How (and Why) I Learned German to Fluency

Though I’ve learned many languages throughout my life, I will always have a special place in my heart for the first language I ever tried to learn on my own: 

German!

That being said, it wasn’t my first foreign language experience. I studied both English and French in high school long before I ever settled it in my mind to try learning a language independently. 

But when I did make that decision, German was my first and most obvious choice.

The attraction that I felt to the German language came mainly from my home life; my parents had a friend who spoke a bunch of languages, and whenever we were invited to dinner at this friend’s house, I heard a lot of stories about him and my father learning and speaking German.

I found it absolutely fascinating!

Getting Started with German

So, once I decided to learn German on my own, I had some choices to make—first and foremost, how would I learn?

I turned to the only German resource I had ever actually seen with my own eyes—a weathered, old grammar textbook that was gathering dust on one of my grandmother’s bookshelves. When my grandmother said I could indeed borrow the book, I was overjoyed! 

However, that joy didn’t last very long; while that grammar book did give me some access to the German language, using it was not easy or enjoyable. In fact, learning with the book often felt like a punishment I was inflicting on myself. 

How was it like a punishment, you ask?

The book was so old the print was in gothic letters. There were no dialogues, audio, or even images—just endless grammar explanations and exercises. 

With that book, I had stumbled upon a way to learn that was even more frustrating than learning a language in school!

The Difference a Good Resource Can Make

After I found “Il Tedesco per Te” and developed my Bidirectional Translation method, my German progress went through the roof. 

Despite all that, though, I ended up learning German for almost two whole years before I had the chance to use the language with actual people for the first time.

It was at a summer camp in Sardinia. Despite being in Italy, the camp was full of lots of German camp-goers—and I mean A LOT.

Inevitably, I found an opportunity to speak German with these people. And though I was initially nervous about my abilities, the reaction I received was incredible!

Whenever I spoke to a new person in German, they were always so surprised and thrilled! “Wie kannst du so gut Deutsch?” - “why can you speak German so well” - they kept asking me. Apparently it was unusual for an Italian kid my age to be so enthusiastic about learning and practicing German outside of a school setting.

Of course, all of their surprised reactions motivated me to practice even more and work even harder with the aim of surprising even more people.

Thanks to all that, my German really started to flourish, and I rose to a comfortable level quite quickly.

The icing on the cake came later that summer when I met and fell in love with a German girl. If you think having conversations in a foreign language is a challenge, imagine what it’s like to exchange long, detailed love letters in one!

The Difficulties of Learning German

You may be reading all this and thinking that learning German was something that came easily and naturally to me.

While I’ve had plenty of successes along the way, there have been difficulties as well.

First of all, German is grammatically quite different from Italian. 

For example, German has a grammatical feature called “cases” which cause certain words to change form depending on the role they play in the sentence. 

For example:

Der Mann ist groß - The man is big. 

Ich sehe einen großen Mann - I see a big man. 

I won’t go into too much detail here, but the words in bold here (definite and indefinite articles, respectively) communicate two things: the grammatical gender of the following noun, and the case (or role) that that noun takes in that sentence. And even the adjective (“groß” in the first example, “großen” in the second) has to change to accommodate the case as well. 

Italian grammar, by contrast, doesn’t have cases, so learning to accurately create sentences like the ones above did occasionally cause me a bit of a headache. 

Pronunciation, on the other hand, was a bit easier. German, like Italian, is mostly pronounced how it is written, so once I learned how the German sounds matched to the German/Latin letters, I didn’t have too much trouble—though I remember struggling occasionally with the “glottal stop” that occurs between German words.

Speaking of German words, one of most interesting things about them (from my perspective) was that they could be SO long. 

German is quite fond of what are called “compound words”, which are words formed by putting two or more existing words together in a row. My native Italian does occasionally use compound words, but not anywhere near as often as they are used in German. 

Beyond tricky grammar and the occasional indecipherable compound word, I’d say that the most difficult part of the German language has to be its syntax.

In German, the word order can change in ways that seem quite strange, even to speakers of other European languages.

For example, in German, you don’t say:

“I think that Berlin is a cool city”

X “Ich denke, dass Berlin ist eine geile Stadt”.

While most languages would have the verb “to be” (“ist” in this case) between “Berlin” and “a cool city”, German actually requires the verb to go all the way at the end. This means that the correct form of the sentence is:

“Ich denke, dass Berlin eine geile Stadt ist.”

Perhaps even more confusingly, this “verb at the end” word order isn’t required in every sentence. Instead, it is used for more complex sentences and in a number of special occasions. 

If you’re unfamiliar with German, all of the above difficulties may seem intimidating. 

But here’s the thing: any language has its quirks and idiosyncrasies. If you have a passion for the German language and you’re learning it with a method that works well for you, all of these challenges eventually become irrelevant. If you learn every day, with focus and passion, these difficulties will not stop you, just as I did not let them stop me. 

Learning to Live Through German