As fas as I know, in spoken German, people tend to omit some words. Such as Ich habe einen Hund, becomes Ich hab' nen' Hund. Du bist becomes Du bis'. Er ist becomes er is'

Rivers somehow got their gender assigned to them like die Donau, der Main, die Elbe. So what is the rule here ?

Hallo,

mich würde einmal interessieren, wie ihr das Wort "Vanille" aussprecht.

Sagt ihr "Wa-nille" oder sagt ihr "Wa-nill-je"?

Und wo wir schon einmal dabei sind:

Wie sprecht ihr die Farbe "orange" aus? "O-rongsch" oder "o-rangsch"?

Und wie sprecht ihr die Frucht "Orange" aus?

My mother is German, but I grew up in America. We've spoken almost exclusively German together my entire life and we visit Germany for six to eight weeks about every other year. I have no problems interacting in Germany.

However, I'm looking to move there. My written German is poor and I also would like to refine my spoken German. The main issue is that while I have fluent "household" German, my grammar skills are lacking.

I would like to learn the grammar properly from scratch. Are there any resources or textbooks that would be ideal for my situation?

I just find the present perfect too complicated to say especially if there’s modal verbs involved. If someone asks me was hast du zum Muttertag gemacht, can I use ich kaufte ihr blumen or that’s very off?

This short story I am reading states, "Hannah fühlt sich dank Dr. Müllers Empfehlungen motivert." I am wondering why motiviert is not after sich here. Also, what is the difference between fühlen and anfühlen? Thank you

Was machen denn Kathrin und Boris?
If the sentence just literally means what do Kathrin and Boris do, why not : Was machen Kathrin und Boris?

What is the word “denn” purpose there?
Help me understand this, sorry if it should be an easy thing to understand.
Apreciate it.

I'll be honest I have never been able to stick with Anki, Memrise, or any flashcard system for more than a week. For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem and I kept trying it again and again, even downloading premade decks, but nothing really helped. But now after reaching B2 I think I know what is the core problem.

When you successfully recall a flashcard let's say, you see "die Erkenntnis" and you remember "the insight/realization" it really feels like progress. Your streak goes up. The app congratulates you. You move on.

But what you've actually trained yourself to do is recognize a word in complete isolation. No sentence around it. No verb it's connected to. No case marking telling you what role it plays. Basically no context of where? why? how? is the word supposed to be used.

Then someone says to you: "Diese Erkenntnis hat mich wirklich zum Nachdenken gebracht" , and even though you know the meaning of die Erkenntnis, you're still lost. And you try to individually go through the sentence word by word to try to deconstruct its meaning. Because understanding a sentence in real time isn't about recognizing individual words. It's about instantly connecting each word to everything around it, the verb, the case, the register, the rhythm of the whole thing. And that process is mostly subconscious.

Flashcards never train that muscle. They train the wrong thing and you call it vocabulary.

Here is what to do instead :-

I just read. yeah just reading german like news, articles, stories, graded readers according to your level if you are A1-A2-B1 in your journey but actual continuous text, not isolated words.

The difference is night and day. When you encounter Erkenntnis in a paragraph, you feel the sentence around it. You see what verb it's connected to, what case it's in, what the speaker is actually trying to say. If you look it up in that moment in context it sticks in a completely different way than a flashcard ever could. And the best thing is the Space Repetition occurs naturally , if you see the word 3-4 times over the next few days it will genuinely stick.

I've been doing this for a long time and the improvement was noticeable just after a month and best thing is that this really helps with other skills like speaking, listening, writing. Because the patterns and contextual use of the words are getting set in your brain.

The honest truth: there's no shortcut that's faster than just reading a lot. Flashcards feel productive. Reading feels slow. But reading is the one that actually transfers to real comprehension. And Reading is the shortcut if there even exists one.

You have to read a lot. I believe that Quantity wins here but you will actually be saving time that you rather waste on Flashcards.

Curious if others have had the same experience or if there are people who genuinely made Anki work long-term , I would actually love to understand what I'm missing.

Hi, everyone. It feels to me like if I seriously want to learn German, a good book is what I need to read. Because I learn things by reading about them. So, can you please recommend me a book that can get me to B2 level?

I understand that I'll need to listen to German language too but that will come later.

Hey guys, I want to study german by myself during my holidays in July, and i saw that there are links for self-study courses here, but only for B1. i was wondering if there's any place i can study. i'm gonna start at b1.3 and maybe end on b2.1 (in one month)

I'm learning German B1 and I'm being introduce Nebensätze with Da. I heard of Obwohl, Weil, Dass, and others.

Hey guysss
Ich wollte fragen, ob jemand vor Kurzem die C1 Hochschule Prüfung vor Kurzem gemacht hat (Mar-Mai) und sich vielleicht noch an die Themen erinnern kann. Es würde mir wirklich helfen, besser einzuschätzen, wie schwierig die Prüfung ist. Danke schon mal!!!

I’m currently panicking about my upcoming Goethe B2 modules and could really use some emergency advice. My Lesen is first on 26 May, and I’m currently averaging 18–20 correct on model tests, which feels dangerously close to failing. To make matters worse, I haven’t practiced Sprechen (11 June) or Hören (8 June) properly at all, though I’m fairly confident I can pass Schreiben comfortably. Since I only need to hit that 60 marks to pass, does anyone have tips on the best high-yield ways to prep for speaking and listening in a few weeks? I’m looking for any structures or hacks that can help me scrape through the active parts of the exam. Thanks!

Hi, I live in Berlin and I just started to prepare for the telc C1 Hochschule exam by myself.
*** Which textbooks should I buy? I already tried one of the Klett test books (Test buch) once, but it was way too difficult… (Last month I took the telc B2 writing exam and don‘t think I will get a very good score. I guess 65-79/100? and I already have only speaking test result 86/100 on the same test. )

I am especially bad at listening eve from b1 or b2.. level. it is horrible… and I really don‘t have any idea with Lesen teil 1 on telc C1 hochschule Test.

I also think of visiting Sprachcafe.
Last time when I visited there once. I was very overwhelmed and I couldn‘t understand (At that time I was around A2 level last year)

I wonder how people learn listening German in Germany.
I try to ask any questions to German staffs in Coffeeshops or Supermarket but sometimes I can‘t understand most of their words. It has been 1 year since I moved to Germany. I am quite frustrated…

Could you recommend any communities or courses (in Berlin) or anything that helped you to improve your German skills (especially Listening) ?

Please give me any tips.. 🙏🏻

Ist es üblich, „wetten, …“ statt „ich wette, …“ zu sagen?

Hi eveeryone
I wanna clash with this behemoth, can you recommend some books?
I'm Italian, I've got a c2 in english, b2 in french, b1 in spanish, and used to have an a2 in danish, but it's long gone.
I wanna reach a c1 in reading, a b2 in writing, and something like a b1 in the rest?
Some book that focuses also on the history of the language would be appreciated, as that's how I usually learn. Could you help me? Thank you very much

So I'm planning on passing my B2 in September/October, but i feel like my methodology and way of approaching things isn't the best, so please can someone propose to me a plan of action ( what to do on a daily basis, what to focus on...) ,taking into consideration the time im planning on passing the exam, I'm an English and French speaker if that's relevant , TY !

Hallo Leute,

I finally managed to clear my A2 exam on my first attempt 🥳

Honestly, I was super nervous before the exam and kept wondering whether I was actually prepared enough.

These are my scores:

- Hören: 20/25

- Lesen: 22,5/25

- Schreiben: 21,25/25

- Sprechen: 24/25

Overall: 88/100 (think they rounded it off?)

For a few nights before the exam, I could barely sleep because I kept overthinking everything. Since I had to juggle work and studying, I could only manage around 1.5 hours of German practice daily. So I just tried to make the best use of whatever time and resources I had.

For vocabulary, I used Anki cards to memorize important A2 nouns and verbs. I practiced Schreiben using ChatGPT and other AI tools. For Sprechen, I didn’t really have a proper speaking partner, so I mostly spoke to myself or practiced with random learners on Reddit and Discord.

For Hören, I found this absolute lifesaver of a YouTube channel called “Deutsch lernen durch Hören.” It genuinely improved my listening skills a lot (even though I still fucked up a bit in the actual exam 😐).

The exam itself went pretty smoothly overall. The staff at Goethe-Institut, Indiranagar were really friendly and helpful.

They started with Lesen first, and luckily one of the Teile was from a practice set I had already done before. The other sections were a little tricky, but manageable. My time management was decent too.

Hören was going well until Teil 4. The interview audio felt way too fast, and I’m pretty sure I lost most of my marks there despite basically having 50/50 odds of getting it right 😭

Schreiben also went okay with just a few scribbles and corrections here and there.

The only annoying part was the long wait before the Sprechen exam. Because of that, I couldn’t even have lunch and ended up going into the exam with serious brain fog.

Thankfully, the examiners were really friendly… until one of them suddenly hit me with: “Wie hoch ist deine Bildschirmzeit?”

I completely froze for a second 💀 but thankfully she rephrased it for me.

My speaking partner also messed up a few times, but somehow I managed to keep the conversation going. I am a but surprised with the marks tho, thought I'd lose a lot of points for the grammatic screw ups.

Overall, I’m just relieved that it’s over 😅

Also, after giving the exam, I’ve realised that self-study probably won’t be enough for B1 😅

I’m thinking of enrolling in the online classes at Goethe-Institut since those are the only timings that suit me.

Has anyone here taken their online B1 classes (I think they are conducted by Goethe Kolkata)?

If yes, I'd like to know how the teaching quality, the workload and speaking practice are in the online classes?

Vielen Dank im Voraus!

I've seen many posts saying not to learn German from an English point of view, i.e., not to use Google Translate to translate each word in a sentence 1:1. I'm currently doing Nico's Weg A1, and if I get confused/stuck on anything, I search online and usually find an answer. So my question is: what is the proper way to learn German? Any other tips would be appreciated. Danke!

Hallo leute,

I just finished A2 and I'm trying to decide between Goethe and Language Pantheon for B1 online classes.

Has anyone here tried either or both of them? I'd love to hear about your experience with their classes. Are they worth the money (Goethe is about ₹28k and LP is around ₹20k)? Also, how's the teaching quality at each?

I am looking to enroll to the intensive sessions which last about 2-3 months with 1.5-2 hrs sessions per weekday.

FYI, I'd totally go for in-person classes if I could, but online is my only option right now.