Rather than doing a blog, I'm going to smash my findings altogether here. This section is ordered chronologically, oldest to newest, so it can be read from top to bottom. I reserve the right to re-write history, like other top-down planners. Ha!
I approach German knowing many tips and tricks from studying other languages. These are explored in more detail on my page on language learning.
I would like to be able to study both online and offline.
Grammar books are useful for getting a basic grasp of what there is in the grammar. I'm approaching this kind of like seeing what syntactic things are available in a programming language. A phrase book offers pre-cooked recipes to get through most basic communication needs. These are also good for building up a basic vocabulary.
Davis, CA — I'm glad I got ahold of paper resources because many online resources are lacking in things like stress/accent placement. Additionally, for learning resources, it is nice to have printed tables and such.
Having studied other languages before German is nice because I can use nice resources like Naver's German-Korean dictionary (which also aggregates some English languages resources too).
I'm noticing some similarities to studying East Asian languages. In languages like Chinese, there are a lot of words made of combined parts (reflected as characters). German is kind of like this, except you don't have to remember thousands of characters. You just see letter sequences you recognize smashed together. I found that this is more so in German than in languages like Spanish, where lots of words seem to atomic (in the sense that they can't be broken down further in any way I see; linguistic fancy word is monomorphemic words).
The main content I am looking at is Wikipedia. I haven't done much audio at all, just enough to learn basic (intelligible) pronunciation and be able to dictate words I hear. I like to read Wikipedia.
After spending some time studying Russian, German feels quite easy/accessible. Compared with Russian,
Overall, I still find the German writing system to be pretty intuitive and easy to use.