Hey everyone, I’m not sure if you can see my stats, but I’ve been working really hard on my listening and reading comprehension in German. So far, I’ve read 2 million words and listened for almost 200 hours. My question is, did any of you also find it this hard to notice progress? I still struggle a lot with Netflix shows like Better Call Saul, which has a lot of legal jargon, and it makes me feel insecure, especially since I want to reach B2 or C1 in a year. At the same time, I’m also learning French, and honestly, French feels a lot easier—my listening comprehension is already almost better than my German after only two months of really hard work. For those of you who are learning German or have reached B2 or C1, do you have any strategies to help me feel more confident? Is it normal to feel like I’m struggling as much as I am right now? Any advice would be appreciated!
Edit: Thank you all for the messages. I simply understood that I need to just be more patient and try to compare myself to what I was in the past and maybe be more self-ware. I analyzed my progress in the app and I saw that there are long periods of non activity, so may be an illusion that I’m working really hard since I can be very inconsistent.
I find French much easier than German. I really struggle to learn German vocabulary. In addition French word order is much closer to English, hence French phraseology and idioms just sound more natural. But I’m only B1 (lower intermediate) in German.
For an English speaker, French has far more easily recognised words than German. However, German is very Lego like. Thus even if I know the French verb tourner I cannot guess the meanings of le tour, le tournant, la tournure, la tournée, la tourbière, le tourbillon, la tourelle, le tournoi etc even though they share a common root. The suffix is not directly meaningful. But I can guess a lot of German words such as die Ausstellung, die Aussage and der Vortrag as the components relate more closely to the meaning. I’m sure you’ve noticed this too.
If only 200 hrs of listening, that’s not a lot so it’s not surprising you may be struggling. I checked your stats and we are at similar level of known words but I have over 500 hrs listening…and really I’ve done a lot more than that outside of LingQ…probably closer to 700 or more. And frankly, I still struggle quite a bit with listening.
Are there other things you are listening to? What kinds of things have you listened to that you feel you understand well?
I forgot to add, my French comprehension increased markedly when I started reading along with a video. Until then I had been listening, or reading. I expect you know this little trick, but I thought I‘d mention it.
Like ericb100, I noticed your listening hours when seeing your stats. Listening-centric methods like “Dreaming Spanish” mention 1000+ hours of listening to comprehensible input as a benchmark for understanding native media.
There are a lot of variables, such as whether you are actively or passively listening, whether you read or do other activities to improve your comprehension, how close the language is to a language you know, etc. There is no magic number, and but I’d guess they’re probably in the ballpark, and 1000 hours is much closer to what you’ll need than 200 or 300 hours for native content comprehension.
Of course, I’m assuming you are accounting for your listening here on LingQ, If not, feel free to disregard.
I like simultaneous listening and reading and later re-listening to work on listening comprehension.
I agree with you Leif. It’s something I did all the time in the beginning stages to get used to the sounds and then somehow I got away from it until the last few months. It seems it’s perhaps even more important in the intermediate/advanced stages as the material is not so crystal clear and enunciated as it is in the beginning stages. So what you think is correct when you hear it in your head on your own is not necessarily close to what the native speaker produces.
@diogobaptista, you can look up my stats for reference, though I don’t bother updating my listening input anymore, it’s well past 1300h at the moment (too lazy to log all this content).
I barely notice progress, sometimes I wonder how much of a gap there is between my tenth read book and my current 112th. Progress is just so infinitesimal when it comes to noticing it day-by-day.
Try reading a book that you read three months ago, or an article that you read a month ago. Redo some previous episodes of a podcast that ypu’re closely following. The idea is simple, notice how much information you retain from the content you’ve consumed. Although I don’t do it often, it always feels amazing when I do. Gives you a sense of going through the motions, showing you that you’re comfortable with the things you’re familiar with. The fact that you had to struggle in your first encounter with this content, only to breeze through it now will also give you a sense of accomplishment!
Exactly that. Listen again to content first consumed six months ago, even if it’s not perfect, comprehension should be much better, not just words and phrases, but the overall picture.
Another tip (that I sublimated from a lot of reading) consists in trying to assosiate a piece of content with a set of words, ie try to single out some key, reoccuring words from a video/article/book.
An example, I learned french equivalents for tarp and shopping carts (la bâche & le caddie) from reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. Now whenever I see a piece of tarp I get depressed remembering McCarthy’s novel and french translation. There are many examples like that.
It is often that after putting a lot of effort into reading a book you might feel like you didn’t achieve much with it. Remembering a mouthful of key words from a book you read serves as nice reminder to the work you’ve put in.
Having said that, please, don’t focus on some obscure words that only one author uses. Apishamore lives rent free in my head thanks to Blood Meridian.
Learning a language takes a long time. If you want to be B2-C1 in German, try and aim for 1,000 hours of total study. You need to relax and lower your expectations that you can achieve basic fluency in a few hundred hours, which took others 700 or a thousand hours to achieve.
Hi, I am a German teacher by profession and one piece of advice I give in such a situation is to focus on high-frequency vocabulary (Erwin Tschirner’s book is the go-to in my opinion), especially the first 1200 words or so. This makes about 70% of the language comprehensible. When I incorporated this into my teaching I could not get over how many of these words came up everywhere and my students could read native texts much more easily with the vocab under their belts.
I’ve been feeling like I’m missing some really common and useful words (especially in spoken contexts) even though I’m LingQ Advanced 1 so I actually have been exploring the frequency dictionaries in the past two weeks. Even in the first 2500 words there are a lot of words that I don’t know, or don’t have solidified so I’ve been focusing on these. (I ended up getting the “MostUsedWords” bundle of 4 books up to the top 10,000 in pdf form). I think this will be helpful. I feel like I’ve somehow skipped over a lot of these more common words since much of my input has been novels or even the news. You end up seeing a lot of “frilly” words that may or may not be all that useful in everyday spoken language. In any event these dictionaries definitely highlight my gaps that I can focus on.
How can I feel more confident in my German listening skills, especially when I struggle with shows like Better Call Saul despite putting in lots of effort? Any tips from those who’ve reached B2 or C1?
Better Call Saul combines both slang and very specific vocabulary, so the bar you set yourself with that show is pretty high actually. What was the last thing you’ve watched that you actually understood (to a degree that you could follow the plot at least)?
I feel you man, been going through the same thing but with Afrikaans as my French, and French as my German.
Others have already mentioned the advice about listening, but what I wanna say is that since you clearly understand a lot of German and have progressed very far in one field, there might be a risk that your own expectations from other fields are transferring over to listening. My example would be my written French. I have nailed down French pronunciation. Took me forever but I can do it now. I can understand French word order well now, and I remember when the sentence starting with “vous vous” made it incomprehensible to me.
These feel like issues I had a lifetime ago, but you mention being insecure, and I feel insecure a lot in French. It’s also my first language I’ve ever learned so that’s a big reason to why it’s scary. I think maybe your sense of security in French is proof that it’s because you’re navigating some new in German, because everything is a first there, and with French you can compare to German progress.
What my suggestions are, is simple: write down on a piece of paper, every memory you had of being insecure about German from before. Word order, etc. As you write you might realize that you overcame almost every difficulty you used to have. The other, is to go back to basics. You are struggling a lot with Better Call Saul but your German is in the final part now in vocabulary. This might also mean you put too high expectations. I’m running into the same with written French. It’s not perfect immediately, so I’m angry. But it took me so much longer to reach a level of reading where French felt this vivid and easy.
All of this is to say. I think you are doing great, I think your insecurity is proof that what you have been doing is working and successful. Your German is so close to where it’s your language. Where you own it. But undoubtedly there’s small parts left.
Try breaking down what areas you struggle in: reading, writing, speaking, listening.
Then go through your search history, lesson history, etc. Write down how much practice you got done in certain areas: how many books you read, how many podcast episodes you’ve listened to, how many pages you’ve written.
Compare and contrast, you’ll probably see you just worked less on those areas. Think in this moment of how proud you are of what you’ve achieved in reading. Then go back and set a concrete, small goal for yourself. 50 hours listened in two months, or aim to meet the LingQ target for listened hours, and re-evalute your skills from there. So on. There are only four linguistic skills to reach. You seem to have at least beaten one. One more and you will understand German perfectly.
Maybe I have 300 or 400, but your idea makes a lot of sense still. I simply don’t have much time with the language, and I need to be more proactive on the listening side.