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).
Huh, I’ve never heard of the German Grammar Drills book, absolutely is something I’ll need though, I have some strong basics of German grammar, but compared to the other skills in language learning it is definitely my weak spot.
I started learning German with Duolingo, which I honestly suggest for anyone that is first jumping into a language and wants to gauge its worth and learning curve. Duolingo helps drill some basic grammar and vocabulary into your head, but I would not rely on it past an A1 level. Duolingo’s idea of pure repetition to learn new subjects is not the way to go, its more of a tool to make sure you’re reinforcing what you already know.
Easily the most important tool I use for language learning is a notebook for each language. Perhaps other peoples’ brains do not work like this but a notebook to me is an essential repository of information you already know to look over. Also, writing down anything you learn helps further reinforce it. I structure my notebook with pages dedicated to nouns, where the page is broken up by gender (Der, Die, Das), along with verb pages where the page is split into columns for different conjugations.
Besides these two resources, I also use the Nico ist Weg movies, that start at an A1 level and get increasingly harder with each movie. Much better acting and story than you’d expect for a movie to learn German. I just finished up the A2 movie.
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.