PFM246

Thank you for posting this! I just took a quick look and I cannot believe all the material that he has created. Definitely a great resource!

I'm finding it much more difficult to remember the gender of German nouns than in Romance languages I have studied. As others have said, it really helps to learn the noun with the definite article as well as the plural form. Even though it makes learning a bit harder in the short term, it pays off in the long term.

Take a look at the free Deutsche Welle online German course: http://www.dw.de/learn-german/s-2469

While it's not an app, Deutsche Welle has a very complete set of online interactive German lessons that are free: http://www.dw.de/learn-german/s-2469 The course starts at level A1 of the Common European Framework and goes as high as B1. The interface can be a little clunky at times, but there is a good variety of activities. The is lots of practice with reading, listening, and even opportunities for speaking, though you won't get any feedback on your pronunciation. There are also tests that you can take to see how you're doing. It's important to log out and then log back in periodically, or you can lose your progress. This course is basic, but it can be challenging, and requires more concentration than apps like Duolingo. One thing I do not like about it is that some exercises require you to fill in the blanks based on an audio recording. The problem with this is that you cannot pause, rewind, or fast forward the audio, so unless you can type at super-human speeds, you have to keep re-starting the audio in order to hear everything. It gets pretty tiresome hearing the beginning of the audio over and over again when all you need are the last few words.

Duolingo is what finally got me moving forward with German. I had used other apps, books, and audio courses, but Duolingo motivated me to stick with it. It's almost as addictive as a game. They have a really good variety of exercises and activities so it never gets boring. The lessons are short enough to be completed quickly, and the graph showing your progress encourages you to keep on going. I like the ability to connect with friends who are also using the app, and the daily email reminders are helpful, too. I like it so much that I started using it for the other languages that are offered. I'm reviewing Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and finally getting serious about Italian. I hope that they add some other languages in the future. I'd like to see Russian or Polish. The only area where the app might be improved is in providing a bit more grammar background, but I use books for that. This has been a bigger problem for me with German, mainly because word order and using the correct endings for determiners, nouns, and adjectives can be a challenge.