Learning German

07.05.25

I have been learning German for one month now, so I'm making this post as an overview of my experience so far.

Why German

Deutsch is a West Germanic language like English, but it is much more linguistically conservative. It has a four case system, grammatical gender, and many conjugations. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute considers German as more difficult than French and Spanish, the more widely learned languages. So why choose to learn German?

German is an important language in philosophy, and I want to do the whole Kant to Hegel run. There are of course translations available, but Fichte's later works remain untranslated. It is more academic to read philosophy in its original language. I want to return to the days of multilingual scholarship. In the past, it was common to learn Greek and Latin to understand philosophy. I will do myself and philosophy a service by learning German.

Learning a language is time intensive, and I have a lot of free time. Therefore, it's right that I should spend my time learning new skills and completing my quests.

Finding The Method

Initially, I downloaded a few textbooks, and I planned to learn by the book while immersing in German content without understanding most of it. I looked up words and phrases that I heard often. The problem is that it's difficult to visualize progress with this approach. Trust in the process is important because it keeps me motivated to continue my routine.

While I was trying my initial approach, I came across a method called AJATT, All Japanese All The Time. AJATT is about intense immersion learning and using a spaced repetition system to pick up vocabulary. What is this intense immersion you may ask? Watching anime, reading manga, and browsing in Japanese. It's really that simple. This idea spoke to me because I was thinking something similar already. While I don't plan on learning Japanese, the method is still applicable to German.

AJATT is interesting to me because it's a solitary activity. The solution it presents contrasts with finding a language partner or going to a language school or even moving to another country. It's something you can do alone in your room, and you can easily start today.

AJATT was founded by a blogger named Khatzumoto who learned Cantonese and Japanese using his method. His blog ajatt.com is no longer available, but I have an archive linked below. His just-do-it attitude toward language learning is something I share with him, and he shows a strong personality in his blog that makes it fun to read. After I began learning German, I watched an interview starring him that introduced me to Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis.

I will not give a full overview of Krashen's ideas, but the idea important to me is that second language acquisition comes from being exposed to enough comprehensible input. This is an unconscious process, and it leads to sponatenous speech. In contrast, language learning is the conscious process of learning the rules of a language such as direct grammar teaching.

Improvement comes from exposure to your target language. As long as the exposure is even slightly more advanced, then you will begin to acquire an intuition for the language. For example, few English speakers are consciously aware of proper adjective order, but they know red big balloon doesn't sound correct like big red balloon does. "Red big balloon" isn't strictly wrong, but English speakers never say it that way. It's something we picked up intuitively from mass exposure to the language.

AJATT is a method informed by Krashen's input hypothesis for second language acquisition. As Khatz would say, "You don't know a language, you live it. You don't learn a language, you get used to it." Following this line of thinking, I've committed myself to AGATT -- All German All The Time.

How I Learn

My approach is based on immersion and an SRS. I use Anki to build vocabulary, and I've been using it daily for the past two weeks. I use a deck based on the Goethe Institute A1 word list. I don't practice at any particular time. I do my Anki cards when I feel like it. At first, I was worried that I wasn't getting enough words that are used frequently, but my deck is small enough that they'll show up in due time.

I keep my method stress-free. It's no use to worry about the pace of my progress. I found a method that I can be consistent with, so I keep a positive mindset regarding my current skill level.

There are a few criteria for what I listen to: 1) it has to have good quality comprehensible input 2) it has to be fun to listen to 3) it has to be at least slightly more advanced than my current understanding. These are all based on Krashen's hypotheses. The last criterion is easy to fulfill at this point in my quest, so I'll go over the first two.

I prefer to watch German language videos with German subtitles. YouTube has been useful for this purpose. The automatically generated subtitles vary in quality, but YouTube is readily accessible and has a lot of webseries with German audio tracks (an excellent feature!) and quality subtitles. I've been watching a lot of shows by GLITCH such as Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus. It's an easy and fun way to get quality CI (comprehensible input).

Another way to get CI is to watch children's shows in German. I'm lucky that I enjoy My Little Pony because it's rich in dialogue and fully available on YouTube. Watching My Little Pony auf Deutsch was my first step into immersing, and I improved a lot by watching it. Another good show for immersing is Spongebob which is available in many languages on YouTube.

I enjoy watching a German Minecraft YouTuber named Bastian. He has a series called Craft Attack which is a survival multiplayer server for German-speaking YouTubers. It's fun to recognize words that I've learned from Anki sessions, and it's important that content is engaging even though I don't understand most of it.

My method is essentially hacking my habit loop by making my routines (browsing YouTube and Discord) into productive activities. I joined a few native German servers in order to read more conversational German, and it has been an excellent source of CI. Not all servers are good for learning German, however.

German learning servers are a bad influence in my opinion. It's not good to be exposed to bad input from German noobs, and it's not critical to be speaking and writing German so early. Spontaneous output comes from understanding CI, and there's no use in having people speak Duolingo German to you in the same tired exchanges of how-are-yous and hellos.

Why German: Revisited

Learning German each day is a positive experience for me. It's good to have long-term goals because it's easy to get bored and indulge in vices. German practice has transformed my habits into productive habits. Language learning is appealing to me for that reason. I can be lazy and scroll all day... but in my target language! And better yet, I can pat myself on the back for being productive.

That's why I embarked on my quest to become a polyglot. I want to speak multiple languages, yes, but I also want to enjoy learning new skills. I've made it a part of who I am because of this.

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