Are you moving house or getting naked? “To move” in German: umziehen, wegziehen, ausziehen, einziehen…
Each of the following can mean "to move [house]" in German, depending on where you're moving from/to: umziehen, ausziehen, wegziehen, and einziehen; and one of them can also mean "to get naked". Which one of the above should you use for what context, and how exactly...
Da-words: easier than you thought
I hated these at first. There are a million of them and they seem so hard to distinguish: davon, dafür, darüber, damit, danach, dazu, dabei, dadurch, and on and on and on oh lord. I confused them constantly, I didn't even really understand what they were for, I didn't...
Excellent TV Show (free on YouTube) for Learning German While Simultaneously Learning about German Culture: Deutschlandlabor
Deutschlandlabor is a TV series whose title literally means "Germany Laboratory" (Deutschland means "Germany" and "Labor" means "laboratory"). It's put out by the Goethe Institute; from Wikipedia: The Goethe-Institut is a non-profit German cultural association...
Fantastic German Podcast for Learning German! Free, Slow, Clear, Includes Transcript, Uses Common Language, and More…
Hi guys, I'm going to share with you today a resource I've been using to learn German for a couple of months and which I really enjoy: Slow German. It's a (free) podcast by Annik Rubens. She's a German journalist from Munich. What she does is very simple: Talks...
Memrise vs Anki: Is Either Better? No, Just Different (and for a different application).
Anki vs Memrise People have bugged me about Memrise for years now and, although I've used it a fair bit, I'd never gotten around to writing a proper review of it, so I thought I would by comparing it with its obvious rival and answering a question many ask: Anki or...
Learn German Vocab Fast with this Fantastic Free Tool
The tool in question is ReadLang, it works with any website in a variety of languages, and makes the process of learning new words from online text much easier than it was before, saving you massive amounts of time and effort. You click the word you don't know, it...
Native Speakers are NOT Good at Teaching Their Own Language!
I just wanted to quickly talk today about a common misconception I see amongst beginning language learners, and that is that native speakers make good teachers of their own language. Imagine trying to teach someone English (or whatever your native language is). See...
Interested in the culture of other countries and habits of their peoples? I HAVE A NEW BLOG ABOUT THAT!
I've been wanting to write about the culture in other countries for a while now but wanted to wait until I actually started traveling to do so. I'm in Spain at the moment and have had just a ton of observations and interesting little insights into Spanish culture,...
How to avoid wasting months learning German the wrong way (and learning the wrong type of German)–get started the right way, learn to talk like native speakers do
The worst thing that can happen to you, and it happens to thousands of newbie language-learners every year (I've met several of them), is that you just don't know how to start off so maybe you try this, that, and the other random method or resource and, of course,...
Another Advantage of a Tutor: MUCH Faster Error-Correction Rate Than Anything Else I’ve Experienced (which means you LEARN faster than anywhere else)
As I'm fond of saying: You learn to speak a language by trying to speak it, poorly at first. What this means is that you learn by making mistakes which are then corrected, the corrections being where the actual learning takes place. Previously, I had recommended that...
