Learning German: 10 pieces of advice you can safely ignore

#4 You don’t need to go to classes

We humans, we’re suckers for a shortcut. It’s so easy to convince someone that there is an easier way when that’s exactly what they want to hear…

German classes are hard, they are a large investment in terms of time and a fair one in terms of money too. You take your chances with the kind of teacher you get, as well as the kind of students you learn with. The size of the class and the length of the course is in direct proportion to the cost. You can get lucky or unlucky with just about every choice you make regarding your class.

But for the average person, they are hands down the best way to learn.

In the end, you have to put in the hours to learn a language and classes provide you with a guide that will take you down a well structured, well proven and well-worn path that will maximise every minute of this huge amount of time that you need to become fluent.

If you have that rare combination of extreme type A personality and plenty of time and money, then you are in a perfect position to give everything you have into learning German at 9pm every night and again at 6am every morning — power to you. But if you are like the rest of the human race, you have to work five days a week, you have a family to provide for, or a child to take care of, you need to chill the hell out and nurse a hangover on Sunday, and let your hair out on a Saturday night. If you are a human and not a machine, then you need to take classes.

If I had lots of money and time, I would do intensive classes. I did this once, took 2 months off and enrolled in a B2 Course, 7 hours per day, 5 days per week for 8 weeks with a test at the end to get my B2 Certificate. Never have I found anything that so rapidly improved my German as this.

These intensive courses are available for free through the state to refugees, immigrants on special visas (such as nurses and chemists). If a company is sponsoring your visa, the state, or your sponsor, they may send you for a six-month intensive course.

But they are intense! It is very much like going back to high school, with all the crazy teachers and students you could imagine. Many of the people don’t want to be there, for whatever reason good or bad. But not me. I sat front and centre and soaked that shit up.

A word of warning, if you’re not paying for it yourself, you have to attend unless you have a doctors certificate, no exceptions… which adds to the intensity.

This level of intensity, however, is hard to come by for free, so if it’s not available to you, try to find out how you could somehow take two months off and enrol in this course yourself. Pay for it. It’s worth it.

Classes work. Tricks, shortcuts and hacks may be enough to impress your English speaking friends, or even impress that hot German girl you met in a hostel, but they won’t help you in any serious theatre — such as finding a job. Stick to the tried and true methods, splash out and use some of the tricks and hacks for some fun, but always return to the fundamentals, you can never escape that dreaded declination chart, so just bite the bullet and learn it off by heart like everyone else.