German

I am new to studying German, so this page is mostly dedicated to documenting my journey from being a complete beginner to hopefully a proficient speaker/writer.

Interest/Motivation

I want to learn some German to (1) experience what learning English might be like for billions of people around the globe, and (2) access mostly 19th-20th century German art, literature, music, science, philosophy, etc.

I get the impression that learning German is difficult in many of the same ways English is. For instance, there are lots of prepositions, confusing patterns with articles/determiners, contraction firms (e.g. beim from bei + dem), accents to memorize on words, a relatively complex phonology, and slang/vernacular usages that differ from standard users.

On the other hand, I expect German to be easy like English in that resources are plentiful, native speakers should not be difficult to find, there is an alphabetic script, and of course, there is lots of interesting stuff to consume in this language. German is a widely spoken "world language" useful for accessing the words of many people of the past few hundred years.

German also seems to be a popular language to know/study for European friends (probably after English and French, maybe before Italian—don't know the stats).

Finally, learning German will make looking at other related languages easier—e.g. Yiddish, the Nordic languages, German of early North American settlers.

Pages

As I learn German, I will be documenting my journey and providing free study resources.

• My German Learning Log—entries from time to time
• First Steps in German—my quickstart guide to getting usable German

Faustian learning methods are not recommended.