If you would like to learn German fast, we have a few tips for you. While learning a language does definitely take time, effort, and also just a lot of "getting used to", these five tips can really help you speed up your progress with German.
1. Modal Verbs
Our very first piece of advice is to learn the modal verbs in German as soon as possible. Modal verbs are words like "can", "must", "want" or "should".
What's so great about modal verbs is that they allow you to construct a variety of sentences very very easily.
The magic comes from this: Just like in English, German modal verbs require the second verb to be in the infinitive form. This means that if you know how to conjugate the modal verb, you only need to remember the infinitive form for the second verb:
- Ich muss gehen.I must go.
- Du musst gehen.You must go.
- Er muss gehen.He must go.
So, instead of having to remember Ich gehe, Du gehst, Er geht, you now only need to remember the word
gehen. And if you then decide to add a few more verbs to your vocabulary, you'll already know how to use them
in sentences, as long as you can remember the infinitive.
2. Study Cognates
A second piece of advice is to study cognates. When two words that belong to different languages look very similar, but have different meanings, they're called false friends.
Two words are cognates, on the other hand, when they belong to different languages, and seem very similar (because they are spelled or pronounced very similarly), but also have the same meaning in both languages.
- der Studentstudent
- das Museummuseum
- das Radioradio
- das Hotelhotel
Sometimes you will have to think a little to find a cognate. The German word , for example, doesn't sound anything like dog. However, if you think of the English word "hound" instead, you might have an easier time remembering it.
3. Use Frequency Lists
Once you've got your modal verbs down and made sure to learn as many cognates as possible right from the start, we can move on to words that aren't that easily guessed.
Those, unfortunately, will have to be studied. The good news, however, is that some words appear far more
frequently than others. In English, the tiny article the and conjunctions like and, or and because come up constantly. The same is true in German — and a frequency list tells you which words to learn first, so you spend your time on the vocabulary that actually appears in real sentences.
4. Practice Spaced Repetition
Practice spaced repetition early on and keep working at it in the early intermediate stages, until you can read native-level material and words & phrases start re-occurring naturally.
Until then, we recommend using a tool like Anki or physical flashcards, to make sure you repeat the material you've learned.
Flashcards
TODO: Implement flip functionality to show front/back interactively
5. Immerse, Immerse, Immerse!
Immersing in content is a topic in and of itself, but the headline is simple: the more you immerse in German and the more you stay in the zone of comprehensible input — material you can mostly follow on the first pass — the faster you'll see progress.
A few low-effort places to start: German podcasts in the background while you cook, German audiobooks alongside their print versions, and accessible German news articles for short daily reads. None of this needs to be intensive — consistency matters more than effort per session. For a fuller breakdown, our guide to how to immerse walks through the practicalities.
That's the whole shortcut: modal verbs first, cognates next, frequency lists for the rest, spaced repetition to lock it in, and immersion to glue everything together. None of it is glamorous, but together they will take you further in six months than most learners get in two years.