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).
I used Duolingo, then took face to face small group lessons before the pandemic. We were working on A2 material when covid struck, and the new online teacher was … well it wasn’t working for me.
Since then it’s been a rather undisciplined mixture. I do have the book Grammatik Aktiv A1 - B1 and it is helpful, when I open it and use it! I’ve watched various Youtube and Netflix programs with the help of Language Reactor which lets you see both German and English subtitles at the same time.
I’ve used Clozemaster, and tried the Deutsche Welle website. Their Nicos Weg is good, but I find it very demanding to listen to normally spoken German conversation, instead of a newsreader’s clear articulation!
I really liked the story books by Angelika Bohn - they are at all levels from A1 up to B2, and you can get audio of her reading them too. I wrote a fan letter to her and one thing led to another and now I am having more-or-less weekly Tandem chats via Skype with a friend of hers, an absolutely delightful German woman.
I’ve tried italki, and some teachers were more suited to me than others. Currently I’m reading fantasy books in German on my Kindle, because then I can quickly get a translation of all the many words and sentences that I don’t understand.
I think I made the most progress with the face to face group, but I’m very covid vulnerable so I’m not sure when or if I can pick that up again.
This is awesome! How have you found Clozemaster? I ended up uninstalling it yesterday, it presented itself as something different but really it’s just a very simple version of some of the other apps I’m using.
The DW videos are great, so well produced for a language learning ‘show’ — i’d definitely say stick with it because listening to Germans talk IRL is soooo much harder.
I need to book my next iTalki, it’s the hardest thing to do but there’s nothing quite like putting all the vocab you’ve learnt to use and being somewhat articulate!
I liked Clozemaster for a while, but now it’s only worth it if you get the paid version, otherwise you can only do 30 sentences a day. I did find it helped to see vocabulary in context.
The DW videos are OK but I’d rather watch real input if I’m going to work with speech. I really enjoyed a Netflix film “Offline - das Leben ist kein Bonuslevel”, and a DVD of “Frau Muller muss Weg”. The Netflix Criminal Series were good too.
I’m giving italki a miss for now, because talking to Heidi is much more fun. (She the friend of Angelika Bohn that I mentioned earlier.)