“German is one of the hardest language to learn!” you might have heard. I am here to tell you that it is completely untrue only partially true. Any new language is hard in the beginning; German is no exception. But there are signs to be optimistic as you would notice in the story of my journey to proficiency level B2-C1* (Advanced level). In the end, just like the German people, the German language looks rough and difficult to penetrate at the first sight but once you get the hang of it, you start to see and admire the orderliness that underlies.
(By the way, German is called “Deutsch” in German and can be denoted by the letter DE or DEU. The same goes for Germany which is called “Deutschland”, literally, “Land of the people”)
English is a Germanic language and helps in learning German
Since you are reading this article, there is a strong possibility that you have a decent command on the English language and that will make German learning slightly easier for you. Why? Because English is a Germanic language, meaning that it shares its origins with German. People of the Germanic tribes of mainland Europe were among the first people in modern human history to populate the British islands. They brought their language with them which eventually became old English, then middle English (after being exposed to a lot of French), and eventually the modern day English that you are reding right now. English also has tons of influence of Romance languages (Germanic and Romance being two sub-branches of the Indo-European language tree) but it has so many Germanic elements that you can’t help but being helped by the English language when learning German. For example, the English word ‘love’ has the same root and the same meaning as the German word ‘Liebe’. The same goes for words ‘fire’ (EN) and ‘Feuer’ (DE), ‘new’ and ‘neu’, ‘mother’ and ‘Mutter’ and so on. (In case you missed it – You capitalize the first letter of German word wherever it was a noun) This connection is not limited to nouns and verbs. For example, English prepositions ‘for’ is a close relative of German ‘für’. The similarities are endless and you will start to see them as you dive more and more into German. I, personally, was helped by English in a whole different way.
“Harry Potter and the German Student”
My first and the biggest leap in German came in 2014 when I decided to read some German books. “Children books should be easy and fun!” I naturally thought but picked the wrong book – Brother Grimms’ ‘Kinder und Hausmärchen‘. Yes, they are fairytales written for kids (though, the original stories are much more gruesome than the Disney versions) and yes they are freely available online but they were written centuries ago and use a lot of archaic and outdated German words. I couldn’t build a rapport with the book and gave up. Then the perfect idea came to me – Harry Potter books!
Why was the idea perfect? Firstly, I was familiar with the story, having had read the books only 3-4 years ago, and would be able to follow the story even if I didn’t understand the whole text. Secondly, I was not so familiar with them that the books would be boring (3-4 years is not such a short time period after all). I didn’t remember the story at the sentences level (or even at the level of the different chapters and the twists and the turns of the story). Thirdly, the books are so engaging that you just can’t put them down, so I would likely keep my interest and motivation for a much longer period. So, I got the digital versions of the Harry Potter books and started reading. (The German titles already amused me!)
The first Harry Potter book (“Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen“) is the smallest in length – less than 200 pages. Still, it took me a month to finish it and that’s when I dedicated 2 hours a day, on average, to reading. If a sentence contained 10 words (other than grammatical elements like articles, prepositions etc), I had to look up 8-9 of them in the dictionary. And even looking up in the dictionary wasn’t an easy task because German has things like compound nouns (nouns made up of 2, 3, 4 or even more words) that don’t appear in the dictionary as is and separable verbs (where two different parts of a verb appear on different places in a sentence) that give no meaning or a totally wrong meaning when a part of them is looked up. But it did help that I was reading the English versions of the book in parallel as well and where the dictionary failed me, the English text came to the rescue. (Though, a lot of wordplay, puns and other jokes couldn’t be translated in German)
As I soldiered on with this hard work, the words started to repeat and I started to get the hang of the separable and irregular verbs (a verb whose declination doesn’t follow a neat pattern). The first chapter was the hardest but it got easier from there. By the time I finished the book, I was having to use the dictionary much less frequently. The same pattern followed for the rest of the 6 books.
The first book was the hardest and took the most time (despite being the smallest in length) but by the time I got to the seventh book (“Harry Potter und die Heiligtümer des Todes“), I was looking up barely one word every 3-4 pages and was able to finish the book in a week. And within 3+ months of having started the climb to my Potter mountain, I had conquered the peak, i.e. finished all 7 books. What was next? … Climb it again without the helping gear and see how competent was I now.
My second reading of all 7 Harry Potter books took barely a month, mostly because I wasn’t reading the English books in parallel and had to do bare minimum dictionary look up. And it wasn’t just the Harry Potter text that I was competent with (though, the words for “wand”, “cauldron”, “Defence against the dark arts” etc were imprinted on my brain, possibly forever), I realized that my German reading skills in general had improved by a lot. I went to Germany for two weeks in during this time and I could understand much more than I did on my previous stay. (Though, my listening comprehension and my speaking were both dud. But more on that later!)
So, I decided to continue reading more books in German but that’s where it got tricky. Harry Potter books are brillant but they ruin reading for you because once you read them, it’s hard to find anything that you will love as much! I struggled in finding anything that would be as perfect as HPs but no success. In the end, I compromised with the German translations of Dan Brown books. Meh! They aren’t Harry Potters but they were alright!
The point of the story is that an expensive online course (Rosetta Stone) and other language forms online couldn’t give me what Harry Potter books did. My German vocabulary, grammar knowledge, and reading comprehension went through the roof!
“But my listening and speaking is still crap!” I told a German colleague one day when I moved to Germany permanently after a few months. “You know what, I have the audiobooks of Harry Potter in German” he said and promptly gave them to me. I was skeptical of audiobooks in general until then. “It’s just reading some text out loud!” I thought, not realizing what a brilliant art form book narration is!
The narrator of the German Harry Potter books, Mr Rufus Beck is a magician with voice. He did the voices of all the characters with such distinct quality in each one that his voice became the character’s personality for me. The snobbishness of Aunt Petunia, the gruffness of Hagrid, the calmness and wit of Dumbledore, they were all palpable in Mr Beck’s voice! Add to that the sound effects in the audio books and they became a treat for me! I listened to them all the time, even when visiting my parents in India during my vacation! The result of all that listening? My comprehension of German, at least of a slowly spoken accent-less High German, improved greatly, though not as much as I had hoped, probably because real German speakers around me had their individual styles and accents of speaking and they didn’t have the voice of Rufus Beck. Listening to those books was still a totally worthwhile activity and I plan to do that, if possible, when learning my next language.
(Continued in the next part)
* CEFR = Common European Framework of Reference for languages