Learn German Your Way - German Class is Optional

By Max Sprechen

There are many ways to learn German. About all classes and instructional courses can only take you so far in the German language, however. The more you participate in learning German outside the class room, the more quickly and solidly will you learn how to speak German. A good German class (whether high school, college or adult class) with a good teacher can give you a solid foundation on grammar and important words. If your class isn't teaching you important basic German skills such as the present, past and future tenses of verbs and the grammatical cases of nouns, pronouns and adjectives then its not doing you very much good.

If you really want to learn how to speak German well, I recommend that you don't depend on the class as your primary means to learn German. I honestly believe that learning German is something you do on your own and you can use the German class as a tool to help you make it over difficult areas and to answer questions. I can say this from experience. I took an adult class the first month I started to learn German, but then had to quit it because I was moving. So, I kept the text book and just learned out of the book and practiced with a neighbor who was a native German. In my experience I really did not need a class at all.

Now, I'm not putting down on German classes. In my case, a year later I signed up for the Goethe Institut (a good German language institute) in Munich, Germany. I took an entrance test and placed myself in the first intermediate level - not bad, huh, for learning German a year on my own! However, I discovered that even when I was at the Geothe Institut I learned most of my German getting out around Munich, meeting people, talking with Germans. There's nothing more fun than learning German this way.

So, there are many different ways to learn how to speak German and all can be good. High School and college classes usually cover the basics, unless you are getting a masters degree. There are also excellent, but expensive institutions like the Goethe Institut, which has branches in North America and Germany. If you are determined to learn German in Germany, you may look into various German universities. Many of them have German language courses for foreigners and are inexpensive. Just a couple of the universities who offer "Deutsch als Fremdsprache" courses are the University of Freiburg and the University of Tubingen.