When in Berlin, do as the Romans. (The Holy Imperial ones, that is.)

[lethargic_man]

Someone said something to aviva_m the other day something about my learning German, and she said she'd given up hope. I'd told her previously it was on my to-do list, but I preferred to get my Hebrew sorted out first. Plus I've frankly found it hard to get myself motivated to learn German.

What aviva_m didn't know, though, was that the preceding day I'd decided to get off my tochus and learn the language. (She still doesn't know it: I'm posting this on an aviva_m-less filter, as (a) I don't want to get her hopes up too high until words turn into fact, and (b) I thought it would be nice to surprise her with my being able to speak^* German.

* A very little: obviously the surprise element doesn't outweigh the advantage of being able to practise my German with her.

I've not tried to do something like this before, since the two times my mother set me up with an Israeli member of the Newcastle Jewish community for one-on-one tuition in Hebrew before I went to Israel as a sixteen and then eighteen-year-old. So how would people recommend I got started from a stationary start: teach-yourself books? evening classes? one-on-one tuition?

Comments

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It depends on how you like to learn, but for me it's Teach Yourself books (literally, as in the Hodder and Stoughton series with audio cds), podcasts, and one-on-one conversation as soon as I can arrange it. I'll also carry around a phrasebook in my pocket for browsing in idle moments.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Try as many different formats as you can find - book-and-CD, interactive learning, podcasts, DVD with subtitles, whatever, until you find a method that suits you.

Und vergiss nicht, Spaß zu haben!

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

<heads off to Google translate> Ah, that explains why aviva_m is constantly using too many commas in English. I thought she'd been getting better recently, until I heard her confessing to someone else that whenever she wrote an email to me now, after writing it she would go through and delete half of the commas at random!