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Better German Podcast with Susi

Susanne Schilk-Blümel
Since 09/2023 54 episodes

54 Good Habits to Learn German Anytime of the Year

2026-01-03

Description & Show Notes

Learning German usually doesn’t fail because German is hard — it fails because the habits don’t work. In this episode, Susi talks about realistic learning habits that actually help you make progress in German, whether you’re restarting, learning on the side, or finally want to do it properly this time. No gimmicks, no unrealistic promises — just what actually works.




🔎 Key Topics
• Why motivation alone doesn’t work
• How much weekly time actually makes a difference
• What to focus on first (and what to ignore early on)
• Vocabulary, practice, and media — how they work together
• Subtitles: when they help and when they don’t
• When structure and courses actually matter

🔗 Mentioned Links & Resources

📚 German Dictionaries (mentioned in the episode)

🎓 Mentioned Course
Get Talking: German for Beginners & Restarters
Speak German from the first lesson — no grammar terms, no memorizing rules, only practical language you can actually use.

👉 You May Also Like
• Episode 14: Learn German with Movies (complete guide): https://bettergerman.info/14
• Episode 7: The 7 Best Tips to Learn German: https://bettergerman.info/7
• Episode 4: How to Learn German: https://bettergerman.info/4

📩 Questions, feedback, or topic requests:
podcast@bettergerman.info

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Transcript

Maybe you're one of the people that, take the end of the year or the beginning of the new year, to use this opportunity to, plan for the future. In German we say " Man nimmt sich etwas vor" So you're, planning to do things, and you have New Year's resolutions and I thought, okay, I'm taking this and give you my 2 cents about what you can do, and, what would be good habits to learn German. Welcome to the Better German podcast. I am Susi Blümel, a German teacher and founder of Better German. This podcast helps to learn German in a simple and clear way. With useful words, clear sentence structures, pronunciation, and real life topics from daily life and culture. You'll also get tips for learning German and understanding how the language actually works. And when you're ready, we have a free community and courses to support you even more. All right! Welcome to the Better German podcast. Welcome to this episode which is called "Good Habits for Learning German, not just in January," but I'm prerecording this, of course, it's a podcast, but it is going live on the 1st of January. Of course, you may not hear it on the 1st of January, but this is what I'm having in mind. It obviously does not only work on the 1st of January. Maybe you're one of the people that, take the end of the year or the beginning of the new year, to use this opportunity to, plan for the future. In German we say " Man nimmt sich etwas vor" So you're, planning to do things, and you have New Year's resolutions and I thought, okay, I'm taking this and give you my 2 cents about what you can do, and, what would be good habits to learn German. When I prepared the episode, I was looking at, "Okay, good. So what could be good habits? How would I do that? How would I, if I was going to learn, what would I do if I wanted to learn a foreign language?" I am, actually, planning on learning either, French, Italian, or Spanish. Eventually I want to speak all of them. I speak all of them a little bit, but not fully. Then I decided, okay, good. How would I learn, whichever one. It actually turns out to be French, Italian, or Spanish. That's probably its own episode, so I decided to really look at, So what are habits that can help you learn German and actually all of them can help you with pretty much any language you wanted to learn. The good news is many of them are free. Many of them are not connected to any course. Actually these are the habits that I want my students, even if they are, a student of a course. Maybe my course in the future or any course, if you're taking a course. These are habits that, you should be doing in addition to your coursework. But, depending on what your plans are at this point in time, if you are just learning German on the side, refreshing maybe a little bit, or want to get back into something, or it's not something that you are fully determined to do now and you say, "Okay, good! In six months I want to speak German." Or something like that, but you're just learning to get started or checking out if that's even a thing for you, then all of those free habits will also do it. So let's get started with the first habit, and that seems to be super obvious, or maybe not, I don't know. Many people actually kind of like skip it and then they're surprised why they're not making progress. So in order to learn something, my first advice, if you want to have measurable progress, you need to make a schedule. You need to set a time. However that works for you is a different thing. There could be very different things. You could be one of the people that, just say, "Okay, I'm going to do this every Saturday afternoon. Every Saturday afternoon from two to five, I'm going to sit down and learn German." Or "I'm going to, do two evenings a week," Something like that. If you're very busy, another approach could be, "I'm going to do everything that I can with listening, then once a week for an hour, I sit down." I'm actually doing an another course, that has nothing to do with, language. It's an extension course, I'm not going to a place. It's not technically an online course, but I guess, it's been an extension course for a long time, but actually now everything is done online, so you could say it's an online course. What I do is I listen to recorded lectures, and then I have to sit down every now and then and write answers to questions, basically. Work out some examples, things like that. So that works for me by listening. I mean, whenever you have time to listen, could be when you're driving, when you are taking a walk, things like that. So take your time, listen. That could be another thing. If you are taking a course with me, there are videos involved, but I'm making them in a way that is usually also possible by listening to them. So you can just pop in and listen, and then you have to have regular time where you sit down and do everything that you can do by listening because, learning German if you want to fully learn German, you have to learn speaking, writing, reading, and you're listening of course. So you cannot learn everything without ever sitting down and doing anything else. But, first good habit, make a schedule, anything that is regular, and adjust the schedule to your expectations. If you are doing 10 minutes a week, you are not going to be learning fast and you're probably going to be learning too slow to actually get to where you want to be. I mean, if you want to be fully fluent, being able to, communicate with people that are native speakers and that are talking super fast as if they're with each other and you want to contribute, or you want to be working in a German-speaking area, that is something that obviously takes considerably longer. If you want to learn, some German so you can get by when you are on holidays, that is not as long. But you have to understand, obviously, —whatever people tell you; there is videos to learn German in sleep and all of these things— I've yet to meet someone where this actually works. You will have to make sure that you have enough time, and in my experience, if you do three hours a week consistently, then you will make enough progress to keep you going. So you, see that you're making progress and you have fun with it. Good! Next thing— learn new words. Very simple life. If you follow my, podcast, you know that I keep saying that. Learn new words. Learn new words every day, or whenever your schedule is, and focus on that. If you're not doing anything else, focus on that. And even if you are taking a course, I bet you learning new words is still something that is perfect. You can even make them your own. I think the best way of doing it is you start with nouns and, before you have learned a few hundred nouns, I wouldn't worry too much about the other things. Yes, take something in German we call it a "Grundwortschatz" It's a list. It's available in books, that you can use to expand your vocabulary. There is actually a list that I have that is available. It's on my homepage. I'm going to link it in the show notes, and that is a place you could get started. There is a lot of resources to do that. So learn new words as a focus, particularly nouns if you're a beginner. Say them, repeat them, make sentences with them. Mix sentences. If you can't do anything else, I'm telling you, even knowing the words to 500 objects when you go to a country is going to be helpful, but the rest will follow soon. The next thing is practice. Practice every day or whenever you're scheduled. Again, repeat the words. Make sentences with the words. If you, learned a sentence structure, make sentences of your own. That is the most important thing you can do. It doesn't matter if it's correct or not in the beginning. Remember when you were a child and you learned to speak, you did exactly that. You learned a few words and then you tried to say something. Things like, " Haben Ball" Okay, we don't know in the beginning. That could mean "I want to have the ball." Literally it means "have ball." We don't know 100% just from the context. Does it mean, "I want to have the ball?" "I have a ball?" "I had a ball?" That's okay. With the context of the child being there and pointing at the ball or pointing at a big picture of a ball, you will figure it out, and that's the same thing. If you start learning German and you're communicating like that, then people will understand and you will get over this very fast over this phase. Good. Next, very healthy habit, even though, it could be a little bit overwhelming when you're a complete beginner, but, a lot of people have fun with it, even right from the beginning— watch movies or TV shows with subtitles. For German, there is actually a very good YouTube channel that I like. It's called Easy German, and they say everything in German and they have English subtitles and that is a very, very good way of, learning, I think. I'm going to link you a curated list that I made from that and other YouTube videos that, provide easy German and with English subtitles. But once you're ready, or if you don't mind that in the beginning and you're interested in it, start watching German TV. I know people that have learned learning German just by listening to German TV without subtitles. But it took a while. I mean, I know a friend of mine, she learned German. She lived in an area where she would receive the German TV because she lived at the border to Austria. I mean, it was actually Austrian TV, and, as a kid she liked watching the Austrian TV better than, the TV, which was Czechoslovakian at that time. She learned German just by that. So even that works. But I mean, at that time she didn't have anything else to do. She was watching a lot of TV and it took her years, but still, it works. I do not suggest to watch German, or any language— by the way, this works for any language— watch an English movie with German subtitles, or with subtitles in your native language if you want to learn English. Do not just watch the movie without subtitles. I also do not suggest watching German movies with German subtitles, because this will only help you if you are already on like C one level. If your German is really, really, really good, but you're just maybe having troubles catching some part of like particular accents, yes, then do that. But do not do this as a learner. You will just get a lot of things you don't understand. A lot of times people tell me, "Yeah, but they're too busy to read the subtitles." Yeah, but that's the exact learning thing. You will still learn, believe me, and it's going to get easier, but if you really feel you get nothing and it's just reading and it's not enjoyable then just don't do it. Then you're not ready for it yet, or it's too difficult. There is one very, very good one. I'm also going to link it. It's called Nicos Weg, it's a movie that was specifically produced for German learners and it's available with I think subtitles in 20 or 30 different languages. So I'm going to link that. I used to have a movie guide, but it is not working unfortunately at this point in time with one of my latest update on my homepage. It stopped working and I haven't managed to get it working again, or I didn't have the time to actually look at it. But I will, link for you a list of German things to watch when you are like beginner, advanced-beginner with English subtitles. If you're listening to this and you are saying, "Hey, I would like that with different, native languages," So this is a list, A PDF. It's a list of movies and it's sorted by, platform. So there will be a few things to watch on Disney. There will be a few things to watch on Netflix. There will be a few things to watch on, YouTube. There will be a few things to watch on Prime, of course, Amazon Prime. But I only have this at this point in time or I'll make it available with English subtitles. If somebody's listening and they're like, "Okay, I need it. I would love it with different subtitles." You can drop me a note at podcast@bettergerman.info, because if English is not your native language and you are having a hard time following English, maybe you will not listen to the podcast then, but if you should, I do not suggest to watch English subtitles anyway. So I'm just going to put this thing there. So as long as you enjoy it, you will learn. I can tell you there was a TV show that I watched a couple of years ago, and it had in between a lot of Spanish with subtitles, so Spanish with English subtitles. My English is good, and in the beginning I was like, I don't get it at all. And now I'm telling you, after some time I started getting more and more, and now when people speak Spanish, I get, I don't know, a percentage. I'm not saying I speak Spanish at all, but it helped. It helped and I know it would help if I was actually going to learn Spanish. Good. One other good habit, is, and that is a very important one — clarify words if you don't understand them and use a dictionary. Use a dictionary whenever you can. I'm not saying that Google Translate and all of the AI translation, I use them, they are great, they have their usage, but if you want to learn, use an actual dictionary whenever you can. For several reasons, an AI translation will tell you one translation of the word and it will be the most frequent one, usually. However, the point is when you read a text and there is a word and you don't understand the word, and you need to clarify that word, chances are that this word has several meanings, or more than one meaning. The first step is you need to look through the meanings and you need to decide based on the context of what makes sense, which one is the correct meaning. AI sometimes really doesn't get that at all. If you're in my courses, you'll learn this in detail eventually, but particularly when you're more advanced, you should also look at the other meanings of the word. So in the future, when you hit that word, you are not going to misunderstand it again. So use a dictionary, only a dictionary will give you enough information to really learn. I can link, some dictionary ideas that you can use that are online and they're usually free. However, as everything in the online world, if it's free, it usually means there's a lot of promo attached to it, so there are ads there, but they, are free. Okay! So these are the, free, more or less free, habits to build. There is one last habit, which if you are serious about learning learning German or anything for that matter, I think the best way to do it is to find a course and find a good course that will give you also support. Obviously I'm biased. I put together the best course that I, could come up with, based on my almost 20 years of experience, but also based on how is the online world working now, what is available, Talking to students or talking to people who followed me and asking them what they need. And what I came up with is, a course, it's called "Get Talking: German for Beginners and Restarters." It's starting at specific times of the year. Usually two times in a year, and the first time it's actually starting is in January 26 if you want to take part. So this is something you could check out and, that is a good habit, I think. My course, even other courses, but of course I think my course is the best. If you want to be serious about something, then actually take a course. It will give you more structure, it will give you accountability and hopefully if it is the correct course, it will help you to make much faster progress. However, there is actually an article that is also, scheduled for now, so it's also appearing at the same time of this episode or around the same time, and it is about how to get restarted learning German. So if you already had started and it wasn't successful or you were not happy with your progress, this is for you, and I'm also talking about a little bit on, "What if you have a course that doesn't actually help you?" I'm going to link that as well in the show notes. So, I hope that you have a wonderful New Year. I hope that these help you, these tips and, let me know. And if you like this podcast, then leave a review. Give me a five-star review and you can always write to me at podcast@bettergerman.info Bye-bye.

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2026 - Susanne Schilk-Blümel

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