Welcome! In this episode, we're going to look why it happens that people study German for many years without success. So this is interesting for you if it happened to you. If you are one of these people and you have studied German, and you tried, but it is also interesting for you if you are about to start to learn German and if that is something that you plan, so you can maybe avoid some of the mistakes or some of the things that happen to people when they happen. Okay, so let's get some clarity, what I'm even talking about. This is not something I'm making up just because I want to, shock you or something. It's actually one of the reasons, probably the main reason, why I have started to teach German. So people came to me, telling me that they had worked on learning German, but they weren't successful. So I had a friend and she's a very smart girl. Her name is Diana, I'm sorry, of course she's a woman and I don't know exactly, I think she had been in Austria for two years at that time, and she really worked on her German. She had learned with different people, even teachers, and she just didn't really make any success, she just didn't really make any progress, and she told me about it. That was just a time, when I had already given up on teaching German myself, frankly. Then at that time I started to work with a new program with new materials and I saw these new materials and they gave me a new angle and I used those, I used what I had learned with her and suddenly she learned German very fast. And then I thought, "Hmm, I think I'm onto something here." Okay, so let me summarize what's happening here. It doesn't really matter if they learn it in a particular country or if they learn it in Austria or if they learn it at school. Let me just summarize a few of the things that are happening here. One of the things in most schools and classes is that there isn't even any practice for speaking. There is like, what do you want to do when you come to Austria, for example, to work here or to live here? Or even if you travel to Austria, like in 95% of the cases, if you are learning German, you want to be able to speak German. Be honest. I mean, I personally, I'm a books freak. I really love books. I have started reading when I was seven, probably or eight. I don't know when exactly I started to read books, but once I started to read books, I never went back and I don't think that there is a week in my life I have spent since then with without reading books. So I really, I love them and most of the books that I read for pleasure are German books. There's a hell of a lot of good literature, and I read everything. I read serious books and I read books for fun, I read the romance and I really read almost everything. There is really a lot of German literature that is very worthwhile reading. Still, I dare you, I think most of the people that actually learn German are not learning German mainly because they want to read Goethe in original. So people want to speak German and, it's really not something that is actually taught. It is something that is expected to happen automatically at some point, but it is not something that is actually taught. And people read in class and they write a lot in class and maybe they even do listening stuff, but they barely talk. Another point that could be happening and is indeed happening a lot is that at the very beginning when you learn a language, the first thing should be you are learning a lot of new vocabulary. And by learn, I mean not just see words on a page, but learn how to say it, how to pronounce it, and how to use it. I've just recently had an experience with one of my students and she told me that nobody ever made her pronounce any of these words. She had been doing German classes for years and nobody actually ever made her pronounce words. That was a little bit of a surprise to me on one hand, but then on the other hand, maybe not, because that's another big reason, and another thing that happens a lot, that people are not actually made to even say things and they're not, learning vocabulary. These are probably even two different things. So the first thing, if you start learning a language, you need to build up some sort of a vocabulary. That's also what we did when we were kids. We learned words first because you can't do anything. So what is the thing that people learn in schools or in courses very much, and I think in Germany it's even worse, is they're focusing a lot on grammar. So what is grammar though? Grammar is the rules how you put together words so they make sense in communication. Try looking up that definition, but that's what it is. So you have rules, we have all of these words and how are we putting them together to make sentences that actually make sense. I cannot just throw together a bunch of words and expect that people will understand them. I cannot say "flower, red, pretty, vase." So what? "Put the red flower in the pretty vase." Or, "Put the pretty flower in the red ways." Or, "The red flower in the vase is pretty." What? These are different concepts that you could make with these words, and so to make them into an understandable thought, we have rules how we put them together and that is grammar. That's all it is, Now, let's go back to this definition; It is the rules how to put words together. Now, if you don't have any words, how can it be useful to learn rules on how to put the things that you don't have together? So what I'm trying to say, in order to learn grandma in a way that makes sense you need to have words, and I think before you haven't learned a few hundred words, I'm sure you will agree, there isn't much you can say because it's a few hundred words before you can even start saying something very intelligible. So you have to learn a few hundred words before you even bother about any grammar really. Yes, that's the second point. Then I already touched on it. In many courses, people are not made to say things. So, many courses work on the theory that you're sitting there, and you're sitting there and you're writing and you're listening, and then suddenly you start magically speaking. That's as if you were reading a cookbook and watching cooking series, and you were never anywhere close to a kitchen and you would never touch a knife, and then after you have done this for two or three years, you go into a kitchen and you cook perfectly. This is not going to happen, and it's not going to happen with German either or anything else for that matter. So that is one of the things, another point. And then another point is, we've kind of touched on it, but it's a general imbalance of theory and practice. This is, by the way, something that is again, not just happening with German or language at all. So, what do we do in a typical German class, people read a lot. They learn a lot of theory and rules and so on, and then there is no time left for practice. I've seen that. This is actually an example that I know from English. They know the rules. They know they can tell me, "Okay, go, went, gone, blah, blah, blah." But then when they make a sentence where it should be in there, they don't know how to use it. They know the theoretical rules. They can even pass an exam about the theoretical rules, but they don't know how to apply them, and that is also very much the case with learning German. and It is very simple to test if that is happening. If you are sitting there and you're reading and you're learning a theoretical rule and you're doing that for half an hour, then you should be practicing for two hours or probably it's better you do something theoretical for like 10 minutes and then be practicing this particular thing for like 45 minutes. And that kind of like concludes one hour of lesson. That's what it should be, but I'm telling you, it's not. In a good case, in a school, it's probably more like you're doing 40 minutes of theory and then 10 minutes of practical. I never thought of that. So the typical school lesson in Austria is 50 minutes. I don't know how it is in your country, but I think that's something that is happening in many places. So you should have like 20% theory and 80% practical. So you could actually say it's 10 minutes theory and 40 minutes practical. However, in our classes we do have homework and homework is in many, many cases something practical because of writing stuff. In a class with me, the written parts where you write things yourself are, done at home because you don't need me watching that, and, that is also part of practical. So I guess you could say you do 20 minutes of theory in a class, that would be ideal, 30 minutes of practical and then another half an hour at home. Something like that. That would be a good percentage, but what is happening, I remember it distinctly, you go through a word list, for example. You read it and you clarify the meanings, and that's it. And then you get a homework, learn it verbatim, which wouldn't be so bad if that would be an actual practical thing. So that brings me to another point that is happening. This is learning things verbatim. So learning things verbatim. I don't, say that you can't learn things verbatim and there is certain things that you have to learn verbatim, probably, but even the things that don't have, a, system or something like that, like the German "der, die and das" articles and so on, learning verbatim means usually to most people, you sit there and you repeat the thing, "der, der Stuhl. der Stuhl, der Stuhl, der Stuhl, der Stuhl" in your head and then you expect that you remember it and, honestly, if you were saying it again and again, and if you were reading a list of words aloud, that would probably be not entirely useless. However, the best way of learning words is actually using them so you can make sentences with them. When you learn a word like "der Tisch" in German, "the table," then you use that word. And if you can already, you can of course make simple German sentences and you can say, "Der Tisch ist groß," "The table is big" Or "Ich habe einen Tisch," "I have a table." But if you're at the very beginning, then you just use your own language for the rest of the word, and you say, "I need to clean up my Tisch now." "The Tisch is very beautiful. "I want another Tisch," and you do this a couple of more times until you are good with the word "Tisch" and you just practice the article with it and that will come automatically. So that is not enough practice. That is just one example. By the way, I am going more over this in the better German workshop. So if you are interested, for example, in doing a course with me, then the first step would be to attend the "How to Actually Learn German" workshop because in that workshop I go over a few of these things and I also go over practical parts. So if you're interested in that, you can always do that. You can come and you can go to bettergerman.info/workshop for the next appointment, the next date. Anyway, so that's another point. We don't have enough practice. Then there is another point, and we have touched on that, but I want to go back to it. I have already talked about too much grammar in the beginning, and I want to go back to that because it's not just that it's the wrong time, before you have any words to learn grammar, because in principle there is nothing wrong about learning grammar. As I said, if you don't have any words yet, it's not the right thing. But you do need grammar. I mean, you do need to know how to put these things together, but how is grammar taught usually? So, as I said, I really love grammar, and I do have grammar books at home, but in experience, have a look in them. They're written by linguists for linguists, so in most cases, even when somebody's ready to learn grammar, they make it hard because they're using very complicated ways of explaining these concepts. Let's put it that way. That makes it very hard. I don't want to, kind of like put you asleep or something like that, so I'm not going to tell you, too many things, but there is actually books that were quite good, and then if you suddenly throw five or six different concepts with long Latin words at someone's head and he doesn't know what they are, even in his own language, then he's not going to have a good time learning those. So that's another thing. And then one other thing, probably the last one that I'm going to cover in this episode that I see, that is more in schools, actually not just in schools, that the method that is used for examining people is not helpful. I just had a very good example yesterday, I read somewhere that "This is a good example that is used for, exams a lot because students usually get it wrong" and I'm like, "Huh?" So this, text said that it is very good to use this particular question because students often get it wrong. So I'm basically testing people to fail, and maybe some of you will say, "Finally, somebody says that!" Of course not everybody's the same. I definitely don't think that teachers are generally, trying to do that. However, what happens as a practice, just because it has been done like that for probably centuries, the way most exams are built are you ask people for questions, trying to find something that they will fail, and we're not mainly putting our focus on the application. Can they actually apply what they've learned? This is probably more in school than it is in other places, but in school, this is very, very, very bad. And then there is one last thing that I want to mention, just because I've seen it in Austria very much, and I'm sure it's the same way in Germany, people have to pass certain language tests for their visa to get a citizenship, to go to university, things like that. And they passed these exams, so there's these levels of German, or any language knowledge, A1, A2 for beginners, B1, B2 for intermediate, C1, C2 for very advanced, so A1 the simplest, and C2 the hardest, and people pass A1, A2, B1 and even B2 exams and they do not speak the language. They somehow get by, they learn things verbatim mainly, and then at the end of the day, they can't speak the language. I've had several students who've passed B1 or even B2 tests, and they were not able to even have a conversation, and the reason for that is I think that people are learning for exams mainly, and also that they don't know how to learn properly, and it's made very hard for them. So how can we summarize that and what can you do about it? First of all, if you want to learn German then try to get a course that keeps that in, that focuses in the beginning on vocabulary. That doesn't throw super long, complicated things at your head that you don't understand, particularly in the beginning, and that has a balance of theory and practice that makes you speak, that makes you say things. This is the type of course you should be looking for. Of course, my courses are courses like that, so if you are interested in that, then you can check those out. So, focus on vocabulary first. That's something you can do even if you learn by yourself. Focus on vocabulary, and if you just do that, you will come to a point where you can get by. Even if you do that and you learn and you can actually use 500 words and then start your first German course, even that will help you, and it will make things so much easier. But then of course, if you want to learn something, you have probably heard in this episode already, if you want to know what your actual German level is, not the tested level or something like that, then you can go to bettergerman.info/test and take a test. Even if you are a complete beginner, you can take that because there's also questions about like "why do you want to learn German, or what do you want to learn German for?" and things like that, and you can add things like, you're looking for this and that or this type of course, and the thing is, I'm going to look at this and I look at it personally, and I'm going to send you a written recommendation based on what I think that, you could be doing or you should be doing. This could be a course of mine, but I will always include also something that you can do without doing a course, but it could also be something completely different. If I don't have a course that will help you with your situation, then I will tell you. Okay, so I hope that this, episode is helping you. Please do let me know and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye!