Learning a new language is often considered a costly task and people spend tons of money on buying books, courses, taking daily German lessons or paying for audio tapes, video lessons and so forth. Now, there’s an alternative to all of this: free language lessons online.
Not all languages can be learnt online. It depends on what you’re trying to learn and what your mother tongue is or what other languages you’re already familiar with. For example, learning Chinese online won’t be as easy as learning German through the same methods. Chinese requires more careful assimilation of grammar rules, vocabulary and learning steps whereas German can be learn more “freely” (and I’m not talking just about the financial costs). If you’re reading this, you’re either at least moderately familiar with English, or English is your mother tongue and this is a good starting point to learn German online, since there are a lot of connections that can be made between the two languages.
With German becoming an increasingly important language on the international stage, more and more people leave their course books behind and seek out websites that can offer free language lessons online. They’re faster, more convenient, you can go through them from the comfort of your own home and most importantly, they are much easier to assimilate, since an online lesson, unlike a course book for example, can combine visual and audio elements to make your learning process faster. In the past, this was not possible as websites were pretty blunt back then, they were just “clones” of course books with text, text and more text.
With the increased interactivity offered by many language learning sites out there, you can take online quizzes, play language games on the Internet, or on some sites, take audio/video lessons like you would from an audio or video tape. Forget about wasting time going to your local store, buying the tape, buying a good stereo and a set of headphones – now you have all these bundled up for free on the Internet. Technology is a blast, isn’t it?
Many websites (such as Internet Polyglot for example) offer a wide variety of methods to learn German, ranging from standard basic-to-advanced lessons, to word memorization games, text-video quizzes (like the ones that have you attach a specific word to a specific image – sort of like an interactive flashcard game) and so forth. Using games to increase German vocabulary or strengthen your grammar rules is also a solid option. Although many consider these games “childish”, they’re actually quite important and efficient, since you’re learning while having fun and we all know that this is a major boost to assimilating new words naturally.
One good tip would be to try and find quizzes and games that don’t simply use words. Sure, you can easily memorize a few words each day, but they won’t be “printed” in your memory as strongly as if you would have something visual attached to them. Our brain holds visual images much longer in our memory than simple strings of characters and words, so it’s a good idea to associate a picture to each word. When learning German, it’s even easier to do this since German has a lot of cognates with English (words that look or sound alike in the two languages and that share a common meaning) so you can stamp the English word instead of a visual image to the new word.
However, watch out for false cognates as they can be quite misleading. False cognates are words that sound or look alike in both languages, but their meaning is completely different, so if you don’t learn to spot them, you could be using words in completely inappropriate contexts. Fortunately, the list of false cognates is not that high between English and German, but it’s still a good idea to learn these exceptions by hard.
I’ll leave it to you to find the right websites for learning German online, but know that you shouldn’t just settle for the first one you find. Try learning from two sources and go through several websites before settling in on these two. In most cases, this will offer you a more complete coverage of the German language.
Posts Tagged ‘English Is Your Mother Tongue’
How To Learn German The Easy Way
December 10th, 2009I’m so tired of people crying out that “learning German is so hard and so time consuming” you basically hear those guys and girls everywhere on the Internet and you have to wonder: what the heck are they doing wrong? German is one of the easiest languages to learn if you are already familiar with English and if you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you are at least moderately familiar with it, otherwise this is just a random string of characters to you and you don’t know what on Earth I’m talking about anyway.
The German and English languages have a lot in common, due to the fact that they share the same Anglo-Saxon language base. Grammar rules are almost the same, they have many look-alike words and although German may seem a bit “rougher”, with more focus on consonants, that barrier can be easily overcome after a few language lessons. If English is your mother tongue, ironically, it will be slightly harder to get a good grip on learning German, since all your grammar rules are natural and have never really been “learnt”, but rather acquired through practice. Someone that has learnt English as a second language, will find it a lot easier to learn German afterwards (or vice versa) since these basic rules have already been assimilated the hard way.
The trick to making the German language learning process easy is to keep everything simple and fun. Yes, those two ingredients, simple and fun, make a great language learning soup. Start out slow even if you’re an adult, start out with “children techniques”. Learn the basic words, numbers, colors, months, days and so forth and familiarize yourself with the writing style, pronunciation and try to find links between these words and their English counterparts (what does the “Montag” day of the week look similar to in English? Etc). The natural progression in any language learning process is to get the grip on some grammar rules after you’ve accustomed yourself with the language through the basic words. Like I said above, this will be easy for an English speaker.
Next up, work on increasing vocabulary in German. Use language games, flashcards, mnemonics and everything in between that can stick a word to a picture. The word-picture combination is a great way to memorize words as they will be absorbed faster by your brain, they’re fun and most importantly, your brain will hardly forget the picture, leaving you with a sidewalk to the word in case you forget it.
One last thing worth noting: this is a general tip but it applies great to learning German. Don’t forget to revise what you’ve learnt, otherwise you will just assimilate new stuff and forget a good part of what you learnt earlier. If possible, try to expand what you learned earlier and not go for a different subject (for example, if you just learn the basic words in the “vegetables” field, try working your way from there to the “kitchen” or “farming” fields so you’ll still use the words you assimilated earlier). Make sure you don’t over-revise either. It won’t hurt, but you will lose precious time for nothing and that time is better spent to improve vocabulary, focus on the grammar or working on pronunciation and spelling.
I’ve seen some disputes as to whether or not “natural language learning” is beneficial or not. It involves learning a language through direct contact with it, instead of taking it step by step. For example, watching a TV show in German, reading a book in German or simply hearing two people speak the language is considered natural learning. The advantage of natural learning is that you can easily grasp new words out of the context. If you understand 70% of what a person is saying, you’ll be able to decipher the other 30% and what those particular words mean by a natural deduction. This is a great way to add words to your vocabulary and if you can’t get a new word out of the context, or you’re not sure what it means, simply write it down and check the dictionary for it later.
The disadvantage of this method is related mostly to TV shows, audio tapes and so forth (less with books and magazines): sometimes the speakers will talk a German dialect or they’ll talk with an accent, making it very hard for you to learn anything constructive from them. That’s why you should always choose the shows or audio tapes that feature someone talking “clean” German as much as possible.
