To Learn German You Need to Invest the Time

Well, here’s my 2 cents.  You need to spend lots and lots and lots of time — hours and hours — learning any language.

For me, Rosetta Stone — I use their new TOTALe product — is the easiest and most fun and more “passive,” least boring, way to spend hours and hours and hours “immersed” in the language.  So, in that regard, it is perfect!

So, even though it is “easy” that doesn’t mean you need to slack off.  You still need to indulge in 60-minutes and more/day in order to move forward in the software and not just tread water in course software.

I love it now that I realize that it is not a toy but is as serious as Hartnackschule Sprachschule in Berlin or the Goethe-Institut in München.  The Rosetta Stone software is not a toy and it isn’t just something passive.

If you spend the amount of time immersed in the software as you’re expected to Hartnackschule or Goethe-Institut then I guarantee you’ll learn not only more but you will have a better accent and mastery of the spoken language — because unlike a classroom of 10-30 people, you are constantly the only focus of the software — it is making all of its language-teaching choices based on how well you’re doing and how much you get.

Mind you, you’re never going to learn academic German through Rosetta Stone but that’s not what they’re teaching.  They’re teaching you — and me — how to talk to people in as many real-world, messy, creative, experiences as possible, using pronunciation that they person you’re going to be speaking to probably actually can parse and understand.

And, since you’re spending all of your time immersed in the software and listening to only German and only native German-speakers and you’re not in class and able to trick your teacher into explaining stuff in English, then you really do get a solid base for comprehension.

The most important thing when it comes to speaking, as I am sure you’re all aware, is not actually asking the questions in German but being able to make sense out of the answers, too.

I think that Rosetta does that — now that I am actually spending the sort of hours of commitment that it takes to make some forward process and “change my brain” to start thinking — and dreaming and obsessing — in German.  Cool?

(I originally wrote this over on the Toytown Germany message boards)