1. First 9 months living in Deutschland

I came to Germany in Janury 2019 knowing about 10-20 words total (active and passive vocabulary). I'd never studied it before nor been interested in doing so. Things were very busy right from the start with getting life sorted out and I was overwhealmed by how much there was I had no clue about - I couldn't even recognize any words or have any idea what they might mean.

In February I learned about 500 of the most common words in German (from a frequency list from germanprofessor) using Anki. I rushed through and I don't think it was very effective. I then started to copy and paste bilingual dictionnary definitions into Anki to learn words in context.

To be continued....

Resources:

• Grimms Grammar from UT Austin - grammar guide with lots of example sentences


• Medimops.de - buy new/used books, CDs, DVDs etc in German (be sure to check the item's details as some are French or English. Also, 'acceptable' books may have loose pages (learned this the hard way...)


• GoldenDict - free dictionary program that I run on my Linux computer and Android phone, loaded with the Duden Universalwörterbuch (monolingual) and PONS Universelles Wörterbuch Deutsch-Englisch. Works really fast, very customisable, invaluable resource! Forget about paper dictionaries!

Anki tips:

Searching for 'mp3' in the browser will show all cards with a .mp3 file in them (it will find mp3 in the audio name).
To find the cards WITHOUT audio, search for '-mp3', then you can add audio if you wish using AwesomeTTS.