Hallo und willkommen zu meiner Frage!
Title says it all, I’ve been taking my Deutsch seriously for just under a year and have found some good tools that I find helpful for learning, I’m sure everyone will have encountered these before but hey — we’re a new community and it’s good to get discussions started.
A book that I’m going through at the minute is called: German Grammar Drills by Ed Swick — recommended by elyssespeaks auf YouTube.
I’ve been using LingQ for a few weeks now and I think it’s such a simple yet useful tool for boosting vocabulary, it makes it enjoyable to read in another language.
Anymore for anymore, currently I’m trying to escape being on three different language apps (looking at you Duolingo, Memrise, Speakly).
Yeah Duolingo is a great introduction but by far the best thing I’ve done is attend a real class and then, like you say, use Duolingo to reinforce what I’ve picked up in class.
Hats off to you for your notebook, that would definitely not work for me but I use Anki to make flashcard decks for this kind of thing, helps me absorb things a bit better — I started doing some iTalki lessons too and then taking all the vocab from those and putting them in Anki, been a gamechanger.
Real classes have definitely been the most help for me. I’m just thinking what I can do for the new school year in September, if there may be classes I can join. I’m still wearing a mask indoors though (I’m covid vulnerable and so are some of the family I live with) so I don’t know how practical that will be.