DS 15 wants to learn German

[FluffyUnicorn84]

First post as OP and really regretting my name but can't think of a better one 😂

DS 15 has decided that he wants to become (eventually with a lot of work) fluent in German.

He already learns it at school and is achieving good grades (going into Y11 next year), worst be gets is a 7, got a 9 on his most recent exam but that was speaking only.

He's doing a lot of Duolingo and whenever he watches something on TV if it's with us he puts on German subtitles if it's just him in German with German subtitles though he struggles to follow.

I'm thinking of asking my SIL (who is German but lives in the UK) if she or her sister who lives in Germany if they know anyone who he could go and see at some point to try and get that immersion.

He's asking me and DH if we have any ideas on how he can improve his understanding and speaking. We've never been linguists but we've always said it's important and now just wondering if any of you learnt a language in your teens and how you did it?

Thanks

Or if any of your teens learnt a language how did they do it

You have a native speaker in the family. Regular Skype calls with her would help a lot.

Is there a Goethe Insititut near you, sometimes they do open events.

I started listening to DW - news bulletins in German, the beauty of this is if he's also listening to the news in English he will have a 'key' into the story, and can also read the articles on the app/website.

I’m learning Italian & one thing I’m doing at the moment is listening to Italian audio book versions of books I’m already familiar with in English. I don’t get every word but I’m getting better, & I can do it while doing other stuff.

I use the Libby app - if your DS has a library card he can sign up, it’s free.

Well, he's doing all the right things. Now it's just practice. Is he able to talk to your sil in german? Can you take a family trip to Germany? In a year or so, he is probably old enough you could send him alone for the summer, especially if your SILs sister was willing to be nominally responsible for him.

Is there a German school near you? Perhaps you can contact them and ask about extra curricular activities and events.

Learning any language is practice and time. But he's well on his way so I would think the moment he spends some time in German speaking.country he wil rapidly become fluent.

Podcasts are a brilliant way to learn a language and listening to stories.

Can he do A-Level German at a sixth form after GCSEs even if he has to move schools to do it?

Or try the Goethe Institut for courses both online and in person.

Really good that he's so enthusiastic to learn this wonderful and incredibly valuable language! V important to encourage this and ensure as many kids as possible have the chance to study German at GCSE and beyond.

I'm an A-Level German specialist teacher btw. Feel free to msg me if you want to chat further

Watching TV/films, where you hear the spoken language. Depending on his level, with or without subtitles. Much goes in by osmosis that way. If he can find German language music, rock/pop/whatever. All helps

Glasgow and London only sadly, I'm not near either

DS decided at the very end of yr 11 that he was going to squeeze in A level German as well as his main subjects, and that summer threw himself into it fully. He'd read somewhere that, I think, you need a 5000 word vocabulary - so set that as his target and used things like memrise to work towards it. (I think it took him just under 6 months, about November he announced he'd got there). He too set his phone and his computer systems to German, watched news and podcasts in German and so on. I remember the first point I thought "he's really getting somewhere" was when I started hearing him laughing at jokes when watching stuff. Then last summer we had a trip to Bonn; I recall him managing to go round a museum with the German audioguide not the English one.

I'll ask him what he thought the most useful websites / videos / whatever were when he first got going. He's awaiting his A level results at the moment, still listening to stuff in German alongside his maths (what he wants to do at uni). If something's gone very wrong with his exams he might well explore doing more German with a view to being able to study there - he looked into it initially and felt he'd need a gap year to get to the necessary standard.

Good luck to your son and hope it works well for him!

When his vocabulary has expanded a bit he could also try reading some German translations of books he already knows fairly well - I found Agatha Christie books are pretty easy reads in translation, but equally something like Harry Potter might work if he's read those before.

Good call. Funnily enough, I'm a native German speaker and Agatha Christie was incredibly useful for learning not German, but English. Probably because the language is plain enough to get the meaning without constantly resorting to a dictionary.

I'd say reading, and plenty of it, is about 50 percent of mastery, with the other half immersion in spoken language. Watching English language films with German subtitles is unlikely to be very useful, it should be the other way around. Not much on Netflix etc but German public TV has loads of content on their web archives - some of it may require a German VPN for streaming but that's doable as well.
https://www.ardmediathek.de/
https://www.zdf.de

In terms of content, probably a good idea to start out with some high quality kids' programming - I'd recommend the wildly popular Sendung mit der Maus (https://www.wdrmaus.de/) which is a general education format and should be pretty easy. Once he's got better comprehension, probably some of the endless supply of crime serials- not the prime time Tatort which gets carried away on edgy visual or audio features but the dozen or more plain vanilla 6pm serials (can be found via the programmes also available on the Mediathek.)

Good luck!

Immersion is definitely the way forward. Talking to SIL on German would be an easy start. But I would also ask her if she knows anyone in Germany with a teen who would like to do an exchange. We organised this with a friend of a friend. My daughter flew to France alone at 15, was met by the French family and spent a week there. Then the French girl stayed with us. It's basically free except the flights. The more time he can spend in the country the better.
Also worth looking for German language films or tv to watch. Putting the subtitles on either in English or even in German if he can manage it really helps comprehension.

The Goethe Institut offers a range of things which include an after school online course in German for teens:

https://www.goethe.de/ins/de/en/jug.html

He might enjoy one of the Mary Glasgow publications for German - they will be pitched at exactly the right age:

https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/mgmgerman

If he is going to study German seriously, I would advise getting Hammer's German Grammar and Usage - there is a matching workbook too:

https://www.routledge.com/Hammers-German-Grammar-and-Usage/Durrell/p/book/9780367150266

https://www.routledge.com/Practising-German-Grammar/Durrell-Kohl-Kaiser/p/book/9781138187047