How I Learned German 

What have the greatest difficulties you experienced when it comes to learning German? 10 Secrets of Language Learning ⇢ www.thelinguist.com LingQ Grammar Guides ⇢ www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/ My blog ⇢ blog.thelinguist.com/ The LingQ blog ⇢ www.lingq.com/blog/ My Podcast ⇢ soundcloud.com/lingostevepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learn-languages-with-steve-kaufmann/id1437851870 --- Social Media Instagram ⇢ instagram.com/lingosteve_/ TikTok ⇢ www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve Facebook ⇢ facebook.com/lingosteve Twitter ⇢ twitter.com/lingosteve LingQ Discord ⇢ discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN

"Having Kaufmann as last name gives you 50% of the German language knowledge at the start of the adventure" Such a great buff for early game german learning.

I highly recommend the RU-vid challenge "Easy German". They interview normal people on the streets and put subtitles on it and other things that help you learning the language

I'm german and I felt like your pronunciation when you read the titles of the books were really good! 👍

Ich liebe es wie du deutsch sprichst :) Für mich als Deutscher ist es ein riesen Kompliment, dass du dir die Zeit genommen hast, um diese schwierige Sprache zu lernen. Teilweise erzählt dein Deutschakzent auch eine Lebensgeschichte - du klingst manchmal wie mein Opa, manchmal auch wie ein Franzose. Faszinierend! :D Grüße aus Sachsen

My dream is to have a job that allows me to use my passion of language learning just like you! I love your videos!

So I guess it's not just about "brain power", but more so about "thirst for adventure" and "a thirst to see the bigger world"!

Steve is a legend.... along with Richard Simcott, is my biggest influence on language learning

Your videos give me hope and strengthen my commitment to learning a foreign language. Thank you!

Hey Steve! Ich bin immer wieder sehr davon fasziniert, wie leidenschaftlich du mit Sprachen umgehst und sie strategisch lernst. Viele Grüße aus Deutschland von einem Deutschlehrer auf RU-vid! :)

I love your attitude towards learning. I hope I also have a growth mindset like you do. It makes life so much more interesting.

Hi, Steve! I am learning German by now and it was really stimulating to see this video and to know a little more about your history with this language! Thanks a lot for sharing, I really appreciated this! 💜😊

I was born in Germany in 1970 and lived there until '77. After that while learning/improving Turkish I forgot German. Since 1998 I've been speaking English where I live in the US. Three years ago at the age of 48 I started studying German again. There was not much left from my early experience of it. So I started with a couple small dual language simple story books. After them I ordered from Germany "1001 Nacht". Two volumes, almost 2000 pages total. I said to myself by the time I finish these two volumes I should be at a good level of comprehension. Of course I added lots of listening to this. The books were too advanced for me but the stories were familiar since I'd read the "Arabian Nights" (basically the same books) in English 1-1/2 times. This helped a lot. Until the last few months I tried other things, other books, other methods of learning. So the 1001 Nacht was slowly simmering in the back burner. None of those other methods and reading material grabbed me like this book. So a few months ago I gave my full attention to them. And stopped worrying about using the monolingual dictionary, started using Google translate. Often times I get lost in the stories and in those moments I live in the language, I forget that I'm learning it. I think total immersion is the secret to absorbing the language. I started reading the same book in Arabic also since I have a basic understanding of it. I'm also doing shadowing to German radio. (English also). Just a little mumbling works the best since I don't worry so much about getting it right, and this allows me to stay connected to the talk I'm shadowing. I think in the same lines with Steve and also benefited a lot from his videos.

Hello Steve! Thank you for sharing your German library with us. I was particularly interested in the book published by my alma mater, the University of Southern California in the year I was born. My greatest frustration in learning German is not the grammar but still struggling with listening comprehension. And my New Year's resolution is to stop asking you to make a video in German. 🤗 Frohes Neues Jahr !! 🥳

love these kind of videos

Great motivating video. As a native spanish speaker, I remember how I learned my ABC in english.. I was 16 and just discovered The Beatles, and I got a book with the lyrics of every song of them (and a dictionay). Two things you mentioned that I can confirm... 1) reading anchors very effectively in your mind the sound to the word and the concept 2) music (I am pretty sure movies can do the same) makes all the learning a delicious way to walk. Generally most of the people are intimidated with the challenge... so take your favorite song, get the lyrics... research a bit to translate and understand the meaning.. and begin to sing along. Happy 2022!

REALLY useful thanks!

Obrigado e Steve por trazer este tipo de contéudo no seu canal é exatamente do Que preciso muito obrigado

Ich bin philippinischen Krankenpfleger. Für zwei Jahre habe ich Deutsch gelernt, dann machte ich die B2 Prüfung. Ich brauche die B2 Zertifikat, um in Deutschland arbeiten zu können. Aber die Prüfung ist wirklich schwierig! Ich habe zwei Mal die Prüfung gemacht. Meine Schwäche sind Leseverstehen und Hören Teile. Und ich muss sagen, dass zahlreiche Vokabeln wichtig ist und nicht nur die Grammatik müssen in Betracht gezogen werden.

As a German native speaker I agree that the language is pretty hard, even many native speakers are having trouble with it(mostly the written part though). Pupils are learning to write in the correct grammar for at least 8 school years straight -even though it's the language that is native to them. I am quite proficient in German and can point out most errors when I read them on message boards, though I wouldn't dare to claim that I never make any mistakes, cause I still do. Pretty much everyone does, even news writers will have the odd spelling error here and there. - I was baffled about how easy English was in comparison. The grammar rules are much simpler, capitalization rules are pretty easy to understand as you can write most stuff in lower case to start with. However, one thing that German has going for it, is that reading and then pronouncing something is pretty easy. English isn't that hard either but it has its quirks, French would be one of the more difficult beasts in that regard. As I am currently learning Japanese I found that the language was very straight forward with the pronunciation, much like German in a way. It is similar to German phonetics actually, maybe because the vowels are spoken almost the same way, which play a huge part in any language I guess.

I still have one of my college German textbooks from more than 50 years ago, Im Wandel der Jahre. I noticed you mentioned that one.

I am from Colombia (South America), however idk why I've fallen in love with German... I expect to become really fluent in 2022.

Du hast die Buchtitel wirklich gut vorgelesen, deine Betonungen sind wirklich gut👍

Thank you so much. Vielen Dank für deine Hilfe

I think you did an amaizing good job in learning that difficult language. What does count in languages is not to be perfect without any mistakes. Languages are to communicate and to express and understand. So be proud of your achievements and do what languages are made for: get in touch and have fun!

Great vid quality.

God bless you!! You are motivation for me in my language learning journey!!

Thank your for sharing yout experience. I heard your interviews in German and in Russian - they have impressed me!

Merry Christmas ☃️🎄

I’m learning German on lingq right now. Approaching a million words read and 200 hours listened. It was hard at first but it has gotten a lot easier. Still can’t understand freely spoken German and can’t read unassisted but I’ve gotten so much better since I started. Vera has tons of good material. Reading and listening to suni and the detective now. Still a long time to go but seeing the progress is motivating. Just enjoying what I’m doing and not worrying about being fluent anytime real soon.

ありがとうございます。 thank you for your sincerely

Wow! Deutsche Sprache für Ausländer was the book I used when I was attended the VolksHochschule in Germany. I can commmunicate well enough like when I'm travelling there but I'd really like to nail down the language and have been toying with the idea of re-learning it. But I also want to learn Spanish. Seems like a really useful language to know especially here in the Americas. Thanks for your inspiring videos.

Thank you! It's very impressive to have B2 level by studying a language by yourself! I already have a small book in german, so I guess I'll start there. 👍📖

Wow Steve your subscribers counter is spinning like crazy, half a million before 2022 ?!

Hi Steve, I have just found, in a second hand book store, a very old book, Grammatik der deutschen Sprache, by Schultz-Griesbach, that I guess you might have, that seems to be very hard but also useful, with a lot of drills and reading. Greetings from the underground.👍

great video

Danke fûr die video. Sehr Interessant. Lieber Gruße aus Québec!

Thank you for sharing your story. I have been living in Germany for 20 years and still have problems with dative and accusative.

that's interesting and really helped me as i'am trying to learn German away from the textbooks and grammar stuff. than;'s Steve.

Im Wandel der Jahre…so grand! My grandfather used the same book when studying at USC in the early fifties!

С рождеством вас и наступающим новым годом!

I'm German and my gf introduced me to watching movies with their original English language and subtitles, that's what made me learn English better than from school and understanding it as it's spoken. Today I mostly watch videos in English.

When I was studying languages at university I found it very useful to translate German into French so I did not think in English. I still use French when trying to learn a new language.

I love German so much that I can't even notice that it's difficult

I have to start to appreciate times we live in- the knowledge is so available and yet I do not learn as much as I could or should...

Immerwieder erfreulich zu sehen, dass sich Menschen dazu entschließen diese tiefverwurzelte Sprache zu lernen. Die Sprache der Dichter und Denker war nicht grundlos eine der wirkungsstärksten Wissenschaftssprachen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert neben Latein, französisch und english. Der Fokus auf englisch in den letzten Jahrzehnten macht zwar Sinn aufgrund der weltweiten Verbreitung, aber es geht etwas sprachliches verloren, besonders im Bereich der Metaebene und der tiefen Sinnhaftigkeit und Geschichte der Worte.

Vielen Danke🎉

Just the other day I found a graded reader in Russian, “Taman” with some text by Lermontov. Glossary on each page. Published in 1945!

This man's voice is so soothing, I could listen to him tell stories all day.

I want to learn german

It was interesting to view your statistics on LingQ. If my calculations are correct, you've learnt about 28k words over a 14 year period, so you've averaged about 2k words per year. I find those graphs to be fascinating.

Whenever i got Chance ! Every day i learn new German words . As indian my most favorite country among the other European country is Deutschland . Auf Wiedersehen . Namaste

Hi Steve, good to see you again! 🙋‍♂️ Thanks for sharing with us your expierence in learning different languages 😊 It helps us both, students and teachers 👍 I hope some day someone will say the same words about me 😊 Let's learn English together, guys! 🙌

Encontré el vídeo Muchas GRACIAS 👌😃

I honestly never had problems learning foreign languages. I am from a country which officially has 3 languages and 2 different alphabets, so I naturally fell in love with learning the same. I moved to Austria a little bit over 1 year ago and ever since then my german has been improving itself every day of my life. For the first year (2021) I didnt speak any german, only english, and when I came back to austria after Summer break and started going to high school I managed to speak really good german, which obviously still isnt perfect. My point is, never give up and after some time and enough hard work you can speak any language of this world.

Would be great if Update us on your persian learning process or anything you found interesting about the language ❣

My family is mostly German. I learned to speak German fluently by use of unconventional means. Courses in institutions aren't enough. First, I learned by researching topics of interest on the internet in German. I would look up words in a dictionary and build my vocabulary. Pronunciation and speaking I learned primarily playing Xbox. You can switch the settings to Deutsch and the game would often be dubbed in German in addition to German subtitles. I heard native speakers and mimiced the speech. I was able to hear dialogue in realistic situations. Unconventional but very effective. Many Germans have told me I don't have a foreign accent.

i can only say, you are amazing.....,

I'm beginning this journey, planning to learn German for the foreseeable future. I've been using comprehensible input casually for a week or two, but now I've decided to become more serious. *Day 1* (more accurately day 14 or so): Reading Die unendlichte Geschichte I have to look up words every now and then; my reading pace is significantly slower than when I read Ollie Richard's Short stories for Beginners in German (A2-B1) - For the first chapters of that book, my WPM was 60 WPM, and at the end, 120 WPM. (250 upon rereading the first chapters). For Die unendlichte Geschichte, my WPM is 60-80 on the first day

Hello, could you make a video about language learning materials which aren't online? Since you are learning languages for some decades you might have an astonishing collection of resources. I'm interested in creative resources which don't teach the usual way, many of them you might have surely aren't in print anymore.

Schick! Ich wusste gar nicht, dass du Deutsch kannst. 😊😊😊Ich habe deinen Kanal erst vor kurzem entdeckt und finde ihn sehr spannend. Gerade bin ich dabei, Spanisch zu lernen, weil das die Sprache meiner Nichte und meines Neffen ist. Deine Videos haben mir dazu schon gute Anregungen gegeben, danke dafür!

Following closely since I want to learn the language and be able to participate in the voluntary BFD program come 2023. Thanks for this,

Unbelievable... and very interesting!

Oh that's perfect, because I am learning German also

Hallo Steve! Wenn du solche Videos machst, warum sprichst du nicht ein paar Sätze in der jeweiligen Sprache? Ich hätte mich sehr gefreut dein Deutsch zu hören. Viele Grüße und ich lerne jetzt weiter Spanisch auf Lingq :)

Hallo, genau so lerne ich, und habe gelernt, die englische Sprache. Mit viel hören, zum Beispiel BBC, BFBS Radio, viele Filme mit Untertitel. Und viel lesen : Bücher, Zeitungen oder auch englische Schulbücher ! Grüße aus Hamburg -Stephan PS: Ich liebe die englische Sprache !

Here’s what I did, when I started learning German. I purchased blue, pink and yellow Post-It Notes. I labeled my refrigerator with a blue masculine note that read “DER Kühlschrank/ Die Kühlschränke”. I labeled die Mikrowelle/Mikrowellen with a pink feminine note. I placed a pink note on mein Kühlschrank mit Milch/Butter/Sahne/Cola/Torte as well as the plural versions. Das Fenster gets a yellow neuter post-it note. I labeled my mirror, window, stairs, door, appliances with labels. Anytime I see the label with the object. I say the object with the article. As my vocabulary improves. I use the word in a sentence.

Hi there - Brasil !!!

"I haven't done much" and still has 10,000 more known words than I do after two years of a single language 😅

Steve,I am so impressed! How quickly can you read books?

Since many years I try to get fluent in English. I read english books, I always watch movies in english, I even speak english to myself. Writing is not a problem, understanding neither. But as soon as I talk to someone whos native language is english, I struggle, miss all the words and sound like a fifth grader who started to learn English.

Why is his lingq web page is different? Is it new version?

Wow you like read books so much about languange that you're learning, i rarley read books in english i just using an article from google read articals on google vs read book what do you think guy?😊

Früher habe ich auch viel mit Büchern gelernt, jetzt benutze ich sie auch, aber weniger. Mir ist es jetzt lieber, mit Videos oder Podcasts zu lernen, wenn möglich. Hast du auch Videos auf Deutsch? :)

I think the question is how do you move to the intermediate level where you can listen and understand and read and understand. Right now I'd have to look up and translate every word of text.

You’re the best

What is the name of the cassette recording? :]

Have you tried learning more than one language at a time? Tried German and Dutch but too similar and gets confusing.

Can you put links to the German books you have on your website,please?

Which second-hand bookstore do you go to, Steve? The cranky old guy on Pender? 😁

Danke. Aus Gradac Štajerska Austrija.

So what’s your native language?

Steve have you ever learnt languages through Language Stacking as Lindie Botes does??

*Deutsch:* Sehr interessant. Der Weg zum Lesen war das Lehrbuch für einen Deutschkurs, den ich an der Uni belegt habe. Es war schwer. Deutsch ist die einzige Fremdsprache, die ich auf dem B2-Niveau erworben habe. *English:* Very interesting. Der Weg zum Lesen was the textbook for a German course I took at university. It was hard. German is the only foreign language I've taken to the B2 level.

English is a germanic language for you it's more easy to learn it that's all. For à latin speaker like spanish italian or french it's complicated.

Steve, este método podría funcionar para aprender holandés , sin vivir en el país y habiendo muy poco material en internet?de Alemán hay mucho

Learning a language takes a lot of time and efforts and moreover you have to like the whole process of it. I know that there's quite a number of words in English, which are of German origin. But German grammar is complicated. Once I even started to learn German and then quit it. Simply didn't want to continue and study all that grammar rules. Here it comes again you have to like it! Which is obviously not in my case.

Those books seem advanced in German. Shouldn't we be doing reading in our target language that's on our level? One of my greatest problems is understanding natives and comprehending them, maybe reading will help with that also!🤔

How long does it take to get to that dormant level, you called it B2?

Hallo, ich kann auch deutsch sprechen, guten morgen guten abend es ist sehr gut mein deutsch

How I learned german? Working hard! 😄 That's simple!

I learned German for 7 years in school and have an ok understanding. But I need to reconnect with it, brush up on the vocabulary and maybe get a language exhange partner, who wants to practice Danish (my native language)

Are you saying that you have read all those books in one month?

I'm trying to learn German.

It's very much more difficult for a native speaker of English to learn German than for him/her to learn Spanish or Italian and certainly more difficult than learning French. I speak from experience. I am trying to learn it again after several aborted attempts. The cases are not a problem but all those nochs and dochs and ans...

Hallo. Can anybody list all the books mentioned in the video. Thank you in advance

Fantastisch. Selbst, habe ich als US Soldat viel deutsches Bier getrunken 1965 - 1968.

Das finde ich super! Herr Kaufmann, das ist klasse und ich hoffe, Sie könnten meine amerikanischen Cousins animieren Deutsch zu lernen. Second hand book store - great idea! Im Wandel der Jahre ... 1959 (published) I will send this podcast to my cousin. Jetzt lesen wir ... so cool! Deutsche Sprachlehre für Ausländer - Quer durch Deutschland ... Super!!!

You seem like a cool guy to have a beer with

Hello guys did you think if watch german movies with my native subtitles is help to learn german?