German vocabulary. How to learn German on your own and quickly: simple, accessible ways. Alphabet and umlaut

To broaden your horizons, you need to learn foreign languages. They will help you better understand a foreign culture, touch the great works of the classics of world literature in the original, and learn a lot of new and interesting things. When choosing a language, you need to be based on your preferences.

People interested in Germany ask whether it is possible to learn German on one's own? Those who have achieved success in this important task confidently say yes. You just need to try a little and spend some of your free time.

Native speakers will take you to Germany, where you will learn how to navigate a wide variety of everyday situations. The 64-page, full-color textbook provides useful backup and additional practice. This makes our fast German course for busy people; you can study in the car, on the train, in fact, wherever and whenever you choose.

They will go step by step through all the units. Listen to them as often as you can, as this repeated play will help you become really confident and fluent. You'll soon be speaking German! Basic German verbs and key grammar for everyday situations.

  • More than 500 practical german words and phrases.
  • Essential German vocabulary for everyday situations.
  • Ability to speak, listen and write.
  • Fundamentals of German development.
  • Genuine accent.
  • Introduce yourself, talk about your life, family, friends and your work.
  • Express your opinion Travel and accommodation.
  • Hotel, car rental, travel, etc. make friends, business contacts.
So, in the unlikely event that you are not satisfied with your course after 21 days, you can return it to us.

What is needed for this?

For positive result You need to have motivation and set a deadline for achieving the goal. It is equally important to organize the learning process in an interesting way, otherwise the desire to master is quite complex language may evaporate quickly. Determine why you want to start practicing. Perhaps you are going to travel to Germany, work in a German company, or communicate with native speakers. There can be many reasons. After all, Germany is the leading country of the European Union, and its language is very widespread and popular.

From basic phrases to seamless conversation, you'll be surprised how quickly a second language becomes second nature. Listen Listening to native German speakers is the most relaxing and empowering way to learn, helping you associate the sounds you hear with the words and sentences you read.

Understand. By listening and reading German, you begin to understand what each word means. Everyday objects have interesting new names. Gradually, words and then phrases become clear and your reading, writing and speaking of the language will improve.

To learn German from scratch on your own, it is important to choose the right teaching material.

  • A good option is audio lessons. It’s convenient to listen to them on public transport, making good use of the time needed on the road and during your lunch break.
  • Along with an audio course, it is often necessary to use diagrams, special cards, textbooks or other didactic material to help you quickly master knowledge.
  • Along with audio lessons, it is useful to study the German language tutorial. Try using “German for Beginners”, compiled by V. Bukharova and T. Kessler. With its help, you will quickly remember elementary phrases.
  • Be sure to purchase a comprehensive German-Russian and Russian-German dictionary. Set a goal for yourself to memorize 10 new words every day, and you will not notice how rich you are lexicon.
  • Visual information is perceived more quickly by many people. Therefore, to learn the language and improve pronunciation, video lessons are needed.

If you can’t remember articles and irregular verbs at home without outside help, sign up for courses and study as part of a group. There you will receive regular tasks to complete on your own, communicate with like-minded people and, perhaps, achieve success faster.

People are said to say that speaking a new language is the hardest part. There is much more simple languages which you could choose than German. Since this video content is material that is constantly watched by native German speakers, it is filled with vocabulary that is actually used by real people.

Modal verbs: hug infinitive

Watching interesting video but without realizing it? You can use any word to instantly find it. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you're in. This is a level of personalization that has not been done before. Let's face it, one of the most tedious things about it is the many declensions and conjugations. Verbs change depending on the occasion and tense, as well as the grammatical person and number?!

Alphabet and umlaut

You need to start studying from the beginning. The first step for a language learner is to understand the alphabet. For those who attended English classes at school, this will not amount to special labor. Languages ​​belong to general group- Germanic, and their alphabet is of Latin origin.

  • If you set yourself a serious goal, you can master a language quickly. In it, words are written in the same way as they are pronounced, you just need to know the consonant and vowel sound combinations well and remember when an umlaut is placed above the letters Ä ä, Ö ö and Ü ü - two dots on top.
  • You need to figure this out and learn how to pronounce the umlaut at the very beginning, otherwise your speech will be difficult to understand correctly.
  • Most often, two dots appear in words used in the plural, but sometimes they change phrases completely. It is convenient to learn how to pronounce them by listening to educational audio or video material.

Some people mistakenly compare umlaut with a feature of the Russian alphabet - the letter E. In fact, there is absolutely nothing similar between them. These points have different meanings.

Learning all the forms for every verb can be tedious, especially for the dreaded imperfective or simple past. How about this, you just learn to conjugate just seven words that will allow you to express almost everything you need? These modal verbs, when used in a sentence, take the position of a verb. This verb, in turn, goes to the end of the sentence in the infinitive.

As a formula it looks something like this. Subject Object → Object Modal Verb Object Verb. Because it allows you to use all kinds of verbs in a large number of sentences without knowing how to conjugate each of them. As long as you remember how to conjugate modal verbs, all you need is the infinitive form.

Start of classes

The main difficulty in the German language is articles. With their help, the gender of nouns is determined. German grammar differs from Russian, so at first students have to memorize nouns along with articles in order to speak correctly.

If you don’t give up on learning, articles will gradually cease to be a problem, and language acquisition will begin much faster.

The two sentences are not exactly the same, but the intention is certainly clear and any native will understand what you mean. What is not easy for many German students is the fact that the language knows three genders for its nouns: masculine, feminine and neuter.

This is further complicated by the fact that there are no clear rules for which gender is assigned to what kind of noun, and if there are any, there is always an exception. This whole thing seems to be based more on congress than anything else, and it's something the Germans are just growing up with.

Alphabet and umlaut

Consider the gender of a noun as an integral part of the noun from the very beginning. A little trick to make this easier is to get cards in multiple colors and assign one of them to each gender. For example, green color can be masculine, red for feminine and blue for average.

Learn new words systematically. These should be not only nouns, but also other parts of speech. To successfully memorize prepositions and verbs, it is advisable to find educational poems or songs. In this form, they are stored in memory faster.

Remember the study foreign language At school. At first, children learned to describe pictures, memorized basic expressions, names of days of the week, months, and kitchen utensils. Don't neglect this moment. Simple words necessary for communication.

When learning vocabulary, write each noun on the card in the color assigned to its gender. This will give you a visual cue that will help you remember the gender of the word better. Color coding can be further improved through the mnemonic method: where you study a noun, picture what it describes in your head, and make a mental connection to the color of the grammatical gender.

Relatives: The Comfort of a Familiar

Do this consistently and you will be the master of the German floor in no time. Languages ​​do not develop in complete isolation. They blend as much as the people who speak them and intertwine with bloodlines. Everyone borrows from everyone else, and German is no exception.

A little later, it is important to understand how Germans construct sentences. They do it differently than the Russians, so it’s difficult for beginning students to understand.

  • The Russian language has its own rules, and it is easy to arrange words in a sentence in a wide variety of orders. In German this is strictly prohibited. There, every word has its place, and their order is strictly fixed.
  • To understand, you need to learn conjunctions and remember that in German grammar the subject always comes first, and the predicate comes second.
  • In addition, it is important to learn the forms of verbs, which can also be difficult. You need to learn how to manage them, decline them by case, use them in the plural and singular.

If you need to know how to learn German on your own and quickly, after mastering the basics, start watching films released in Germany. It is useful to include a film that you have seen many times in Russian dubbing, so you are well familiar with the plot and dialogues of the main characters. A simple way of studying will bring a lot of impressions and significantly increase your vocabulary.

This is good news for language learners because of the so-called “cognates”. These familiars cannot start completely from scratch with the language because you have many words at your disposal. Good news for speakers English language is that there are many thousands of German words related English words. The two languages ​​have many common roots.

If you really want to get into it, take a look at the Higher Germanic Consonant Shift rules and it will all make more sense. But even without this, it is easy to see the common history of these two languages. You can find many lists of German relatives with an online search.

Search the Internet for the series in German “Extra Deutsch”. It is designed specifically for learning. The characters in the film pronounce phrases slowly and clearly, so you can calmly repeat the expressions after them. Each episode comes with German subtitles so you can learn the pronunciation and spelling of the words at the same time.

What to do next?

For quick learning language it is useful to use it in different areas life. Find a German news site on the Internet and read the notes published there every day. Right away you will need a dictionary and a lot of time for this, but gradually you will notice that you instantly understand what is written.

The above shortcuts should help you achieve functional fluency faster and get you speaking German quickly. That's when the real fun begins. You may be wondering if you need to learn vocabulary at this point. Are there natural learning methods and linguistic immersion methods? Don't they tell us that languages ​​can be easily learned? Do German children learn vocabulary? Of course they are learning, don't be shy. If you are paying attention, we often use the words of our native language by intuition.

Read a fiction book in German. It is advisable to choose a familiar work, then you will have to look less into the dictionary, because you will understand some words intuitively.

Change the language in settings mobile phone and try to figure out the controls.

It is useful to study information about the origin of the language. This interesting topic, which is intertwined with the history of countries such as Sweden and Denmark.

But the normal thing is that we can't learn like that because we want to learn fast and effective way. Did you know that the brain uses different areas of the cortex for different functions? To remember, we also use different areas of the brain, different “tools”. In simpler terms, we can say that there is a so-called “working memory” that is used to store small amounts of data, for example when they tell us a name or a phone number. This is a memory that is erased immediately, usually lasting no more than 30 seconds, which is why it is called short-term memory.


The final stage

When learning a language at home brings positive results, think about communicating with the residents of Germany. Thanks to modern technologies, it’s easy to do without leaving your apartment.

  • Communities of like-minded people dedicated to the study of German culture, history and language have been specially created on popular social networks. There it is easy to find friends who are fluent in the foreign language you need, enter into correspondence with them and subsequently start communicating via Skype.
  • This practice is incredibly useful because mastering spoken language is the most important step in learning any language. It will help you perceive words by ear, recognize slang expressions and abbreviations.

At first, certain difficulties may arise. To reduce them to a minimum, arm yourself with the necessary notes during a conversation, open a phrasebook and be sure to turn on the online translator on your computer. It will help you translate unfamiliar phrases of your interlocutor. By talking regularly, you will no longer need helpers and will understand everything on your own.

But there is also long-term memory. And how can we learn German vocabulary but we stay forever? We can use several methods. Review makes memory adjustments every time you study again. Even if it seems like you won't, when you forget a word and study it again, the second time you study that word of truth. And organization is what makes it easier for us to learn something when we do it with context. For example, the works of a Spanish man of letters are not studied in the same way if we learn them from memory one by one, than if we read them, if we saw his photograph, or if we knew something about his life.

According to the observations of people who are interested in how long it takes to learn German colloquial speech, this takes about 2 months. During this period, a huge vocabulary is developed and an understanding of how to correctly construct sentences comes.

To learn German from scratch, it is important to immerse yourself in the language environment, read more, listen to songs, and study the culture of Germany. If possible, it is advisable to visit this country, admire the beautiful castles, museums, nature and communicate with people. Having set a goal for yourself, feel free to do everything to achieve it. Of course, at first it will be difficult, but gradually you will get involved and the process will become easier. The main condition for success is regular study, perseverance, and then you will quickly be able to speak German and understand native speakers of this beautiful language.

All these images and data from our memory help us retain data by supporting each other. Then you need a container to store and organize the chips, for which you can use any box or even an empty and clean tetra brick that you have cut a part into.

And you can also buy it. Then you must receive chips. If they are colored, we will use a color for each word type.

Your box will look similar to the image on the left. Once you have this, you only need five minutes a day. A short time? Well, if you really do this every day, you'll see all the things we can do with them. You will have a day to identify the words, five days to study, and a day to review.

If you already have basic skills in any language (except German, of course), it will be much easier for you to learn words and expressions from the speech of residents of Germany, Austria or, say, Switzerland. They already understand grammatical structures, there are standards for comparison and analysis, which means that learning will take less time.

Let's start with the first step: specify the words. On the first day we use five minutes to fill in the words with the words we will be learning. If you have color chips, it will help you to use one color for each noun genre. You know that genres in German are one of the hardest things to learn, but if you put, for example, men's in "blue chips", women's in pink chips and neutrals in "green chips", then it is easier to remember the color of the card later, even if the genre doesn't sound right.

In the front of the tab we put the word only in German, and in the back - in Spanish. If you're efficient, maybe 5 minutes will give you time to write thirty or forty words. So, will you start studying tomorrow? Well no, you have already started learning because by pointing at them, try to remember the words, try to concentrate and not think about anything else. And try also to look at the “picture” of each word. Yes, every word is a picture, and we have the ability to remember the pictures.

Currently, a lot of language centers offer their services for quick learning of the German language. They talk about some incredible techniques that will help you master German in just a couple of months (!). There is truth in this, but only a small part. In fact, their approaches simply focus on spoken language and spend very little time on the grammatical aspects of it.

What to do next?

When you have written them, place the chips in the first compartment.

Today you will use five minutes trying to remember yesterday's chips. And you will follow a simple procedure. If you remember its meaning on Spanish, Congratulations! you already know the word.

What is needed for this?



But it will happen that you don't remember some, and then they can't get into the second compartment. They will remain in the first, but at the end of the deck. Those who will have to repeat them. This procedure must be performed five days a week, since on the first day we allocated it to indicate new words in empty tokens. And the last thing?

Start small and learn the German alphabet. He is in .

Of course, it is impossible to talk about total mastery of German in three months. This technique serves to liberate and bring the student to the contact stage. In principle, any spoken language has a similar goal. The problem is that with the standard, “school” approach, the transition to speaking occurs very slowly, or even never at all. So the technology of teaching German in such centers can be considered rational.

Difficulties of the German language

If you do not want to attend specialized language courses, you can learn the basics of German language and speech on your own. To do this, you just have to stock up on some time, patience and the Internet. In the “web” you will find all the necessary audiovisual tools (audio recordings, pictures, visual aids, dictionaries), which will help you master German at the initial stage. Having done necessary supplies, use the following action plan.

  • Listen to real German speech. This starting technique will allow you to feel the melody of German sentences, to grasp the subtleties that distinguish the language from others. But there will be differences - that's obvious.
  • Repeat what you heard after the speaker. At this stage, you immediately begin to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of speaking German. Teachers at language centers monitor this process, and in their absence we recommend using a voice recorder. By recording yourself and then comparing it with the original source, you can evaluate how well you are doing. Intonation and rhythmic errors will be immediately audible, and you will be able to quickly correct them.

It is recommended to practice phrases at least once a day. You can spend about an hour or two on this - it all depends on the number of conversational units you are working with. At first, it is possible that their perception, repetition and involuntary memorization will take more time. But every time you learn German, you will learn German faster and faster. After about two weeks of these active activities You will begin to notice how you involuntarily tend to use a familiar phrase from the German language in everyday situations. If this happens, you are doing everything right.

  • Compare what you hear with what you see. Here we already mean the transition to the stage of mastering letters German alphabet and developing the ability to put them into words. You will have to act in two steps. First, using the help of a speaker, as well as any phrasebook or German-Russian dictionary, practice pronouncing the letters. Then you can move on to mastering the rules of reading. (For this point, the German language should be given a separate Danke, because in comparison with the same English or French languages, most of the letter combinations seen are pronounced the same way as they are written; there are rare exceptions and features that will not be difficult to remember).

Knowing how words are read, you will be able to practice on simple lexical units from the most understandable areas of our lives (daily routine, leisure, being, flora and fauna, weather, etc.). Plus, this will ensure visual memorization of the word and its association with the Russian version. Therefore, the vocabulary will gradually be replenished, which is also quite important.

  • Reinforce vocabulary with grammar, and theory with practice. In parallel with reading, begin to master the grammatical rules of the German language. Start with the simplest ones - those that will be useful at an early stage. For example, read about how to construct sentences or how verbs are conjugated in the present tense. Don’t forget to consolidate the material you’ve learned by completing tasks from reference books, which are also easy to find on the Internet. By completing such tasks, you will write down answers and thereby train written speech, including not only visual, but also muscle memory.


And don’t give up oral speech either! Try to meaningfully “substitute” familiar colloquial constructions in situations of everyday communication. If you are in a store, imagine that you need to find out in German how much an item costs. Or in the morning you need to greet your “home” or neighbors, or work colleagues... You never know what else you can think of! In a word, practice.

As a rule, if you deliberately set out to learn German, your main enemy can only be time and family circumstances. Having “seven people” makes it quite difficult to engage in self-development. If you need to learn German for work, this procedure is equivalent to forced measures. Here you can already turn on the “I don’t want” or “Oh, how lazy” mode. Then you should remember that you are not in school, and you need this for growth, career and, perhaps, even prosperity.

It turns out that you can quickly learn German. It all depends on what goal is being pursued. If you need to communicate in a language, a decent result can be achieved in 2-3 months. A thorough study will require more time, the main thing is that the initial goal is justified by the means invested in the process of achieving it.

Several sites for learning German online:

  1. Deutsch-online(www.de-online.ru)
  2. Lingust(lingust.ru/deutsch)
  3. Yeshko(www.eshko.ua)

Here you can check your level of German- http://lingvaacademy.ru/language-deutsch-test

A little humor: