Learning German to Fluency – How I did it

Over 10 years ago, I was told on one of my first days of secondary school that I’d be learning German. Ten years later, I’ve already been living in a German-speaking city for three years. Here’s my German-speaking journey, including some of my top tips for building fluency in German.

“Wow, your German is so good!”

Anyone who has learned a foreign language and speaks to native speakers will have heard this phrase (or a similar one) countless times. It can be nice to hear when you feel the person saying it genuinely means it. Despite this, after a while it starts to lose its motivational effect. That’s not to say I never appreciated it. After all, it’s better to hear this than nothing at all, I suppose.

The goal for me was for the idea of me not being a native speaker never entering my conversation partners’ head. As a native English speaker, you are quite in-demand for helping with people’s English.

Perseverance was key. The second anybody noticed I was British, they would only speak in English. Sticking to my guns and pressing on in German was at times clunky, but necessary to building fluency. After a while I learned where my mispronunciations were happening most frequently, and with friends I’d practice with those specific phrases.

For example, I always stressed the wrong part of the word Monat, German for “month”, and struggled pronouncing “ch” in “manchmal” (sometimes). After enough concentrated effort, however, these mistakes disappear. It was most definitely a step closer to learning German to complete fluency. You can communicate fluently with mistakes, but for me it wasn’t enough.

Learning German Smart – Not Hard

Looking back, however, most of the hard work was done before I moved to Vienna in 2020. In classes, firstly up until my GCSEs in 2018, and my IB in 2020, I was working so incredibly effectively – not hard. I was immersing myself in German outside of class hours. That meant listening to German music, watching German series. To go one step further, I set my phone and Siri to be German, and listened to a news podcast in German.

This was all relatively passive stuff – I was doing it all already, now just in a different language. After a year or two of doing this, the foundation really was laid for me to become completely fluent.

I always loved learning German in class at school, but I could never claim it was mostly responsible for my now fluency. There’s one principle reason for this: No one ever wanted to speak it.

With the exception of one or two teachers I can recall, none of the teachers, nor any of my classmates, ever actively spoke in German. This was always a relief to me, as I found it embarrassing to make mistakes. But really, that’s what would have unlocked it for me.

Once in Vienna, it took me a while to ‘warm up’ to Austrian and Viennese dialects. In school I’d learned High German, and it takes a while for the ear to ‘re-tune’ to the regionalised versions. Once I had, though, fluency was already at my doorstep.

Top tips for fluency when learning German

No one set of advice could ever work for everybody, and my journey is unique to a lot of other people’s. For example, ‘move to a German speaking country’ is not even on this list as it won’t apply to all too many people.

• Surround yourself in the language: Set your phone language. Find YouTubers and series in that language that you like to watch. Listen to podcasts. Here’s an example of mine for German: Kliemannsland.
• Make mistakes speaking: Find someone you can speak with, with the full intention of making mistakes. Getting over that initial embarrassment is really the price you pay early on for building fluency.
• When speaking with natives, politely persist with the language you want to speak. Perhaps offer them classes in English in exchange for classes in your target language. After a while, people won’t even recognise your native language.