Hello! So in this episode, we're going to look at what actual practice in language-learning or German-learning looks like. I bet you what you've been taught is wrong because I have never seen a single student who came to me who wasn't taught the wrong way before, and that is very interesting. So if you have, followed me for a while, or maybe even visited a German-learning workshop, — by the way, if you're interested in it, there's a workshop that I'm holding. It's called "How to Actually Learn German," and you can find the next date at bettergerman.info/workshop. But anyway, what I say in there, and what I've said on the podcast as well, is 80% of learning German, or any language for that matter, or probably anything, is practice. Maybe you've heard people say that in order to be fluent in a language, you need about 3000 words. That's not meaning you're perfect, but you can have pretty much any everyday conversation with 3000 words. So now 3000 words, that's not too many, but 3000 words that you've heard once and that are sitting somewhere in your brain and where you go like, 'Hmm, I think I've heard that. Maybe it's this, or maybe it's that.' And 3000 words where you maybe only be able to produce like 300, are not going to get you there. So, the first course you're doing when you learn German with me, which is called "Get Talking German," I think there's about 500, 600 words in that course, and you need to practice those words. So how do we do that? So the whole subject of how are we practicing is probably not something that we can cover in this episode, but we can really look at how to practice a word or any given set of words. The first thing, it's actually very simple. When you learn in a course or when you go on a podcast here with me, you have a list of words usually. But very often in language-learning, maybe you're reading something and then there is a word and you don't know that word, and then you look it up. here is what you should be doing. So first you need to make sure that you know how to say it and what it means. In our lessons, that would be you repeat it after me and you repeat it a couple of times so you can say it, because if you learn a foreign language, this could be a thing depending on how far advanced you are. Let's take the word, "Buch" "das Buch" Maybe you have to say it a couple of times because this sound "ch" at the end is probably something that you're not familiar with. So, you say it a couple of times, you say, 'ah das Buch the book. Very good.' "das Buch" "das Buch" Okay. In a lesson, you probably can do that with your teacher. When you watch a video from me or you listen to a podcast, you just say it after me, and that is the first step. And you don't stop that first step until you can actually say it without it feeling very hard. This is probably a little longer than you think because most of my students, the first instinct is I tell them, 'Okay, repeat.' Then they say, 'das Buch.' And it's kind of like hard and it takes them a long time and they feel embarrassed about it. And they secretly hope, at least in the beginning, that I'm going to let them off the hook because I see that they're embarrassed and I'll move on. Well, maybe I would do that if I was just trying to do polite conversation with them. But when I'm to teach you something I want you to be able to use it, so I'm not letting you off the hook, and you shouldn't be letting yourself off the hook if you're doing it yourself. So you just keep saying it and I'll just say, 'Okay, good. Say it again and say it again and say it again.' In a group class I'll do it until I hear the group saying, and it sounds correct. Maybe not every single person is included. That's just what happens when you're in a group. When it's a one-on-one class, I'll look very specifically. When it's a video, I'll just try to guess how many repetitions it will take you, and also you have to be able to be the judge of it yourself. So when you're learning without me, just anything in any course, or maybe you're learning in a course and you can't do it in that course, you just write that word up, and then at home, what you do is you say, "das Buch" and you keep saying das Buch until you really feel it's very simple. Great! And now you think now you're done, no you're not. Now we start and then the next thing is you start using that word. When you are very, very, very beginner, you could even go around and maybe touch a couple of times, a book. You find books, By the way, maybe you're wondering why you say, "das Buch." That's just a thing in German. In German, we have to learn these articles. If you want to know more about them and you're still confused or unhappy with them, there is two episodes I want to refer you to. One is an episode that I have recorded at the beginning of the Better German podcast and it's called the "Introduction to Articles" and it is episode 5, so it is bettergerman.info/5. You can always find any of my episodes with going bettergerman.Info, then slash (/) and then the number of the episode. Then there is an episode coming up. It is episode 72. This episode is episode 64. So episode 72 is about articles and why do the nouns have genders? Why are nouns considered to be male or female? And is there a trick? Because I was asked actually, "Do Germans or German-speaking people know all of the articles?" So I'm going to cover that in there, but in the meantime, what I'm just going to say, they are there, they're not going anywhere. That's something that you have to get used to. They're an acquired taste, but on the other hand, it's not super hard. We all learn them. So the best thing is to clear up why they're there, and then to learn them with the nouns. And when you do the practice that I'm telling you, it is going to be easy or much easier than maybe it has been for you so far. Otherwise, don't get crazy about it. I mean, the world doesn't end if you make mistakes with the articles. So there has to be a healthy balance. So yes, do the, good things that I'm going to teach you, like practice them and so on, but also don't hit yourself too much. Okay, good! So we learn it. So when you learn a noun —that's part of practicing a noun in German— you just practice the article with it. Okay. So we now know what the word means, how to say it, and the article in this case. So are we done? No, we're not done because this will not guarantee that you able to use it. That you will really be recognizing it. I mean, "das Buch" is not such a difficult example, but I'm just using this as an example. It will not guarantee it that when you hear this word a few months later, that you actually know it, and, and that is probably the even more important thing is, it will not guarantee that when you want to say something about a book sometime later, that you actually remember it. So you have to use this word, and in the very, very, very beginning, if you're a complete beginner and you learn your first words, then the easiest thing is like, as I said, you go around, you can touch it, you can draw a picture, you can look at the picture and keep saying "das Buch," but another thing is I want you to make sentences. So the most usual way when you are already a little bit more advanced, a little bit, not an advanced student. You're not learning your very first words, you can say a few things. What you do is you make sentences with that word, and we're not worrying about the grammar correctness of the rest of the sentence really, but you're making sentences with that word. Keep them simple, they don't have to be complicated. So you'll say something like, hmm, and this is normal, that it is difficult. It will appear very hard in the beginning possibly. So if it's really a word that you don't know, you will say something like, "das Buch ist groß." That's, "the book is big" Or das Buch ist nicht schön And then you're going to be like, 'What else can I say about a stupid book?' You could say, "ich mag das Buch nicht." "I don't like the book." But what can you do when you don't know a word in German? Well, then you just say it in English for now, for the beginning, you could say, "das Buch is heavy." "das Buch ist very beautiful." And then I would for a noun in German also go like, 'Ah, okay, good. Now I've learned das Buch so what is the plural of that word? Ah, "die Bücher."' You looked that up in your dictionary. Okay, good. So let's make a sentence with "die Bücher" "die Bücher are heavy" And then another one in German comes to your mind "ich mag die Bücher." "I like the books." And then maybe, "I have 100 Bücher So you keep going and it can be 10 sentences or more that you need, and you may think, 'Yeah, but it's going to take me forever to do that.' Well, honestly, without the chit chat, it will usually never take you more than five minutes. Probably even less. Then if you have a whole Word List, on average, in my experience, if we teach a Word List in class, of 20, 25 words and we go through the pronunciation first and then we make sentences, we do that in pairs. I'm going to tell you how you can do it in pairs in a second. It takes about maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour to do the whole Word List. Then at home, my students write it, and maybe that takes another 15, 20 minutes. Yes, this could appear long, but I'm telling you, if you have 25 words and it takes you one hour, one and a half to really learn them. And then if you say, okay, good. When you learn the first 300 words, you can already say a few things. So then do the math. This will take you about 20 hours. Then after 20 hours, you could already start saying something and then multiply that. Say, okay, good. You're doing a thousand words and we're at less than a hundred hours. I'm telling you, if you did only that and if you'd not spend a hell of a lot of attention on grammar before that particularly, and then you'd start adding, maybe watching TV with subtitles, and maybe start reading, but only if you get simplified texts, not native German texts because that's way too much. You will be lost. You start reading simplified texts, and you look up at the words in there and you make sentences as we've just gone over, you will actually make fast progress. I'm telling you, if you do just this one thing, you could basically just do that at, and if you really did that, whatever you do, whatever course you do, then you will be so much faster. And that alone could be the determining factor on whether you make it or not. So you have to take the route that looks as if it is a long route and actually do that. Before, I'm going to tell you how to do this with a partner, I'm going to tell you a little bit more. So on average, I don't know how it is with language courses in other countries, in Austria, you're obliged to learn a foreign language. So you, when you learn a foreign language, usually, we have about 40 weeks of classes in a school year. Maybe in other countries there could be more. There's a lot of holidays in Austria, so we have about 40 weeks of classes and you have usually three hours. And then let's say you have at least another hour of homework. That's about 40 weeks with four hours, so that's about 160 hours. And then you learn your first foreign language, of course. We actually start in primary school, but let's skip primary school for now and let's say, you start about when you're 10 and then you have about 160 hours a year for that language. And you do this for eight years. That's about a thousand hours, and in a thousand hours you should be able to make considerable progress. And yet I have students coming to me that have learned eight hours of German at school, and they can't do anything. They can't say anything. So, what are you doing in those lessons? You're doing something else. You're learning vocabulary. Then you're trying to learn a vocabulary list of 50 words before some exam. If you're anything like I was when I was in school, you're sitting there and you're trying to force these words into your memory, like, 'I don't know how this is supposed to be,' And maybe you remember some of them, but then you immediately forget them again after the actual exam. And then there's a lot of exercises with fill in and it's more like a mathematical thing because you're trying to logically deduct which word would be going there and stuff like that. And you spend a lot of time with exercises like that and you are not actually using the word, and that is usually the result. That you can't actually use it in a real communication. So that is how I suggest to you to learn words. Then when you have a study partner, it's actually even better. In my classes, I always try, like if I have people for one-on-one training, then it's maybe not easy, but if I have people in group classes, I always try to have them work in pairs because it works so much better and it's more fun. So what you do, let's say you have a list of, 10, 20 words, but we're just going to go through the first few as examples. So the words on the list are "das Buch" "the book" "das Bild" "the picture" "die Vase" "the vase" And "der Tisch" "the table" Very basic words. You are working with your study partner, so you are telling the sentences to your partner. You can make it simpler, particularly if you have words that you can actually look at. So you go and say something about it "das Buch," "a book." You probably have a book on your table. Maybe you have one in your head or in your mind, then you take that. But if you have a book on your table, you could just say, " das Buch ist Rot. (The book is red)" Your study partner will listen. He will understand. He will say very good, or sehr gut. And if he doesn't understand what red is, because maybe it's the very first lesson, he's going like. 'Huh? What is that, ro- rot?' And then you will tell him 'red.' 'Ah, okay. Good.' 'Great! Make another sentence.' So you're going to say the next sentence, 'ich mag das Buch.' Maybe he's going to say like, 'Huh? Oh! 'I like the book.' Oh, okay. Good!' 'das Buch ist schwer.' Excellent! He understands that. So he goes like, 'very good!' And then you are going to be like, 'Hmm, it's fine.' And then he is going to tell you, well make some sentences with "Bücher" 'Oh yes, sure!' 'Die Bücher sind groß.' You're going to say, and he's going to say, 'Very good.' And you're going to say, 'I have two Bücher.' 'Excellent!' Then you're going to make another one, and you're going to say — because you stopped thinking so hard about it — 'Die Buch ist schwer' Then he's going to say, 'Huh, die Buch?' And then you're going to say, 'Oh no of course. das Buch ist schwer.' And he's going to just keep you make sentences until it appears you can say them easily. Then he is going to make sentences with, "das Buch." And he's going to make sentences with the next word as well, "das Bild," and you're going to listen for both of them and make sure that he keeps doing that and he doesn't stop after making one sentence. Then you're going to make sentences with das Bild and the next one. So that's how you do it with a partner, and that is quite a long episode about something that is so simple, but I'm telling you this one simple practice can make the difference between you making it in German with or without any German course or, with any German course that you already have or not. Also if you don't use this, even if you are coming to my German courses, which are probably easier to do than many others, you are not going to get the result that you really want to be fluent. Yes, I am teaching this to you when you come and I'm looking at how you're doing it, and I'm looking at how you're doing it with a partner, but I can't be there all of the time with you. So at the end of the day, it is you who uses it. So try it out. Let me know if you see any difference and I hope to see you in the next episode. If you found that this one is helpful, then absolutely let me know. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye!