Thinking about some of the comments about German studies on this post I had Dinner yesterday with a 30-something British diplomat who will be posted abroad in March 2026 and has literally just started to tackle German. He has two online teachers splitting the daily schedule during the week and was going to be one-on-one with them, but has now been joined by a second diplomat needing to learn German. They are working through what appears to be a somewhat old-fashioned textbook with drills and plenty of homework.
As you can imagine, I had a number of suggestions such as daily Assimil, EasyGerman videos, Lingq, the “beginner” book on “German Gender: is it der, die, or das?” by Angelika Davey (which he understandably said was his perplexing initial hurdle), Deutsche Welle, Slow German podcasts and a NordVPN connection to start looking at news and current affairs (where because he is a diplomat he has a very strong background).
What struck me was:
- His absolute confidence in achieving a very strong mark in the C1 examinations in less than nine months. This is a requirement of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before he is posted, so certainly provides very serious motivation. He has an undergraduate degree in French and Italian, so this perhaps adds to the confidence that he will achieve that standard, because of “crossover skills” on cognates and grammar.
- He is full-time on learning German, having been released from all other duties (not a luxury many language learners on Lingq have…)
- Having joined the Foreign Office through a very rigorous competitive examination and then having already been promoted and, after probing interviews, served several stints abroad and with increasingly demanding posts in London and elsewhere at a young age, I would say that the third Kaufmann trait of an “ability to notice” is very likely!
I was reminded of the Easy German video of “How Diplomats learn languages fast”, where young US diplomats get to C1 in 9 months, but this is certainly an ambitious learning curve!
I will be interested to see how this goes…