The German Learning challenge: Lessons from the first two months

5 Dec 2021

This is the first update on my German language learning journey! I had hoped to do a one month update too, but at the time I felt like my learning progress was too in flux and I was on the cusp of some great realisations. They’ve come! And I can’t wait to share them with you in this post : )

Consistency

The first thing to report is that, I’m happy to say, I’ve hit my target of 10 new words per day, every day, since the start of the challenge. The only exception is a twelve-day period during which I was a supervising teacher on a school camp, and working pretty much 24 hours a day during that time hiking, canoeing, and mountain biking. (During this time I did keep up my Anki reps though!)

Stats

New words learnt: 640

Total days studied: 76

Average active study time per day: 51.5 minutes

What have I learnt?

Reflecting on your learning is one of the fundamental pillars of effective language learning. Read more about the importance of mechanisms an adaptation to language learning here.

What didn’t work

Making sentences from word lists

I started off by selecting new words to learn based upon frequency lists. This made sense, because it meant that I was learning the most common words first. But I quickly found that it wasn’t ideal for two main reasons

1. No context: learning words without contexts meant that it felt that what I was learning was essentially meaningless
2. Low motivation: It was not motivating to learn words from a list. I was motivated at the start, but this soon wore off.
3. Slow: Making sentences for new words was very hard for me, and took a significant amount of time, and more checking too.
4. Cognitively demanding: I found it super tiring to try to think up sentences for each word. It wore me out very quickly.
5. No exposure to reading or listening: I was spending the vast majority of my sentence-creation study time just sitting there thinking, ‘How would I want to use this word?’, or searching through online dictionaries for good example sentences. This left very little time (none actually) for reading, watching, or listening in German, which meant that my other vocab wasn’t getting incidentally reinforced either.

Making new cards for forgotten words

Another thing I started off doing, because one language learning guru had recommended it, was making new cards for words that I’d forgotten.

For example, I found that I got the following flashcard incorrect:

So I made the following flashcard the next day:

This kind of seemed to work for a while, but then I ended up running into big problems. Firstly, my number of cards really started to expand exponentially. Secondly, I found I was just forgetting two cards rather than one!

When I reflected on this, I realised that the solution was not to make more resources to study with, it was to focus more on quality encoding of the words and sentences that I’d already decided to try to master. This leads me to a summary of what has gone really well!

Note: The two images above show the format of all the flashcards I’ve been making since the start of this challenge. They’re based upon advice from Bartosz Czekala.

What has worked?

Mining sentences from context

I have found it super motivating, and super engaging and efficient, to mine sentences from good resources. Here are some examples of the sentences I’ve mined, and the resources I’ve drawn on:

This has been much better than creating my own sentences for several reasons:

1. It’s faster
2. I reinforce my previously learnt vocabulary as I go
3. It’s just super engaging! By finding fun content about things that I want to learn about, I’m more motivated to find new and exciting sentences each day (though it’s still a massive grind at times, especially doing my reps in Anki, I’ll write more about this in future!)
4. I end up with native-sounding sentences, and lots of cool colloquialisms, rather than just bland, foreigner-created sentences.

Making this change, which I did at around day

Gaining insight into, and developing a new method for, vocabulary and sentence encoding

An important life lesson is that, whenever you push yourself into new realms of challenge, opportunities for learning are compounded! This is exactly the reason I set out on this language learning journey for, to gain deeper insights into effective learning, and I’m so excited to feel like this is already happening after just over two months.

My key insight into vocab learning so far is that there are three important things that I can do to effectively encode a new word: Attach an Anchor, Rehearse the Rhythm, Envision an Endpoint I’ve written about it in more detail here: How to master any new word – The A.R.E method.

Next steps

There’s still so much for me to work out!

Something I’ve been playing around with, but I’m not 100% sure of the benefits of yet, is reinforcing words and phrases after a correct retrieval. Presently, when I get a card right, I’ll often rehears the rhythm and envision the endpoint a few extra times before moving onto the next flashcard to really burn it into my mind! This seems to work, but it may also be a bit of a waste of time. I’m not sure yet.

The other really big elephant in the room for me is grammar. I haven’t done much these past two months to start making big progress, so that’s something I need to turn my mind to in more detail in the near future.

Read my month 3 reflection here, or view all related posts from my journey at the start of this post.