier to conjugate, adjectives and nouns are harder as they decline. For this reason, it's recommended that you find yourself a teacher or a good study guide to help you understand the complexity of the German language's structure and grammar.

In terms of morphology, German sentence structure has more in common with Spanish than it does with English, and is more complex than our native language. Nouns can be feminine, masculine or neuter. A good practice to get into is learning words together with their gender to avoid one of the most common errors when learning German.

Vocabulary

One of the most important steps in learning a language is learning vocabulary. To help you with this, use apps like Anki which make vocabulary learning easy and help you to revise words already learned.

Your rhythm of learning should be pretty constant when using this app, since if you've learned 500 words but not revised any of them, the next time you open Anki and find 300 words that need revising, it's pretty unmotivating!

Anki is available to download on desktops/iPhones/Android phones, meaning you can learn words while you're on the bus to work or during the ad breaks while watching TV.

Finally, if you decide to study German but don't have any previous knowledge of the language, I recommend taking a look at this German language course online, since it allows you to see and hear directly how the language should be pronounced by a native speaker teacher. The level is A1 according to the national framework, and the course begins on December 12th.