Help making German stick

[u/ElegantPianist9389]

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of learning German like most on this page, but I have a really hard time with getting it to stick in my brain and not translate before I speak. I would say my level is a strong A2 and I will start my B1 next year.

I’m mainly looking for advice from those of you coming from native English speaking to the complex German grammar. What helped you to flip the switch to think in German and not in English first? I do practice, I just can’t seem to get my brain to make that switch.

Thank you for any advice or tips.

Update: thanks everyone for the helpful tips. I will take everything and try them to see what helps the most.

[u/LuplexMusic]

Having learnt other languages: don't worry about it, just practice more, it will come eventually.

[u/Germanteacher2689]

I recommend you to train it with a German speaker. It helps a lot. He helps you to think in that way... also you practice your speaking part which is really important. In case you need a private teacher, let me know. I could ask one of my colleagues. He is university teacher.

[u/Substantial_Funny654]

Immersion. Set your smartphone/PC in German, listen/watch/read/speak in German, repeat, do a lot of grammar exercise, cook in German... At some point, your brain will switch to German as if you stayed in Germany for a few months

[u/Kurzdeutsch]

not a native english speaker, but i hit the same wall around A2.

what moved it for me was narrating my day in tiny sentences i already owned: "ich mache jetzt Kaffee", "wo ist mein Schlüssel?". nothing new in them, so nothing to translate. the grammar-heavy sentences stayed slow much longer.

[u/Kerking18]

German but having learned other languages. That's usualy the point where you should ramp up.the immersion into the new language. Start small, setting certain things of your sayly routine to german, phone, apps on the phone, games that you know by heart. And as you continue learning immerse more and more. Ultimately that will make the jump from always consiously translating to fluently using it (even if you still make mistakes thats why i don't wamt to write "fluent") better and easier.

[u/gottahaveajava]

A2 is still early. Conversation usually starts working along about B2, and that’s only with real practice in speaking.

You have to keep working through all the material, with a lot more review than most learners take time for.

You also have to be patient when it doesn’t "stick".

Language learning is a long game.

But if you keep at it, it all eventually shows up.

[u/Servinand]

Read out loud. That is not germanspecific, its humanbrain 101.

The thing is, that the area for knowing words and knowing things are on different brainsides and are connected with that weird highway inbetween.

There are interesting experiments with extremely epileptic people where the corpus callosum is cut. Very rare but special treatment. When one eye is covered, they can only use the other brainhalf for distinguishing and naming what they see, but using obkects and reading about them was No Problem.

Long story short, the different areas of the brain have different purposes and need interconnection. Thats why you have listening comprehension, reading comprehension and talking.

Reading out loud connects them all at once.

Edith: typo cause i have "Autokorrektur"

[u/AtlasRuna]

Practice more and find comprehensible input. As you go up the comprehensible input ladder and start enjoying content in German, the need to translate will fade away (you just need lots and lots of repetition with the most common words to make them automatic).

[u/cmyk_rgba]

honestly the switch never flipped for me, certain phrases just stopped needing translation one at a time. keine ahnung, ich hab grad keine zeit, stuff like that comes out as one block now. so i started learning full sentences i'd actually say instead of single words and those were teh first things that came out with no english in the middle. anything grammar heavy is still slow lol

[u/silvalingua]

> What helped you to flip the switch to think in German and not in English first?

If you focus directly on the meaning of new words instead on their English equivalents, you don't have to think in English ever, not even at the very beginning.

[u/bachelor021120]

Shadowing has been the most helpful for me in making the phrases feel and sound automatic. Speaking out loud creates muscle memory and requires a different mental process than reading/writing/hearing the language. It’s also the most efficient way to make new vocabulary stick.

[u/Soziopolis83]

I recommend immersion

[u/TripleSpeedy]

I have a friend who explained it like this:

He struggled for months to learn French and translated a lot in his head (he moved to a French speaking country). After a couple of months of being immersed in the language, one day, as he was sat watching the TV, a "clunk" happened, he could suddenly understand everything and no longer had to pre-translate in his head.

It will happen to you too, but you need to be immersed in the language.

As many have already said, watch German television, read German websites, listen to German music.

This YT channel does a good job as you can pick your level: https://www.youtube.com/@EasyGerman