*This article may contain affiliate links. For full information, please see the disclaimer here.
In some circles, German is notorious for being a rather unwieldy language, full of multi-layered grammar rules and irregular conjugations. There is a bit of truth to that – compared to its other Germanic siblings, German has retained a lot of complexities that English, for instance, has not.
But take it from someone who’s mastered the language, German can be incredibly rewarding and even fun to learn if you set your goals and expectations correctly!
With that in mind, I’ve created the following list of some simple things you can do to get closer to the goal of speaking German fluently. Let’s take a look!
1. Pick your dialect or regional variant
This is an incredibly important first step that many people who try to learn German skip, leading to confusion and misunderstandings later.
Simply put, the German language comes in many flavors. These differ enough in terms of vocab, grammar, and pronunciation that starting with one as a “base” will make your life much, much easier than just mixing them all and treating them as the same thing.
Let’s say you’re learning German because you’re planning to move to Germany at some point in your life.
A quick Google search tells you that Germany uses a standardized form of the language called Hochdeutsch (Standard High German). This is the German that almost everyone in the country learns at school, and it is by far the most widespread form of the language worldwide.
However, depending on your exact plans, it might not be the best for you! In the state of Bavaria, the majority of the population speaks a regional variation known as Bavarian German, which has its own pronunciation system and uses some different words and conjugations in everyday speech.
In Berlin, there is the classic Berlinerdeutsch – generally considered not more than an accent, it is nonetheless different enough from Hochdeutsch to warrant its own approach to gaining fluency.
And then there are the other two German-speaking countries, Switzerland and Austria, which have their own national and regional accents, dialects, and even Germanic minority languages that are not directly related to German at all!
In the end, this means you should set a clear goal for your German learning adventure. This will make it easier for you to settle on what variety of the language will suit you best, and thus avoid any potential pitfalls arising from that.
Also read: 10 Key Differences Between Swiss German and German
2. Hire native speakers
Especially if you’re going with a dialect or regional variety that is not so widely spoken compared to standard Hochdeutsch, you might quickly find yourself at a loss about where to find the proper resources to even learn your chosen form of German.
In my experience, nothing can replace the wisdom and learning progress you can gain by working one-on-one with native-speaking German tutors.
This doesn’t just give you real immersion into the spoken form of the language which you (probably) cannot get where you live. It also allows you to really practice and learn from your mistakes even in non-standard registers, while picking up real local and regional quirks and learning to talk like a native!
My favorites for practicing and studying German – any kind of German – in this manner are Preply and Italki. Both German learning resources are full of native teachers who can cater to any budget, are reliable, and are fun to study with!
3. Get your grammatical genders in order
There are a few features of German that non-native speakers often struggle with, which can lead to stunted growth during the learning process. We’re going to look at more of those further down below in this guide, but for now, let’s talk about genders.
Grammatical genders, that is. German is not unique by any stretch in including this feature – almost all of the most widely-spoken languages in the world are gender-sensitive to some degree.
Still, German does take it up a notch compared to many others.
Not only is there a masculine and feminine gender, but there’s a third, too – neuter, which is neither-nor. All three have their own sets of pronouns, which change depending on the grammatical case as well.
And then various suffixes can be attached to nouns, adjectives, and verbs depending on the gender, too!
As a result, German can quickly feel overwhelming, especially to a native speaker of English, a relatively (though not absolutely) genderless language. But don’t fret! As long as you set some time aside specifically for practicing this feature of German, it is very possible to get a good grip on it and master it with time. Start by simply practicing the genders of common nouns using flashcards.
Once you have a good working understanding of those, you can move on to practicing conjugations and noting down the differences between how feminine, neutral, and masculine words change forms depending on the case or tense.
Just remember to take it slow and easy – overwhelming yourself with too much at once will not do anything for your progress!
Also read: 12 Best German Grammar Books for Beginners and Beyond
4. Try German podcasts
A common language-learning problem is one I had to battle with for a long time, both when learning German and some other languages.
While you may already have developed a high level of reading comprehension, and you might even be able to speak on your own and hold a basic conversation, it’s very easy to get stuck when you just can’t for the life of you understand native speakers when they talk to you.
While knowing a phrase like Könnten Sie das etwas langsamer wiederholen, bitte? can be helpful for sure, your bigger goal should be to train your ears and your brain to recognize spoken German intuitively without having to regurgitate every word inside your head.
In my experience, no one thing (apart perhaps from practice with native speakers) has helped me more than German-language podcasts.
Because of the nature of podcasts, they tend to be presented by speakers who have undergone vocal training and enunciate in a very clear, easy-to-understand manner. There are also plenty of German podcasts out there which specifically cater to learners, using more basic grammar and vocabulary.
5. Set easy-to-reach goals
Learning a language, and especially one as rich and intricate as German, is a monumental project. It takes time, dedication, and lots and lots of effort, to name a few.
Because of that, it’s incredibly important to set some clear goals and communicate to yourself what you are planning to get out of this adventure, and how soon.
Viral videos and influencers might want you to believe that you, too, can attain complete fluency in under a month, but in most cases, such stories are a mix of pure fiction and exaggerated truth.
Instead of chasing such overblown fantasies which can only lead to disappointment and waste of energy, concentrate on setting realistic, achievable, and honest goals.
Especially if there’s a piece of your German-learning journey that you are struggling with at the moment, try incorporating it into your goals instead of pressuring yourself to overcome it as quickly as possible.
In other words, aim for practicing your accusative before you jump right into mastering all of the tenses at once (German sure has a lot of those!).
Instead of reducing the whole fun and beauty of learning a language to a mere race towards fluency, this helps to promote a holistic approach where every single step is worth it.
6. Practice communicating in German around the clock
Even if you don’t have any native speaker friends to converse with and aren’t living in an area where German is widely used, you can still manage to incorporate some speaking practice into your daily routine.
One of the easiest and most intuitive ways I like to do so is to just practice some vocab by counting and listing off things around you in German, preferably out loud. Don’t worry, nobody’s judging!
Another method is to actually write down monologues and recite them to yourself. You can use a mirror to have the illusion of an audience and pay attention to your pronunciation more easily.
7. Consider using an app to practice
This method has become so widespread nowadays that recommending it to others sometimes does feel like pointing out the obvious, but what works works, right?
In any case, using apps to help you with your language journey can be a really rewarding (not to mention fun) addition to your strategy and can really help you leapfrog over some potential roadblocks!
A language-learning app can serve many purposes. It can help you train and retain vocab, practice spelling rules, or learn entirely new grammatical concepts! This is especially useful if you’re a bit of a methodical learner like me and the sometimes rather intuitive explanations given by native speakers don’t always click so easily.
The best apps to learn German include longtime fan favorites like Duolingo and Pimsleur, which are backed by years and years of fine-tuning and research-based innovation. Fun apps like Lingopie can also help you learn new German words and boost your listening and speaking skills through German shows and movies.
There are a few more modern alternatives that also offer a holistic program dedicated to teaching you all the nitty gritty features of German. I personally prefer Babbel and Mondly – they’re fun, easy to understand, and offer an alternative to both the gamified, hyper-casualized Duolingo approach as well as the somewhat dusty, classroom-like feel of Pimsleur and similar programs.
8. Practice all your cases
Everyone has their personal pet peeves with any language – the feature(s) that sticks out as the trickiest to figure out at the beginning and the hardest to master in the long run.
For many German learners, that’s the case system. From a purely theoretical point of view, German cases may have got nothing on Slavic languages like Polish, let alone Hungarian with its whopping 17 cases (German has four, by comparison).
But for learners of German coming from languages that have one, two, maybe even no cases at all, juggling those four alone can still be quite a hurdle.
It’s one of those things that requires you to re-wire your brain in a certain way and think from entirely new angles. Because this is difficult to the point of remaining frustrating even well into your German-learning adventure, many learners decide to do what plenty of German native speakers have already been doing: skimp on their cases.
For example, if you don’t feel like using the tricky genitive case to indicate possession, as in der Sohn des Mannes, then you can pretty much cheat your way into a sentence that “still works” by saying der Sohn vom Mann, or even dem Mann sein Sohn.
Essentially, this is the same thing as using “of” instead of the apostrophe-s at the end of a word in English. But while the two are more or less equivalent for us English speakers, in German you’re not exactly supposed to swap out one case for another.
In the long run, you’ll come across problems if you haven’t holistically been practicing all of your cases. You’ll struggle to say or understand certain phrases, and others will simply come out clunky. In colloquial speech, this might be just fine, but if you want to really enjoy original German literature, film, or theater, for example, there’s no way around mastering the cases.
9. Exercise your pronunciation
Depending on what mother tongue you’re coming from, this might be yet another huge source of frustration for you when learning German.
The pronunciation system of the language is… quite something. Only similar to close relatives such as Dutch or Danish, German can force you to contort your vocal cords and perform acrobatics with your tongue if you’ve never tapped into the sound-making tricks that it requires.
From the surprisingly throaty ch to the famous umlauts, plenty of German sounds can come off as quite foreign, strange, and difficult to learners. Don’t worry – this is normal! You can’t expect yourself to absolutely master a completely new pronunciation system right off the bat.
What you shouldn’t do, however, is to fall prey to a mistake that many make without realizing it, which is to avoid “difficult” words or phrases and hesitate to pronounce them.
In the end, this will only bring you more frustration as you eventually run out of “beginner-friendly” words, and sooner or later you’ll need to practice those tricky sounds no matter what.
So, instead of avoiding them, face your weak links head-on and practice them thoroughly. Get a native speaker to help you and expose yourself to lots and lots of spoken German every day to really let it sink into your brain. You can also sign up for courses that focus on German pronunciation on Skillshare.
And most importantly, don’t despair! Like all good things, mastering German pronunciation takes time.
10. Multiply your vocab using compounds
There’s a point early on when learning a new language that can often be seriously frustrating, to the point where many quit here before they ever get ahead.
I’m talking about this annoying in-between – the point where you’ve amassed enough of a vocabulary to maybe understand fragments of conversations and can read at a basic level, but where you’re still just short of being able to really converse with someone in German.
Everyone faces this, and it’s not your fault whatsoever. Normally, I’d say that there is no quick and easy solution to this problem and that all that’s necessary is to bite the bullet, practice more vocab, and eventually break the barrier.
However, German has a unique trick up its sleeve that might actually help you get ahead more quickly!
That trick lies in its use of compounds. You might already know about this, but German uses compounds in the same way English uses the “th” – there’s hardly a sentence without one.
You can use these compounds to learn more than one word at once, thus accelerating your learning progress!
For instance, if you know that the word schreiben means to write, look at the word Schreibtisch. The second half of this compound, Tisch, means table, and the compound together means desk.
Knowing that, you can not only learn multiple words at once, but you can use any of these three to remind yourself mentally of the meaning of the other two since they’re all connected. Neat, huh?
11. Embrace the exceptions
It’s every language novice’s nightmare. You spent hours upon hours mastering a certain rule. You go over to your native speaker friend to show off. Everything seems to go well, until they raise their hand and calmly point out: “Oh, no – that rule doesn’t apply here.”
This agonizing moment is only one of many, especially with a language as complex and rule-obsessed as German. For every rule — any rule — there are bound to be exceptions.
Often, there are lots of them.
Instead of getting frustrated every time you come across one, try to distance yourself from strict adherence to grammar rules and flow with the exceptions whenever they come up.
In the end, even a really methodical and logical language like German is a matter of intuition and “feeling it” to really master the way it’s spoken, written, sung, and thought.
So, if you catch yourself obsessing about the fine details too much, take a step back and remind yourself that that’s not always necessary!
12. Don’t forget to have fun
Most of us know that proper language learning requires lots of practice and dedication. Still, it can be a huge challenge for some people to design a language-learning regimen and stick to it. In my experience, this often leads to boredom.
Yes, boredom!
It’s safe to admit it: sometimes, learning a language can be boring, and who likes doing boring things? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions to that – some, I’ve already talked about above – and they all revolve around making your routine more fun!
For example, if you don’t enjoy rotely rehearsing and revising vocab using flashcards, consider an alternative method that’s more interactive and exciting.
Earlier, we talked about using podcasts, but you just as well could try watching German movies or TV shows, especially ones made for a younger audience.
No matter where you’re getting stuck or demotivated, there is an alternative out there that will be more stimulating for your brain, and ultimately more effective. Look around, find something that suits you, and most importantly, stick to it!
Final thoughts
Learning how to speak German fluently is no easy feat. But who ever said learning a second or third language is easy? Although the language has its unique challenges, the above tips can help you improve your spoken German and hopefully, make the learning journey more enjoyable.