Background
I took 5 years of Spanish in middle school and high school. I took two semesters of German in college, back in 2010/11. After that, I did at most 3 weeks total of DuoLingo over the years for both German and Spanish (usually for a few days), and have done nothing else with the languages since.
The amount of German I remembered before starting studying again was very little. Basic numbers, basic entry-level words, present tense conjugation, I knew cases/declinations existed but did not know specifics, random phrases still stuck in my brain(I have a sandwich, which came from early DuoLingo), but not a lot of fine details or nuance. I'd estimate I was about a few weeks into a German 101 college course at most.
Earlier this year I decided to actually give language learning a proper try, outside of the classroom setting. I had been following MattVsJapan on YouTube, and with the launch of his new site [Refold](www.refold.la), I decided to follow the guide/system explained there.
The tl;dr of Refold is: learn basic grammar, do daily Anki (either sentence mined or a frequency deck), consume as much native content as you can (immerse), and save outputting for later (if possible). It breaks it down into steps and what you can expect at the different stages of learning a language.
Now for the meat of the post!
Anki
I'm a devout Anki user. I originally was using it for words I encountered in my native English readings, so making the switch to German was pretty simple.
I first grabbed the Anki deck "Deutsch 4000 German Words by Frequency" and started with the recommended settings from the Refold site (10 new cards a day). About a week in I realized I could study ahead, and my daily reviews went from about 90 to 320. This was mainly to jump-start my vocab (some words came back to me fairly quickly, and there are a decent amount of cognates). About a week later the reviews were stable at around 150 a day. I can't get exact stats, but it was taking me 10 minutes or less. After the first month, over the next 12 weeks I was consistently inconsistent with my Anki. On average I was only doing it every other or every third day, commonly doing 300 reviews in a session, culminating about 7 weeks ago where I had 782 reviews after about 1.5 weeks of not doing them. I switched to 20 about a month in. This deck goes from German to English and English to German. I find this useful for German (and against the general philosophy of Refold) because knowing the genders of nouns is pretty important. If I get the gender wrong, I will normally fail the card.
The deck itself is pretty good. There's audio for every card, and 99% of the time it is great quality. A few are less than perfect, but still manageable. I really only use the audio on new cards to practice my internal pronunciation. The words themselves have been in a decent order - a bunch don't show up in kids shows and are more "adult" words (think stuff like: contract, law, business, member), but that's actually useful for the content I consume. My only real complaint with the deck are the example sentences - most use vocabulary that is intermediate or advanced, sometimes with complicated sentences. I don't normally use the example sentences if I can help it, possibly for this reason. It's not a huge deal to me. I would recommend the deck to others.
I exclusively use Anki on my phone. I pretty much don't use computers at home unless I can help it, and AnkiDroid is everything you need.
Some other things I do differently than what Refold suggests:
No Leeches
At first I used the leech function with Refold's settings, but I still felt I needed to learn these words, and unsuspending cards is annoying. So I just completely turned leeching off. So far I've had no issues - sometimes a leech kind of word will be stuck in the beginning learn phase for a week or two, but eventually my brain latches on and starts to remember it well and graduates. It is not a big deal to me to fail a card all the time - I accept that every word is remembered at different speeds, some I immediately remember, and some don't.
TL to NL and NL to TL
I go both ways translating. As I said before, in German knowing noun genders is pretty important. My own personal theory is that going both directions with Anki makes a better mental connection, and at this stage of my language learning I'm just doing direct translations from one language to the other. I will likely discontinue this practice when I make the monolingual transition and/or when I start sentence mining. NL to TL is more difficult, but both notes graduate at basically the same rate, just delayed slightly. It feels like for 99% of nouns and verbs, there is usually a direct translation from German to English or vice versa.
Because of this, I do 20 words a day, and use the feature "Bury new related cards". This makes it so I only see one direction (NL to TL, TL to NL) for new cards in a day.
Speed
I wrote a whole post about my philosophy on doing Anki reps quickly here. Basic summary below:
When reviewing, I review very quickly. I average about 4 sec/card, but for most I try to rate instantly. My logic is as follows - during immersion, you don't have 10 sec to remember the word, by the time you do, lines of dialogue will have gone by and you'll need to catch-up or rewind. If I don't immediately know a word, I give myself one moment to think it up before I fail it.
This has worked well for me. In recent weeks I've steadily been doing ~225 reviews in ~15 minutes. Failing newer cards multiple times doesn't really affect the length of my review sessions - if it's failed 5 times in a session that's really like 25 sec, while if I was taking 10 sec each I could only fail it 2.5 times.
Stats
30/30 days, 7000 reviews, 233.9 reviews/day, 470 total minutes, 15.7 minutes/day
Learning cards: 69% correct
Young cards: 75% correct
Mature cards: 86% correct
I'm nearly a quarter of the way through the deck of words in 5 months, and nearly 1/3 of that time I skipped days and didn't learn any new words. It's been 6 weeks since I've missed an Anki day, so the habit is basically completely ingrained now.
Immersion
YouTube
Immersing has been super easy. The first thing I started with was YouTube, after creating a German language account. The first thing I watched was a channel by Kathrin Shectman who does Story-Listening for young children, based on Krashen's work. Super comprehensible, but extremely low level (aimed at 2nd grade or lower, I think). I watched about 4 of those videos and felt pretty comfortable. Then I snuck in two Kurzgesagt videos, which were surprisingly comprehensible at this stage - lots of cognates when things get scientific and technical.
Next I watched ~10 episodes of Super Wings, a children's cartoon show with 10 minute episodes, all on YouTube with subtitles. I tried to watch Bernd das Brot, but the YouTube episodes lacked subtitles and I really struggled without them.
The biggest asset so far for comprehension has been Extr@ auf Deutsch, which I watched next. It's a simple sitcom style show aimed at German language learners. It's very comprehensible while watching, completely subtitled in German, and is actually pretty good and funny. I immediately binge watched it, and then watched it 2 or 3 times in the following week or so after (13 episodes at 24 min each = ~300 minutes each watch). If I ever didn't have something to watch, it was old reliable.
Other content I watched in rough chronological order: Nico's Weg, 1 hr 45 language learning filmed at the A1 level; MrWissen2Go, a channel that explains Politics, History, and News events (aimed at natives and not super comprehensible at first); Deutsch Lernen, a channel with a bunch of German graded readers at the A1-B2 levels uploaded with the text and audio narration; ZDF Heute-Show, German equivalent of the Daily Show; about 11 hours of a Gronkh Let's Play of the newest Assassin's Creed (fairly dialogue heavy, and Gronkh speaks slowly and clearly); and recently nightly news segments from TagesSchau (15-30 min each). I've watched a few episodes of the Easy German Podcast in video form, which are completely subtitled. Probably not recommended for complete beginners, but they speak at an easy pace and quite clearly.
ARD
One of the public broadcasting conglomerates in Germany is ARD, and they have tons of TV shows, movies, and documentaries to watch for free, anywhere in the world (although some are locked to within Germany). I didn't create an account until recently, so I don't have a history to look search through, but I remember watching a mini series called Deutscher, 4 episodes 40 min each, and a season of a show called [Last name] vs. [Last name], but I can't remember the title anymore.
Now I almost exclusively watch a daily soap opera Sturm der Liebe. It's a bit of a slice of life, very easy to follow, and mostly comprehensible to me.
Netflix
The issue with Netflix is that only for native German shows do the subtitles and audio match up. Because of this, I haven't used Netflix too much.
I watched 2 seasons of Dark, but I think they were with English subtitles. I watched “3 Türken & ein Baby”, a comedy movie, and two seasons of "How To Sell Drugs Online(Fast)" in German with subtitles, but that's it. I also recently just started Biohackers.
There are maybe 5 shows left I have any interest in watching that are native German. Once I'm better at listening and I'm at a higher level, I'll try to watch dubs. I tried watching the Community dub (a show I've never seen) but with mismatched subtitles it's too much for me right now.
Listening
At first I didn't have dedicated listening practice at all - it's was always YT or television shows with subtitles. Only recently have I been doing listening only.
My current job lets me wear headphones all day, so I've been listening to a lot over the past month or so. I use NewPipe to download YT audio to my phone and play in the background. At first I used Extr@, along with some of the graded readers on YT. Now I listen to one or two episodes of the Easy German Podcast, Hagrids Hütte (Harry Potter Podcast), and the Harry Potter audio book. My listening ability has been progressing fairly well. If I ever want to turn my brain off, but still kind of use German, I've been listening to German singer-songwriter music, where the focus is more on the vocals than the music.
I've listened to two audio books so far. One was Cafe Berlin a few weeks ago, which was way below my level of comprehension. Other than a few vocabulary words it was almost boring (the audiobook was spoken very slowly, which didn't help). The other was the Little Prince, one of the most translated books ever. I do NOT recommend any beginner to read or listen to this book. I got the general gist, but there was a crap ton of vocabulary I had no idea about, and it seemed a lot deeper and reflective than your typical children's book. The fact that it gets recommended for beginners a lot is baffling to me.
Grammar + Textbook
I kept my college textbook from back in the day, and read about a chapter every other week. I read through the grammar sections but don't actively study them. The chapters have short conversations, vocabulary lists, longer readings, and just interesting info to peruse through. I probably need to spend some more time reviewing grammar each week, like looking at older chapters, but because I don't plan on outputting any time soon, this isn't a priority for me.
German grammar is definitely necessary for outputting, but for inputting I've had basically no issues understanding everything. The main tricky bits that every German language learner struggles with are the different cases, and those I will definitely focus on when I get closer to outputting.
I have an Anki deck just for the vocabulary in the textbook. If I haven't had the listed words in my frequency deck, it gets added to the textbook deck. I manually enter these on my phone which is tedious, and partly why I'm progressing so slowly through the textbook. At first I was only going one direction with these (TL to NL) but then I just recently figured out the ability to go both directions, which has been really nice for more testing of my noun genders.
This deck has 409 words, and all the words are now in Mature or Young stages for me. It takes me an average of 5 minutes to do my reviews for this deck. 82% retention on Mature cards.
Reading
I've done very little reading. I was going to try to read the Little Prince, but I first listened to the audiobook and I will not be reading that for a while.
No, like any good reddit language learner I started with Harry Potter. So far I've finished 6 chapters. I'm usually too tired after work to try and read, so I'm limited to just the weekends. The process of reading takes a lot of time, as you'll see.
My strategy for reading is as follows: First I read through without stopping, I don't do any word lookups, and just let it flow. I then go back with a fine tooth comb and grab a few words per page I know get used more than once or just seem important to the story. I write these down on a sheet of paper. I manually look up each one, and write down the definition on the paper. Later, I add these to another Anki deck, with the idea being that vocabulary in the book and the rest of the series will likely repeat.
I used to then reread the chapter with the piece of paper and translations handy for immediate reference. This third reading resulted in the most comprehension. But now I just listen to the audio book version of the chapter during the week, which kind of does two birds with one stone and gives me more time on the weekends to read more.
In 6 chapters I've noted ~400 words, so about 67 a chapter. This deck also takes me about 5 minutes a day to work through.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through this deck. 82% retention on Mature cards.
Summary and Conclusions
Average Day
So what's an average day like? I work from 7am to 5pm four days a week, and can use headphones nearly the entire day. I've been trying to get at least 3 hours a day of listening in while working. Some days I'm feeling really into to it and enjoying the content, other days my brain is really struggling to pay attention (and some days work requires more conscious thought!).
After work and dinner I bust out my Anki reps. Over the past month, that's been 26 min a day doing 424 reviews. By the time I'm done, it is usually about 7 or 8 pm, which gives me two hours or so to immerse more. Recently I've been trying to watch at least one episode of the German soap each night (50 min), and then Biohackers after (~40-50 min).
On the weekends I have more time to actively immerse, but I also have to focus on my outside life as well, so it can be hit or miss. This is when I watch YouTube, when I read Harry Potter, read through my textbook, create cards for my HP deck and textbook, and watch other content.
Logging
I only just started logging my immersion hours on July 10th. So far it's been 43 hours of listening, and 16 hours of watching. (Reading is tough to measure since I do multiple passes and then the audio book counts as listening only).
A rough estimate is about 65 hrs/month listening and 25 hrs/month watching
What Refold level am I at/what's my CEFR level?
Refold Level
For most of the content I currently consume, I'm at least a Level 3 (Gist), I feel most of the time I'm a Level 4 (Story), even a Level 5 (Comfortable) at times. But I recently watched and read other people's updates and they seem far more conservative with their self-grading. Some examples might help explain.
The German soap I watch nearly every day: I follow all the story lines. I miss a lot of detail, and there are plenty of words I don't know. Sometimes entire conversations are just Gists to me. But a majority of the time I'm watching very comfortably and have no real question marks. (And some of the question marks are because soap operas have long term story lines and complex histories which I don't have the background knowledge for, having really only started watching a few weeks ago). Let's call it a 3.5
For the Easy German Podcast, listening only: Gist for sure, and usually a 4. I miss a lot of their jokes for some reason. Some topics are easier than others. This varies a bit more, so between 3 and 4.
When I listened to the Little Prince audiobook, that was a Level 2 (Bits and Pieces) to mid Level 3.
For the evening news: Gist for sure, but again miss a lot of details, never am I Level 5.
Random YT videos aimed at natives: somewhere between 2 to 4 depending on the topic.
Harry Potter: Level 4 or 5 most of the time, especially the conversations. Some of the narration is difficult - lots of descriptive words that don't show up in TV/movie dialogue (miserable, wretched, shaggy, clatter, darkened, gangly, you get the idea), but you can infer a lot, and since I know the story so well, it's very easy to track.
Biohackers: Usually a high 3 or low 4, but some of the characters speak incredibly fast and I'll be at a 2. Other times the conversation is biology heavy and I'll miss a lot of detail.
CEFR Level
I have never taken an assessment, and likely won't for awhile. It's very difficult to estimate my level because of this, especially since I don't speak or write German at all. Specifically I'll only be talking about my comprehension level.
Looking at other people's listed or stated CEFR levels, I must be around an A2/B1 in comprehension. I'm extremely tolerant of ambiguity - the only time I stop to look up words is while doing my second pass of reading. Otherwise I just let things flow and let my brain figure things out. I can comfortably watch most native German content on YouTube and follow along. There's little content out there I don't feel like I can at least understand a little of what's going on, and most of the time I am following along closely, but missing details. The hardest thing actually seems to be Reddit threads in /r/DE or /r/FragReddit actually, I'm not sure if it's because of more slang, casual language use, lack of story lines, or I'm just not used to reading regular everyday German.
I listened to the first episode of the Fest und Flauschig podcast the other day, which is incredibly fast spoken German, and could kind of follow along with most of it at a very low level. I feel like being able to follow along completely to that podcast will kind of define a low level of fluency for me.
I'm feel I'm at the point now where I've learned most, if not all, of the "beginner" words, and know less common words are becoming more important for my comprehension. Small example, last weekend I found the word for freckles in my HP reading. This came up in the second episode of Biohackers earlier this week.
Areas for Improvement
Listening to 3 hours a day at work will likely be a huge boost going forward. Listening is definitely my weakest point, and I'd love to not have to use subtitles for everything I watch. I probably could start doing it now, but it's so much more comprehensible, and using subtitles also gives me some extra reading time too.
My vocabulary holds my comprehension back a lot. Very rarely are sentence structures or grammar causing my comprehension to fail (although maybe I am comprehending incorrectly). Instead, what usually happens is that some noun or verb is used that isn't a cognate or similar to a word I already know. Example, a recent episode of the German soap had the word for a proxy, someone to represent you at a company board meeting. After that scene I had to look up the word because the whole board was surprised when one character said the other was their proxy. What's the solution to this? I'm just going to keep doing Anki until I feel like it's useless. Until my brain's dictionary is a few thousand words deep, I don't think prioritizing words is super important. If I see words repeatedly in immersion, I'm going to remember them.
So far I've been seeing about half of the words I've been learning in the frequency deck in my immersion, but it's really difficult to estimate that. It doesn't feel like a waste of time yet. Until that point, I'm going to keep using my 4000 word deck.
I really would like to read more. Reading Harry Potter has been super fun and motivating, but I also really want to mine it for vocabulary, which slows me down. I'm going to find some other similarly leveled content to read on the side and not worry about mining for vocabulary to scratch that itch.
Looking Forward
What are my end goals? Long term, eventually I'd like to pass the C1 test for German. Short term, depending on the Covid situation, I hope to do a Winter Semester in Germany this Dec/Jan (classes would be in English). Who knows with Covid though. Being at a level where I can hold a basic conversation with natives would be nice before I get there (and not just basic introductions, but actual conversation), and being able to function somewhat independently without relying on English would be cool. Sometime in the fall I will likely hire an iTalki tutor or something similar to start outputting and working on my speaking. Writing I'm not worried about at all.
If I could project my growth for the next 90 days: another 500+ words from the frequency deck, I'd like to finish HP 1 which should be another ~400 words, and another ~250 words from the textbook. So far my comprehension has been very rapid - going from a German elementary school setting, to kids shows, to soap operas and reading HP seems incredibly quick for 5 months of inconsistent study and immersion.
I may start sentence mining going forward. I'd really need to use some automated tools though, manually doing sentence cards (especially on mobile) sounds miserable, so any advice would be welcome in that department.
Conclusions
Immersing feels amazing. The first time I started watching German content, I was blown away at how much I understood. Watching Extr@ was absolutely wild - the fact that I could understand most of what they were saying, and knowing that it wasn't completely dumbed down German was exhilarating. Watching episodes of the German Daily Show soon after, and realizing "I understand like 20% of this, wtf", later on watching German shows and understanding even more - it's really fun.
Honestly I take a lot of pleasure realizing that I'm understanding what I'm watching/listening to/reading. It's wildly different from anything I did in 5 years of Spanish class and the 2 German courses I took. I remember doing the textbook readings in my German course, and now when I read them I understand absolutely everything, when before it was a complete struggle with lots of word look ups. It's mind boggling.
I don't really have any critiques so far of Refold (other than my modifications to the Anki settings/techniques). It's kind of hard to critique something telling you to immerse more. As I said previously, I think the German grammar is pretty tricky, and spending a decent amount of time practicing it before outputting will be beneficial, but maybe by the time I get to that stage all the immersion will have paid off, and I will need to practice less than I currently think.
I'm surprised at how similar to English that German is. Many times things are phrased the exact same way in both languages, there are many common figures of speech, and a decent amount of cognates. (Example, in English you can figuratively throw a look at someone or something, and the it's phrased the exact same way in German).
German sentence structure is completely wild, word order matters for some things, but for other things it doesn't, so sentences can seem completely backwards if you directly translate them to English, but are completely intelligible in German. The German part of my brain will completely accept it, but if I start translating to English, my English brain throws up red flags. That can be kind of amusing.
I am still actively translating everything I hear into English in my head, most of the time (at least to the best of my knowledge, this is kind of hard to gauge during immersion since having meta thoughts about how you are immersing kind of ruins the immersion aspect). This is easier to experience when I only know a few words in a sentence - my brain basically grabs on to the few words I know.
I'm starting to anticipate separable verbs ("there's gonna be an 'aus" coming up, I can feel it"), my brain is figuring out how having verbs at the ends of sentences works (it expects and understands it now), and I'm kinda figuring out verbs that undergo a stem change.
I think choosing to basically never pause content, and tolerating ambiguity, is really helpful. Just letting the content flow and not breaking immersion let's me consume more, doesn't give my brain time to think actively, and helps nail down the language patterns better. I still need ways to supplement my domain specific vocabulary so I can comprehend better though - there's always a trade-off.
If you couldn't tell, overall it's been a fantastic experience, and way more interesting than anything I did in school. The only hard part is making time for immersing - life gets in the way, or sometimes I just don't want to watch a German TV show or YT. I don't force myself to do it during those times - I'm comfortable taking days off here and there.
Doing Anki daily is now becoming a permanent habit, and I'm far more consistent now than I had been before. Because I do my reps so quickly resulting in only 25 minutes a day of Anki needed, it's very easy to do daily. I might not always feel like watching a German TV show, or reading, or watching YouTube, but I can always do my Anki instead of browsing reddit or killing time in other ways. If I absolutely had to, I could drop the two smaller decks and just be down to 15 min daily.
I would definitely recommend reading the Refold philosophy to anyone learning a language on their own. I wish I had known about Anki and how easy it is to immerse back when I was in high school and college - I would already be 10 years deep into two languages instead of five months into one! I think active classroom instruction plus Refold techniques would be completely overpowered.
Thanks for reading this far. I'd be happy to answer any questions and I'll be reading every comment.
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