Maybe you start out and usually people when they start out something new, they're like, "Yay, I'm going to do this!" Or at least they're not already thinking, "Oh no, I can't!" And then for many people there comes a point when they go like, " Oh, I will never do this. I can't. It's impossible. It's too hard," and so on. And if that has happened to you or if you want to make sure that it's not going to happen to you, then this is the right episode for you. 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, so this is the first part. This was originally going to be one episode, but then it became long. So this is the first part of an episode of how not to get discouraged when you're learning German. And the first part contains tip one to five on how not to get discouraged on learning German. So the idea is maybe you start out and usually people when they start out something new, they're like, "Yay, I'm going to do this!" Or at least they're not already thinking, "Oh no, I can't!" And then for many people there comes a point when they go like, " Oh, I will never do this. I can't. It's impossible. It's too hard," and so on. And if that has happened to you or if you want to make sure that it's not going to happen to you, then this is the right episode for you. So yeah, there's an overlap. I was just preparing episodes and there another episode, which is actually coming soon. This is called Good Habits. This is going to be kind of like a New Year's episode, or January episode on how to have or build good habits about learning German, obviously not just as a New Year resolution, but anyway, there will be an overlap. But in this episode, we're really going to look okay, what can you do, if you, you're discouraged. We're looking at it from this angle. So the first thing that you have to make sure, this is probably true for pretty much anything, and learning anything as well, but you have to make sure what is your why? Like why do you want to learn German? What is the purpose? You could think that this is very simple. "Yeah. I want to speak German." Yes. So you can have a look first of all, how does this apply to you? Is this something that will change your life? Is this something that you want to do? Is this something that you're doing for fun? Do you want to talk to a family member? Do you want to get a better job? Do you want to get any job? If you live in, in Austria, Germany, this could be a point like you need to speak German. Do you want to relocate, and maybe even if you have a job, because there is companies in Austria that have a language and in Germany and in all of the German speaking countries, there are companies that have, an internal language that is different like, English usually. There's a lot of tech companies, so if you come to Austria for example, to Vienna as a programmer, you may not immediately need English, but I've heard from many people that it makes a difference. Honestly. I know people who have been here and who are happy and just, mainly they get along. A lot of people in Austria can speak English well enough to hold up a conversation. I keep hearing that Vienna is one of the best places if you only want to speak English ever, apparently, other than obviously English speaking countries. However, I've also heard that it's really not the same, and I've seen students of mine who were like, "Okay, I've been here for 10 years," and then she told me. "You know what? I've talked to the janitor." This was a student of mine, and she worked in a school and it was actually an English school. And she was like, "You know what? I've been talking to the janitor. I could never talk to the janitor before because he didn't speak, or he doesn't speak English, and now I've talked to him and he's such a nice man!" So things like that happen. So you have a different experience if you actually speak the language. So whatever it is for you, you need to be certain of that. But then it goes deeper. For every single chapter that you learn, you should have clarity on how to apply that. It's not 100% the same. It's more like for example, if you, learn a specific aspect of grammar, let's say conjunctive subjunctive mode. This is, maybe a good example. A lot of people think that this is useless, and then it's very hard to learn. Don't get me wrong, you shouldn't be dabbling in subjunctive before you're really fluent and you can speak and you understand the language and you can use it, and then you start going into this more advanced grammar, things. However, this is just an aside because I sometimes say, "Yeah, you don't need too much grammar. You don't need so much grammar." And I realized this could sound as if I was anti-grammar. No, I'm not anti-grammar. I love grammar, as a matter of fact. I, have a lot of big grammar books, but everything at its time. You don't need big grammar books or any grammar books, really, at the very beginning. However, there comes a time in your German language, journey, let's put it like that, where you may learn conjunctive and then you have to understand why is it used? What is it used for? Because otherwise it's impossible. Everything that you learn, no matter what it is, and no matter how much you learn, no matter how many hours you spent, if you, don't have a validity for it. If you don't have a reason, a purpose for it, like the whole thing or for the specific point of it, it's just going to disappear out of your mind. Unless you are a super math student. There are other factors for things that disappear. That is true, and I'll talk about that a little later. However, I guarantee for you, if you learn something at school, at university, at work, and you had absolutely no idea what it is for that made any sense to you, it will just completely disappear. You'll turn around and that's it. I see that in math. I like math so it wasn't so hard for me. So what I did when I learned math, I later realized that I had actually learned that from a course that I took as a kid, what I learned was I was usually, and this has become second nature for me, I was figuring out how could that be used? How could I use it? Or at least how could it be used generally, and then it was much more interesting. But for example, there was one part of math, I don't want to make everybody be weirded out about math, but there was a specific thing that, I really didn't know why we're learning this and honestly, the way it was taught, it wasn't taught anywhere. This is something that I have to admit, that is like if you want to learn something yourself or help your children, you can do a lot with this, very, very often, this is completely omitted. So yes, we tell children, "Okay, if you learn math, then you will notice when people give you enough, like if they give you enough money back," Or something, but for most of the things that they actually learn in math, they have absolutely no sense of, "Why are we doing this?" And that is sad because most of what you do learn in math, at least in school, I didn't study math at university, actually is valid and has purposes, and if we were teaching them, people will be much more interested. So same thing in German. You need to have your personal reason, but you also, for everything you learn, you need to be sure that you know, why are you learning this? Sometimes it's obvious, but sometimes it's not that obvious. Giving you one more example, people think a lot of people learning German are very desperate about articles and they think it's very, very hard to learn them. I mean, I admit, it's something that you have to do extra, compared to English, where you just have to learn what the word means and how you say it, and so on. However, it is not rocket science. It's not that hard. I mean, we only have three of them and there's actually a lot of things in the English language that are I think for example, much harder to learn the pronunciation correctly because German, once you have learned a few things and you read it, you can relatively easy figure out how to say it. English is much tougher in that respect, but still people are really not happy with those articles. What I've seen in some of my students is nobody tells them or they don't realize why they're learning them. I mean, other than the fact, that's the way it is. We have "der, die and das" and every object is one of them. But the point is you have to understand, you cannot even make a simple sentence like this or understand like, "I bought a new vase. It is beautiful." But let's say. That would be simple. "Ich habe eine neue Vase gekauft, sie ist sehr schön." Soo you're saying, "sie" "she", so basically you're saying, "I bought a new vase. She's very beautiful." So, now it could happen that the whole sentence is longer and you say "She's very beautiful" referring to that vase. If you don't know that "she" would be referring to the last thing, that is a "die" that is female, then you would be completely lost. And that could be considered weird. That's just one small example. That could be considered weird. Granted, I understand if you're coming from a language that doesn't do that, it is weird. However, unfortunately, that's the way this language works, and it is totally learnable. It's not that hard. But if you don't understand that, that isn't just something, to make people crazy, but that there is an actual reason to learn it because otherwise you will never be able to understand some things. I don't care so much if you make a few mistakes, but you need to be understood and this is something that can prevent understanding. So that's why you have to learn it, and only after you have figured it out and really understood it yourself, you can actually then start successfully learning it. Because if you try forcing yourself learning something that doesn't have value for you, that value that you determine, then you will not benefit from it. It doesn't matter. You will, you might be able to learn it for a test and then you will forget it and you will not be able to apply for it. Speaking of tests, that's actually something I left out on my, notes. I have notes here. I put the notes on my notepad here. That is actually something that I'm going to add here, and it is related to what I said before. If you are learning to pass a test, it will cause frustration. I mean, honestly, if you learn to pass a test and that's all you want and you're not interested in actually learning German, okay, fine. Then you can learn to pass the test and then pass the test, and then that's fine. I'm telling you, however, a lot of people can't even do that There is a lot of people that cannot just learn things verbatim and that's it. I don't actually think that that's a very big quality if you can, but even then you will be frustrated because you will just spend your time, waste your time, I have to say, because you still have to put in the time and you could just as well if you put in the time, do it properly and actually learn to apply it. So never just learn for a test, always learn so you can apply it. Everything else is going to be a waste of time, and you might look back and go, like, I've done this. I hear this all the time from students that are in school or adults that I'm teaching German or English, "I learned this for so and so many years in school and I don't know anything." There are other factors, but before we even go into them, like when I'm talking to a student and I start kind of like help them learn properly, before they don't stop learning exclusively for exams, we're not getting very far. Honestly, if I was designing a school, I would get rid of that kind of marks. Yes, we do have exams. If you take an English or a German class with me, you do have exams at the end, but we're certainly not learning for them. These are really designed in a way to actually test real application, first of all. But also they're really only there to verify and to give the final acknowledgement. So, we never learn on them. Good. So the next thing that is also something that could be easily overlooked and it is something even I sometimes overlooked with my students, —you have to have a schedule if you want to learn anything. If you want to do anything, you have to set aside a time when you're doing that. Ideally, I'm just telling you depends of course, how fast you want to progress, but if you want to progress relatively fast and you're still having a busy day and work full time and stuff like that, I would say ideally either you have a course or you take some time, two nights a week. The best course schedule I've seen as far as progress is concerned with my students were courses, where we did two nights a week. So if you do a self-paced course, for example, if you, get a my Get Talking program, this is a self-paced course, so that means you learn in your own speed. It is easier because you can determine what your schedule is and you can shift it. But still, even if you're doing a self-paced course, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of different approaches you can take. I do think that doing a course that is, a good course and factors in different things and factors in writing, reading, practicing, understanding, and all of these things well, like I did in mine, I think this is the thing that will get you the fastest progress, but we're not necessarily looking how is my course the best, but how do you not get discouraged. So if you don't set a schedule that is like enough for you to make progress, then you will get discouraged. If you take 10 minutes a week, you will get discouraged. I mean, yes, I think two nights a week plus some extra time for reading and doing homework, would be ideal. So that would be all together at least three nights a week. That is ideal and you make fast progress. However, if you are doing something like 15, 20 minutes every day and you stick with it, that can also still get you progress. But of course you have to adjust the schedule to what you want to achieve. So if you want to achieve fluency because you want to have another job or a better job, and you work in Austria, you should, have to factor in about a year of learning German minimum. And this is not a year of learning German once a week. This is a year of like really doing three hours a week. And this is not because German is such a big terrible language. This is just what it takes to learn a language. German is not the most difficult language of all. It's not the easiest language of all, but there's statistics. So if you are learning it, you might find it hard as anything. If you're practicing the piano or learn how to knit, there will be times when things are hard, yes, but looking at statistics, it's not the most difficult language in the world. Every language becomes super frustrating if you only put in 10 minutes. The other thing is anything that you could hit that will make you kind of stop, doing it is so much easier if you don't have structure. If you have at least a schedule, then this is some sort of accountability. So yes, that's another thing. You need to make a schedule and then we're getting started. Once you have, like your reason, and for every specific subject, the reason why it is there, and you have a schedule set, then can you get started on actual learning. And then the next thing is when you are a beginner, focus on words. There is a few things that you can do when you're a beginner, but definitely one of them is focus on individual words. Take a a list of for example, there's dictionaries, picture dictionaries. "My first thousand words in English or German" actually. Things like that. Start with nouns, start with words that you have in your, environment and only with them, and you can do that for a while. So that is the thing. If you don't do that, and if you don't get a basic vocabulary of a few hundred words, before going into super deep grammar, then you will be frustrated because, you're not going to be able to say anything, even if you know the structure. If you don't have any words, then it's not going to help. All right, so this is the end of part one. In the next episode, we're going to cover the most common pitfalls. We are going to cover the tips 6 to 10 and one bonus tip. So see you and/or hear you there. Bye-bye.