I have learnt English recently and got IELTS band 6 in only 10 months, and I am learning German, started from last week.
My question is, I am learning German for my studies’ field as Germans have made a great effort in it, so, should I care much about conversing or reading and listening should be my priority and the most important for me?
The second question is , when should I start conversing? After reaching a number of 1000 words for example?
There are a lot of opinions. It depends only of you.
If you would like, you can read my point of views in this topic.
You can find my article “When to start speaking” in English, in German or in Russian.
Here is the link to the English version: IT'S INTERESTING TO KNOW-WHEN TO START SPEAKING?
As Evgueny said, it depends only on you. Firstly, why are you learning German? You wrote
“I am learning German for my studies’ field as Germans have made a great effort in it”
What is it that you are studying? Do you think that you will benefit in your studies from learning German, or are you learning German out of interest because Germans were inportant in developing your field?
No, I am learning German as that will benefit me in my field, as reading the text from its original written is always better as t read for Friedrich Nietzsche and so on.
Also, I believe if I learn this language and get good in it, this will give me an advantage over other researches who do not have the German language in (my country Libya). ( I ask for your opinion especially on this point )
My field is about thoughts and you know how German made a great effor in it such as Friedrich Nietzsche and others.
So your field is philosophy? And not just philosophy, but a section of it that has been dominated by Germans? I do not know how much of an advantage it would be to be able to read the texts in their original language. In the natural sciences, you would only need English, and no other language would likely to useful for you, but in philosophy, I have no idea. Do people still publish their research in German? I have no idea.
It seems to me that you want to learn German for the sake of reading the original language. For that, maybe it is not so important for you to be able to speak, so maybe putting too much emphasis on it is not a good idea. Still, it is also not a waste of time. Everything helps, and doing some speaking practice will help you notice things in German that will then feed back into your reading ability. For your purpose, LingQ is probably the ideal option. Read as much as you can with LingQ in German, but certainly do other things like speaking, writing, studying grammar, and especially listening.
Thanks for your help Mr.Colin, from your experience as I see that you have made a really great progress of this language, I give 2hours a day to German, ( 1 reading and 1 listening ) by two years or 1 and half year,do you think I would be able to read normal books with a little help of dictionary and listen to German radios ?