Make a List of German Words and Phrases
You Need to Know
This is closely tied to the reasons you need to learn German in the first place. Some words and phrases will
occur to you right away – "How are you?" (Wie geht es Ihnen?) "How do you say that in German?" (Wie
heißt das auf deutsch?) – while others will evolve over time. We suggest you buy a blank notebook now and jot
down the words and phrases you expect to need (in English) and their translations in German. This will give you a
direction to follow. (Plus, your notebook can become a study guide you can use whenever you have spare time.)
Don't go anywhere without your German notebook!
This may, at first, seem silly – you're not going to study while driving down the road, for heaven's sake! But
as you follow your daily routine, you'll almost certainly think of new words you'd like to learn, and you may
suddenly find you have five minutes of solitude you can use for study or review. Learning German is easy when you
take advantage of every possible opportunity to make your new language part of your daily life!
Start a German journal!
When you first begin to write down your thoughts in German, your writing will be laughably bad. Your grammar
will be awful. Your sentence structure will be appalling. Any German speaker with a sense of humor would be rolling
on the floor laughing. But journaling is just for you, your private attempts to wrestle with expressing yourself in
a new language.
It doesn't matter what anyone else would think, because they aren't going to get to read it. Write a little
something every day, even if it's nothing more than "Ich verstehe nicht" (I do not understand). As you
study more German, learn more vocabulary, and gain a better grasp of the language, your journal will reflect that,
and it will become not just a learning tool but a valuable form of self-expression.
Remember that you can learn some useful German words and phrases here.
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