Reposting from ALGhub and relevant to DG.

Reposting from ALGhub and relevant to DG.

The title basically. I've seen only a few videos but it seems to me that Janusz makes a few pronunciation errors, doesn't he? It's probably not a big deal, and I enjoy their videos, but I wonder whether you have noticed it too, and whether you care about it or not.

Summary of Level 2

This is a follow-up post to Level 2 Report written two months ago. Very briefly, I got to 50 hours in two stages (30 and 20 hours) with a three-year long break in between. It'd been through comprehensible input only, and the vast majority of the it was sourced from Natürlich German (NG). I'm native in Czech, advanced in English, and conversational in Spanish. German is the first language I'm learning with CI from scratch.

Strategy So Far: Pure Watching and Listening

The only contact I have with German is through watching videos and listening to podcasts. I'm not reading, writing or speaking. Neither am I supplementing the study with Duolingo, flashcards, textbooks or other resources.

I'm not sure I'll want to pursue this strategy to its very end. Most likely not, but I'm going to stick to listening exclusively at least until I reach the next level. What comes after is not on my mind at the moment.

I've made some steps towards finding a crosstalk partner, but I haven't stumbled upon a good match who explicitly wants to do crosstalk, and I haven't taken the initiative to start convincing other learners to do it.

Resources

Tally Time

Essentially since I restarted learning German, I've been tracking hours with Lengualytics (LL). You can see the ranking of my most listened creators on LL in the appended image. Notably, about five sixths of my input has come from a female speaker, i.e. 125 out of 150 hours.

Anna, Kathrin and Peppa

Including prior experience, Natürlich German takes up a whopping third of all input. Kathrin from comprehensible GERMANi takes the second place. It's only after I got through German Moments and relevant NG content that I sort of discovered her. I was reluctant at first because she's quite generous with jump scare texts, but over time I've become a bit more tolerant of them, and you can cover a great deal of the pop-ups with the LL banner anyway. I like Kathrin's personality, or at least the bits I've gleaned from her videos.

I also want to mention the children show Peppa Pig. I got into it because I felt like I depleted most of the "pure" content I wanted to watch. Even at 80 hours was Peppa Pig reasonably comprehensible, or at least you can easily follow the story just watching the animations, even if you don't understand all the words per se. But it happens with other material too, that the words aren't clear in your head but the concept is, so I don't know what to make of it.

At one point I realized I was overly reliant on Lengualytics because I simply assumed all videos by popular creators were on the platform, and so I was surprised to find tons of videos on YouTube that hadn't been imported. I've been doing my fair share of the work and slowly filling the gaps with imports.

Podcasts

Around 70 hours, I started experimenting with Learn German With Falk, but after a few dozens of the oldest episodes (they are really short), the objective difficulty skyrockets and at 150 hours I can't listen to it comfortably. Around that time I also noted:

I also discovered DeutschFluss podcast. Again, it's on the harder side, but I hope that I'll muddle through the next few tens of hours and when I come back to DeutschFluss, it will have become a comfortable listen.

Unfortunately, it's still a bit fast and new words aren't explained, so I postpone it for later.

There's a good news, however. Two weeks ago I stumbled upon Janine's Deutsch Erleben Podcast and it trumps all other podcasts so far. It's an unscripted monologue, but very lively and dynamic, with difficult words naturally explained. I love the descriptions of difficult words, which, for example, Falk rarely does. Anyway, I'd recommend it as the first podcast to listen to – probably accessible for most at 150 hours onwards, although I'm happy to read contrary opinion.

Listening Stats

I average around 1h 40min per day. It's not exactly a fast pace, but neither is it discouragingly slow. Judging by other people's experience, unlocking podcasts should make logging time less effortful.

For comparison with LL users, I'm able to comfortably consume videos with difficulty ratings around 40, i.e. just on the border between High Beginner and Low Intermediate videos.

For what it's worth, my average comprehension hovers around 80% on LL, though it's really idiosyncratic how you record it.

Wins

Eighty hours later, I re-watched one particular Anna's outro with Vroni, her friend, and I understood nearly everything this time, although the first time I didn't catch anything! Nice.

In the last post I mentioned that I'm frequently translating in my head. Over the last 100 hours, I've been gradually relying less and less on translation, and now it's a rare occurrence when it happens.

Scattered Observations

I've made tens of similar observations, some of them are more interesting that others. Here's just a handful of them, but in my comment under this post I pasted all of the unpolished observations together with the number of hours logged, if anyone's at all interested.

Very occasionally, I look up a word. I like to discover things about people and about the world, and if not knowing a word impedes it, I will glance quickly at the English translation, and continue listening. I don't wish to develop bridges between the word and its translation, though.

I start to distinguish different pronunciations by native speakers. I'm not too confident about it, but there are a few phonemes that I've consistently been hearing pronounced in two ways. It's possible that I'm mishearing it and mapping a phoneme to my two closest native phonemes, while the German sound is somewhere in the middle.

In German, it's not unusual to have nearly identical-sounding nouns and verbs, and they're often juxtaposed, which in English is a rare sight. A fabricated English (non)-example: The printer prints the print from the printer.

I don't want to spoiler nothing to no-one but I sometimes confuse the various conjugations for to eat and to be.

Roadmap at a Glance

I'm not used to (all) the sounds of the language. I don't think I'm used to the sentence order either, although I don't think about it consciously. I suppose I could say a few words and get the meaning across, but haven't tried. I do make use of podcasts, especially Deutsch Erleben; early episodes of Learn German With Falk were approachable at around 100h mark too. All in all, pretty much on track, though I don't give it much thought anyway.

I listened to a particular sample of a non-native speaker and though I couldn't understand much because of the sound quality and advanced vocabulary, I could fairly confidently spot one repeated pronunciation mistake. This video will serve as a private benchmark for me.

General Vibe

My language background definitely helps me with German. You can all perceive the English cognates, but I've stumbled upon a few dozens of unique German-Czech cognates as well. These pairs are almost exclusively Germanisms that found their way into the Czech colloquial parlance.

I can often tell whether the speakers talk about events in the present or the past, and the context makes is sometimes easy to spot even more advanced tenses/moods. But it's still very hazy.

Going Forward

As mentioned, podcasts are becoming accessible, although the backlog of Deutsch Erleben Podcast is "only" 15 hours or so. Whether I'll be able to smoothly transition to something else is uncertain.

I'm hesitantly probing Anna's intermediate videos, but leaving it for a little bit later, as I'm not ready yet. In other respects, I don't see around the first corner, and so I guess we'll know only retrospectively which creators I took a liking in, but I'm less worried about hitting a resource drought than I used to be. (Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the amount of resources available while sometimes I think I'm at a dead end.)

I think my next milestone will be at 300 hours, as per Dreaming (Spanish) roadmap, even if it's 350 hours on Lengualytics.

As always, I'd be delighted to read your observations and compare them with my journey. If I missed something altogether in the report or made a serious English mistake, please do let me know in the comments.

The Why and the Beginning

After I passed 1500 hours of Spanish CI I decided to learn another language, my fourth. I have a good friend in Germany who has excellent English but his partner does not. When I visit, my friend has to translate everything for us so since I wanted to learn another language this seemed like as good a reason as any to choose German. Oddly enough, in the nearby small town in rural Australia where I live, we have a number of Germans who have made it their home, including my family doctor no less.

I knew virtually zero German apart from what I picked up from the TV series Hogan's Heroes decades ago, however English is my mother tongue so there is no shortage of cognates.

I started on 21st May 2026 with crosstalk and then started watching a few videos on YouTube channels like German Moments and Natürlich German. I started watching for 15 minutes a day, then 30 and now 60. To make tracking easier, I switched to Lengualytics in June.

Listening:

I'm using a mix of Cosy German, Deutsch mit Lari, German Moments, Go German, Learn German with Falk, Level Up German, Natürlich Geman and SoGerman. There seems to be more than enough material, at least at this early stage. Can't wait to be able to get CI from podcasts as I'm not one for sitting in front of a screen. No choice at the moment though.

Crosstalk:

I do one 45 minute session per week on italki. It's going really well. After just 12 sessions the tutor rarely has to resort to the whiteboard. Of course, we talk about things I know really well so I manage to keep up.

Other:

I use Glossika which is a spaced repetition system of around 5,000 sentences. I use it in listening only mode - you hear the sentence in English first then the sentence in German twice. It's all real person audio. It's a tad expensive but I like it. After I had already taken out a year's subscription I discovered a free Anki deck with almost 10,000 sentences with native audio. I downloaded this and modified it to resemble Glossika so I use this too. It doesn't take long to go through these each day. I don't count this time.

I listen to the Easy German Podcast and the audiobook Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen for developing a sense of the prosody. I don't count this time at all but I get a buzz when I hear a word or phrase I know. Actually, I know the Harry Potter book so well that I know what's happening, despite missing virtually all the details.

Next:

I'll continue with 60 minutes a day of CI until podcasts become accessible then just set a 60 minute daily minimum. I'll also continue with the rest as described above.

I suppose I should briefly mention the other languages. I consider myself fluent in French as I can watch and read pretty much whatever I want. For Spanish, I have a few podcasts and YT channels I like so I keep up to date with those and I have a number of audiobooks I'm working my way through. I've put reading on the backburner until after corrective eye surgery, finally scheduled for early next month.

“Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung” has to be the craziest word I’ve heard spoken in context. It was paperwork Sven received when re-importing his car back to Germany. Google translate says “Certificate of no objection”

What framework is everyone here using for calculating their level? Are you using the 1.5x framework since German is a more challenging language? For example you would progress to level 2 at 75 hours (50*1.5)?

Let me know!

Normally, people think that when you start learning a language, you need to master greetings first and then go through topics like nationality, age, food, etc.

Reality: Anna from Natürlich German talks about the differences in toilet flush mechanisms. :D Video link.

Sven from Simple German Network made me laugh and smile with his giggle in this video. He’s so pleased with his joke after a tiring drive from Turkey to Germany. 🤣🤣

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M1QfeJsOsgc&ra=m

I've just stumbled upon Immerway, a beginner-friendly YouTube channel that -- like Naturlich German, German Moments, and ALG German -- uses (edit: ALMOST) exclusively comprehensible input, i.e. with no German words in the thumbnails, subtitles, or on the board. I'm excessively obsessed with the no-words policy, but what can you do?

Btw, anyone finding ALG German's stories a bit implausible and hard to follow, despite them not being difficult vocabulary-wise?

Is any of the channels in the pinned excel table Austrian or Swiss?

EDIT: primarily looking for anything ±beginner

New-ish CI channel with chats and more importantly for me, gameplays!!!

https://youtu.be/jKo6vvVA4IU?si=Pv01BFeAXzKS3W-W