How to learn German

German has a reputation for being hard that it only half deserves. The pronunciation is regular, the vocabulary is closer to English than any other language on this site, and almost all of the difficulty is concentrated in one place - the case system. Plan around that and the rest is unusually fair.

Learn the article and the plural too

Learn every noun three times over: the word, its article and its plural. Das Buch, die Bücher. Gender is largely unpredictable and the plural is formed half a dozen different ways, so a noun learned bare has to be learned again twice, and the second time is harder.

Meet the cases early

Meet the cases early rather than avoiding them. Beginners often try to dodge dative for months and end up having to unpick every sentence they learned. The endings are a small closed set - there are only so many of them - and seeing them from the first week makes them ordinary rather than frightening.

Long words are a gift

Treat the long words as a gift. Handschuh is hand-shoe, Krankenhaus is sick-house, Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung is speed-limitation. German builds new words from ones you already have instead of borrowing them, so a word you have never seen is often one you can work out on the spot.

Train your ear to wait

Then train your ear to wait. The verb goes second in a main clause but last in a subordinate one, so the meaning of a German sentence often arrives at the very end. Listening habits built on English make you decide too early - practise hearing the whole sentence before you commit to what it meant.