My two struggles: What to learn and how to have more time to learn German?

[Advx]

Hi there,

I'm self-studying German for the past 4 months. I'm doing Duolingo and a few other resources (trying to read a book in German), but I find that I don't really see a clear path for what resources I should use to make sure I'll learn what is needed to get to say B2 (I'm A2 atm).

The other issue is that I have a hard time getting to study.

Do you have any tips on that? Does anyone have a similar struggle with learning as I do? Or different (how do you deal with them?)?

Thanks,
Adam

[宇崎ちゃん]

16 hours ago, Advx said:

Hi there,

I'm self-studying German for the past 4 months. I'm doing Duolingo and a few other resources (trying to read a book in German), but I find that I don't really see a clear path for what resources I should use to make sure I'll learn what is needed to get to say B2 (I'm A2 atm).

The other issue is that I have a hard time getting to study.

Do you have any tips on that? Does anyone have a similar struggle with learning as I do? Or different (how do you deal with them?)?

Thanks,
Adam

Might sound a bit weird to new language learners, but if you want to push yourself beyond A2, quit Duolingo!
Duolingo (or any other language learning apps) should be seen as a way to obtain some words to prepare yourself for the real learning.
Books are the exact same thing, except a bit more boring.

Say, language apps or books, or actually every other type of in between resource is a leaf of a tree, listening and reading practise is the tree itself.
The park is fluency of the language, and the forest is mastery of the language

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As for time, devoting time straight away is pretty much guaranteed to fail.
Instead it's a better idea to develop a habit.
Of course it depends on how your day looks like, but how I do it:
Since the political flu took control over all of society last February or March (depending on where you live), companies decided to go more and more on telework, mine included.

And since I have 1 hour of lunch break, I use half of that time reading manga in Japanese (I bought lots of them, and getting more as I complete them).
At the beginning you'll get to give up as soon as you start reading, but at the very least make sure you read 2 pages (if an entire page is without text, make it 3 pages), make sure you continue with that same comic during lunch break every day, and you'll naturally start grabbing the comic without thinking.
At the same time, you'll start being able to read more and more bit by bit, and 2 pages would eventually become 2 chapters within the same time span.
For German you'd simply read German comics instead of Japanese ones of course, but the practise is the same.

For listening I can recommend YouTube.
Create a playlist, find videos in German, put them in that playlist, and have them playing in the background while working for passive listening, and do active listening in your free time.
You probably won't understand anything at first, but the more you keep up with it, the more you'll start to understand.

Other things you can do is setting your computer and phone interfaces to German, game consoles if you have any in German, etc.
If you have German speakers nearby, definitely try to talk to them in German.
They'll appreciate it, and you'll get practise at the same time, even if you just say "nice weather hey?" in German.
You might add bratwurst to your diet, not that it will help you learning German, it's just delicious!

One general thing about your choice of comics and YouTube videos is, no language lesson or language tutorial videos.
As long as it's made for native speakers, you're good.

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I hope you'll find my tips to be useful.
It could be hard to understand as to how that's supposed to work due to the way people learn at schools and such, but all it comes down to is having your brain to rewire itself to understand the new language by itself.
Doing drills actually only prevents your brain from understanding a new language.