Learning a foreign language can be really frustrating and time consuming. But there are many ways to make it more tolerable, enjoyable and easier. Here I shared the methods that helped me a lot to learn German from the beginning to a Goethe C1 certificate in about 2,5 years.

From Itchy feet comic

1- Free Language Apps

In the beginning of any language learning journey, it is hard to find a fun way to support it, but some apps help to fill this gap. They are easy to use when you wait in the line, or when you use the public transportation. That makes it feel like the time goes faster and you’ll learn something small everyday. For that I mostly used Memrise, because it is possible to download courses and use it offline. The “Memes” they use actually make it fun to remember things faster. There is also Duolingo which is very fun to use.

2- Beginner Level Books

After learning the basics for a while, either with a course or with online apps, it is mostly possible to understand beginner level story books. It can also be a children’s book. It helps to learn vocabulary by connecting the words with their usage and subcounsciously preparing the mind for the language structure. Surely it can be a bit frustrating at first, always looking up the words on the dictionary but it is a great exercise to guess what that word can mean and think about it for a while before looking it up.

Beware of false friends though.

3- Youtube Videos

There is a particularly awesome youtube channel that I want to recommend, and it is called Easy German. They go around in Germany, interviewing people on the streets about common subjects, and the best part is that every dialog has both English and German subtitles. They even have a special playlist called Super Easy German, where they speak slower and talk about beginner level subjects.

A snapshot from one of Easy German’s videos

4- Movies/Series

It is mostly possible to find dubbed versions of the series or the movies you like to watch. The best website for that I know is Kinox.com. Subtitles are not easy to find, but I found a solution: Subtitleviewer. It is a free app that can be used from your phone and basically you just search the movie/series you want to watch and it brings out the subtitle for you. So when you find something to watch in German, but don’t have any subtitles, this app provides a subtitle that will play at the same rate as the show, enabling you to follow the dialoges.

But there are people defending that watching anything with subtitles is not helping with learning the language (such as this video from What I’ve Learned). So try to understand it before looking at the subtitle or use German subtitles at least.

5- Finding a Language Partner

In order to practice speaking with natives, it is possible to find apps that provide it for free. There is Hellotalk where it is possible to exchange languages with native people that want to learn your mother tongue. Also there is Lingbe where you can call native people to chat in their language. There is also Italki with mostly paid functions but it is free to reach their community to ask questions, find friends or get text corrections.

6- Games

Another fun way to learn is by playing a game. Realizing how playing games helped me with learning English, I decided to try that for German as well. The Sims series are a great way to connect words with actions or objects by directly experiencing it. I also suggest playing RPG games such as Witcher series, because they have matching subtitles with their dialoges (which many subtitles to dubbed movies don’t) and it helps a lot for listening abilities too.

If you like, you can also watch someone else play games for you, and there is a German youtube channel for that : Gronkh.

7- Radio/Podcasts

Making dead time valuable is my favourite. You know those times where you use public transportation and that time goes to waste? I hate that and try to take advantage of it as much as possible. Here comes the listening practices on the stage. Gradually increasing in difficulty, there are many options to listen on the road.

-First, there are radioplay (or in german : hörspiel) versions of many children movies such as Shrek or Madagascar on youtube, and it is possible to download them using online youtube to mp3 converting tools, so that you can listen to it on the go. Of course it is hard to understand anything at first, but the goal is to make your mind get used to hearing that language. After all, everything is hard, before it is easy. In time, it will be much easier to pick up the words and understand. That’s why it is better to begin with something you’ve already watched.

-Then comes the option of many audiobooks available free from Spotify. It is hard to browse the existing books but there is an app for that called Spooks, which makes it easier to find the books that you would be interested to listen.

-After some level you can also listen to the news from a radio, for that I recommend the app of DLF24 which also has the transcipt of the news. A slower version is possible to listen from DW website.

-There are also many podcasts on Spotify, which usually don’t have a transcipt but useful to expand the vocabulary after a while. The best thing is any podcast can be slowed down to understand it better.

8- News

There are many news websites in German which help to learn especially advanced vocabulary. I like to use Spiegel Online in the app form and when I don’t know a word, there is the floating translation option of Google Translate, which helps a lot to instantly understand what the story is about.

Tap to translate function of Google Translate App.

Did you know that Google Translate can also recognize the words from the phone camera and instantly translate it? It is not the exact translation most of the time but when you don’t want to type something you see, it becomes handy.

Instant translate function of Google Translate app.

Conclusion

Merging free time activities with their German alternatives allows you to immerse yourself in the language and help you learn quickly.

Do you have any other fun tricks that I didn’t mention? Write it on the comments and help others learn quicker!