Learning German After One Week

Guten Tag meine Freunde!  Week 1 is over and we're looking forward to week 2.  It hasn't been easy and to be honest I have questioned whether or not German was the right language for us, but we are persevering.


It was a busy week.  We are through 5 lessons of the Pimsleur Method and we have been fairly pleased with it's results so far.  The lack of any written material has been a little tough, but we have found it helpful to look up some of the words/phrases that we are being taught in the audio lesson so that we can begin to recognize German phonetics.  I have been researching phrases that I feel would be helpful and have been trying to do some book work in regards to basic grammar.  This has been helpful, but at this stage, everything is so new that it can seem a little overwhelming at times.  I also picked up a couple of A1 level German podcasts that have been very heplful.


So far, we can say several basic phrases like greetings, introductions, and other basic "survival" type things.  I am not as far progressed as I would like to be, but I understand that this is a process and I am making a few alterations to our learning methods moving forward.


I have put together a list of the top 1000 German nouns, top 30 German verbs (with conjugations), and top 25 lists for adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions.  Using these lists, I will put together a daily word list of 5 nouns (with gender and plural), one verb (with all conjugations) and up to five other words (consisting of adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions).  This will make up my supplementary learning material for the next 2-3 months.  At the end of 3 months, My goal is to be at a level where I can be fairly conversationally equipped and be ready to watch/listen to German language TV shows, podcasts, movies, etc with 70%-75% comprehension.


If you would like to have the lists I have put together, please feel free to email me at baronbillprice@gmail.com and I will be happy to email them to you.  They are a work in progress, but sometimes you just have to start somewhere.


I will update again later this week and let you know how the daily word lists are going and if they seem to be helping.


Auf wiedersehen!