The question is:
when are you finally going to use it?
When you were always looking for a way to learn the German grammar in a creative way without getting frustrated but you’re NOT willing to spend even more money on even more courses or grammar books, then you’ll find the information on this website the most valuable of its kind.
Dear student of German! (and the following also regards teachers of German)
Does the following sound familiar to you?
Every day your teacher explains new grammar rules and when you’re studying at home you feel overburdened because you have no idea HOW you’re going to learn all these rules?
You’re afraid to make a conversation in German because you make too many mistakes and you don’t want to look stupid?
You really don’t know how you can learn to use the correct article with each noun in a lasting way?
You still don’t understand the declension of the adjectives?
You live, work or study in Germany and therefore you want to master the language but you think: „I won’t be able to do it because it’s so difficult to learn the grammar!“?
Often you lay in your bed and feel frustrated and lonely, because it’s all chaos in your head due to the lack of a comprehendible system?
The „learning assistance“ of your teacher consists of the expression: „You simply have to learn this!“??
Every month you transfer money for your course of German, but you have the impression you don’t make much progress?
You already spent a lot of money on German textbooks or software, but somehow they don’t offer anything new?
You don’t have a definite answer to the question "HOW do you actually learn the German grammar rules?“
When you find yourself in one of the situations above, I can tell you … you’re not the only one. The same happened to most of my students, until I finally found the most important clue, which until then was still missing, for learning German with a maximum result.
In 2000, when I started teaching German as a foreign language in Berlin, at first I was very proud that I was the the person in my students´ life to explain the complicated German grammar to them. But somehow I noticed that the subject matter continuously extended and that most of the time there was no logic in the rules. My students used to say with a confused expression: „Yes, I understand“, but when more and more students started to ask: „HOW should we learn all this?“ it became clear that there is nothing to understand about German grammar. Most of it is abstract and illogical; you „simply have to learn those rules by heart“.
At that time I wasn’t able to give any better advice than „You simply have to learn it by heart“ either. This was a pretty unsatisfying situation, both for my students and myself: to be bombarded with rules without a powerful LEARNING TECHNIQUE results in more frustration.
This insight haunted me, but I just didn’t know how I could help my students in an effective way … until one day I had a crucial experience:
I participated in a workshop on „Mnemotechnics“. To put it roughly, it involves mental techniques to build a super-memory.
I admit that it sounds a bit suspicious, but I just wanted to know what it was all about. In short: it was absolutely CRAZY!!
Here is how students of German are enabled to learn the German articles 72 percent better.
How it works? Very simple! We simply have to take all the "commonplaces“ seriously:
A PICTURE TELLS A 1000 WORDS!
The trick of mnemotechnics consists of CREATING images where there wasn’t an image before. For instance: when learning the German articles.
And it works like this:
For every article we use a symbol. For the article „der“ we’ll use something male, for instance a lion. It could of course also be a man or else something that you like. In my example I use a lion for the article „der“, and then it looks like this:
Now, when you want to learn for example „der Stuhl“ (the chair), you just imagine that the lion bites the chair. You can create another image, of course; the only important thing is that the lion does something with the chair and not just stands besides it. For example, in my course I use the following image:
I’m pretty sure that you see the difference at first glance. You’ll remember the image a lot easier than the two words „der Stuhl“, which simply is too abstract and easy to forget. Are you still skeptical? Well, maybe you are and that’s all right, but I can assure you the following: When you use a symbol for every article, you will be able to learn the articles a lot better. Here you see actual statistics from my courses on the articles – and until now there hasn’t been one course where it didn’t work!
Probably now you ask „huh“? Is it that simple then?“. Yes, it surely is as simple as that! Of course it requires a bit of time. My article-course lasts for two hours, but I can assure you that my students are absolutely thrilled after the course. When abstract information is transformed to comprehendible images, these images are called „mnemonic images“ or „memory images“, and really, they do have a magic impact on your memory!
And the brilliant thing is: This principle not only works for the learning of German articles, but it works basically for ALL the subjects of the German grammar!
Here’s another useful hint: https://sl1nk.com/7xvsz73
