Hello everyone,
and welcome to a bit of a special article, because today, we’ll not talk about German.
We’ll not even talk about learning German in particular.
Instead, I want to chat a bit about
Learning Material and our Mindset
This whole thing started out as just the intro of an article that I am working on, but it got way too long to actually be in there.
But I still wanted to share this with you, because I have some thoughts about learning material (including my own) and a really nice learning metaphor that might take some study anxiety away from you, if you have that.
If you’re like “Nah, I just want to learn German.” that’s fine. You don’t have to feel obliged to read.
But it’s interesting, I promise.
So, there are two separate, but related things that I want to talk about.
The first one is about learning content or material, and the second one is about you, the learner, engaging with learning material.
The boring headline for the first one would be
Thoughts on the lengths of a piece of learning material
But that’s super boring. So let’s say it like it is.
My articles are often too long
I know many of you are now like “YES!!!”
Of course it’s not true for everyone, but I do have a tendency to do really long articles that are overwhelming for most people. Including me at times, actually.
The reason why I have this tendency is on the one hand that I felt a certain pressure to provide a LOT of value and that people like the “depth” and “nuance”.
But maybe even more important was a certain desire to have “information in one place”. Like… having a base verb like greifen and ALL its relevant prefix versions in one article.
But I realized that this is nice for an encyclopedia. It’s NOT helpful as a lesson for a learner.
This is not necessarily connected to the length in words.
Instead, I think it’s more connected to our working memory.
I’m no expert in any of what I’m about to say, I’m pretty much just using reasoning, so if you know more, please correct me.
But yeah… from what I’ve read, humans can store between 5 and 9 “new items” in working memory at once.
In the case of one of my articles, such items could be new words or concepts.
Now, I think these items can be “enriched” with extra information, like a nice mental image or an interesting connection to English or my personal forté: a particularly stupid example.
Think of these layers as “buckets” that the brain creates and that it organizes information into while taking it in.
Take this example:
- a horse, a dog and a cat
These are kind of three “items” on the same “level”. Now, I’ll add a bunch of info about the cat.
- a horse, a dog and a fat cat that has diabetes and that sits on the window sill all day looking at birds
Again, we have three items on the “top level” and then three items that are in the cluster of “cat”.
This is the layering I mean, and in that way, we can process a lot more information in one context than just 5-10 things.
And interestingly, this layering can happen automatically.
I’ll give you four adjectives and you have to remember them.
- red, blue, gray, green
I think most of us would be able to recall these right away.
Now, let’s do the same, but I’ll just give you 10 words.
- red, blue, green, violet, pink, refrigerator, yellow, black, white, gray
I’m pretty sure that most of us WON’T remember all 10, but I’m sure that most of us WOULD remember refrigerator. Because it sticks out in length and more importantly, it’s a thing, while the other words are all colors. So our brain made up two top level buckets here “colors” and “not color”.
These two buckets are easy to remember, and the one entry in the “not color” bucket as well, but the 9 items in the other bucket… well, that’s a bit too much for a normal working memory.
There’s a lot we can do to help the brain do its organizing work. A simple “and” for instance can also make a difference
- red, green, yellow, black, blue
- red, green, yellow, black and blue
I believe (and I have zero science to back this up) that the latter is EASIER to remember, because the brain can create two buckets – I’d call them “the list” and the “single one”. And now we only have 4 items in the first bucket instead of five, which is lighter on the working memory when it “loads” that bucket.
What does all that have to do with learning material?
Well, EVERYTHING!
The task of a piece of learning material is to organize and cluster the information in a way that makes it easy to retain most of it in working memory because it’s nicely organized in buckets and the working memory is never overwhelmed.
Because once it’s overwhelmed, information will be consumed but not retained, so it’s kind of a waste of time.
I’ve often sacrificed this in favor of having an article be “comprehensive”, but I’ve decided to pay more attention to create them in a way that you can remember the whole thing.
And I’m pretty sure that this last sentence makes quite a few people a bit anxious. Like… feeling pressure that you have to ‘remember the whole thing’, and you think “Oh dear, I probably can’t.”
Which is absolutely not what you should be thinking, because:
Remembering is NOT your job!
And this brings us to my second point.
A mindset for approaching learning material
Most people think when they engage with learning material, be it an article here, a Youtube video or a session on an app, that they need to “do” the learning and remembering.
And I think we should shift our perspective about this.
The learning and remembering is mainly the job of our brains. They were built for this!
OUR job as a learner is to give our brain the opportunity to do its job – organizing, categorizing and storing information.
And that means OUR job is mainly to make sure we approach the learning material with focus, a curiosity and a calm mind.
Think of a learning session as taking a hike on a scenic trail.
What WE need to is pick a trail and walk along the trail.
And the trail leads us through a nice landscape with some particularly nice spots in between. And at the end of the trail, we’ll definitely remember the highlights, and maybe even a bit of the boring sections that led us there.
And that happens automatically!
Like… when we’re standing on that panoramic viewpoint or in front of that really big old tree, we don’t think “OMG, this is THAT viewpoint, I really have to remember that. I hope I can remember that”.
We just think “Oh, this is nice.” or “Oh, this is fascinating.” or even “Wow, this is really overrated.” and we WILL remember it. Our brain does that work, while we just “hike”.
But when we go on the trail and we think about work or we’re on our phone all the time or we need to rush – well then we won’t remember as much. Not because WE didn’t do enough “remembering” work, but simply because WE interfered with our brain doing it.
So we can interfere with our experience of the hike.
And the other thing that can get in the way of us enjoying and remembering the hike is of course… the trail itself.
Imagine we want to go on a trail, we’re calm and curious and really looking forward to hiking this and then the trail sucks.
The markings are bad. We need to stop all the time to check where we’re at and where to go.
Then, there is no trail for 10 meters and we have to walk through bushes.
Or maybe the trail was advertised as easy but then suddenly, there’s this REALLY steep, rocky ascent before that first scenic spot that we’re just not ready for.
Or how about the trail starts off nice, but then all of a sudden, it turns and goes through the shopping district, and then, when we get to the panoramic viewpoint, there’s also a merchant standing right at the best spot who keeps talking to us trying to sell us something.
We will have memories of a hike like that. Our brain will store something. But probably not the memories we came there to make.
Creating good hiking trails is the teachers’ job.
They’re like the park rangers, if you will. They know the area, and they can design various trails along various places for various difficulty levels. And if they do it well, all the hiker /learner needs to do is to really walk it with focus and the brain will remember a lot from it automatically.
So yeah, for any learning material – don’t go into it thinking “OMG, I must remember/learn all of it.”.
It’s not really your job. It’s your brain’s job, and the job of the creator of the material.
Go into it with the mindset of taking a hike through new landscape, and you go in with curiosity to see what’s there. And if you do that and it’s a good trail – you’ll just remember a lot of it automatically.
And that’s pretty much it :).
These were my thoughts on learning material and how it should be and how we should approach it.
And I’ll pay even more attention to making my trails through the German language national park nice.
Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts about this, I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you next time.
Tschau!
On how to learn German properly without being or becoming overwhelmed and in the right mindset , like how u mentioned in this article really liked it . And am interested to see more
Freut mich :)
Please continue to provide ‘depth’ and ‘nuance’. That’s exactly what I like!
I really like your article style. Sure, some people may find it too long, and they may prefer some more “straightforward” articles that just give a list of words with pictures, or give a table of all the personal pronouns. But what really makes your explanations stick is the context, the root of the words, and the “buckets” that arise.
Also, the long explanation resembles that of an official learning material, but unlike a book, which only includes the more “objective” sides of German, you include the “subjective” sides of it and give it nuance that helps the material stick. Thanks a lot Emmanuel :)
I really like it
This is exactly why I love your blog, I believe that a teacher or a course’s role is “to teach you how to fish”.
I use your explanations to categorize words/roots into themes and let the repetition of other native content handle the remembering.
What would have taken tens of repetitions or more to memorize or understand now takes a fraction of that and I find myself much more able to utilize the word than just be able to understand it from context.
Emanuel, you actually already do most of the stuff you’re here suggesting that you will do in the future. You’re an excellent teacher; that’s why we love your blog. Your articles are already short. They do not contain superfluous material. Everyone is allowed to read part of an article and return later for another part. They do feel like a hike in the woods where you can just enjoy the scenery (read it) or you can pay even more attention and stick some of the examples in a memory app like Anki (like taking pictures as you hike). No one learns German only by reading your blog, but every German learner’s life is enriched by the stuff you discuss, which can’t be found anywhere else and gives enormously valuable insight into nuance and how to use words. Thanks so much for continuing to do it!
And no, you can’t use “landscape” without an article.
I am very interested to see how the shorter articles feel. I just read an old one on Warten. It’s great. If somebody wasn’t ready for some of the variations that you included – they can stop. Getting through the whole article is not the point. I got through that article and all of it made sense to me. However, for sure three years ago, I was just getting the first part of each article and it got too deep for me. That certainly did not put me off. I certainly appreciate knowing that you always look to the viewers to make sure they are getting the content. YDG is one of many online resources that I use to learn German. It has a very strong “personality“ and a feeling of authenticity – at the same time it feels also as current as somebody just walking through their town with an iPhone camera and speaking German slowly. Those kinds of resources have personality and authenticity in terms of their particular world, but they don’t do deep dives into how the language is structured. YDG gets deep in the language but doesn’t lose the personality.
Hii is there a way that I can see all the comments I’ve put here? Some recommendations were there, and now I’ve forgotten :(
There’s a rough archive here:
https://yourdailygerman.com/my-comments/
I have not had the time to flesh this out, but maybe you can find what you’re looking for.
I was searching for a book recommendation, and found it.
Thanks!
Nobody can give understanding. Your approach to leading people toward understanding is quite good. I greatly appreciate your thirst and effort to continuously improve, but you’re pretty damn good already.
Wonderful article! One thing that came to mind about remembering is how much work little repetitions can do. This is not not the same as “spaced repetitions” which come days later, but more like a musical theme re-occurring. If your personal comments could be a little more fine tuned to create subtle connections with the instruction, that would indeed be value added.
Don’t think the articles are too long. I like the word history and the Indo-European root stuff. I do think remembering only 5-9 things is right but that’s what review is for, right?
Absolutely, but I think the average reader is more likely to come back to an article if there was just a little bit too much, as opposed to when they’re totally overwhelmed. Don’t worry though, I will not cut interesting or relevant stuff just for length :)
I really like your long in depth articles. One of the first I read was about schneiden and related words. At the time I was struggling with the word durchschnittlich. I came away with good understanding. So I thank you!
some time ago, while a good friend was washing dishes, our discussion decayed rather quickly, and as she squoze a plate to death with red fingertips, out came: “ich kann es nicht mehr – ich kann es nicht mehr.”
i understood her to be perturbed, yet i also remember thinking: “Shouldn’t there be a verb at the end of that sentence?”
it can take a while, but there will come a point where the brain knows more than you do. find a decent pace, then tread some exciting paths.
and try not to smack yourself around too much.
remember, even the best parakeets have a hard time speaking German.
Did you scream „Tun!“ or „Shaffen!“ ? I find myself analyzing my own English and wondering why we use certain prepositions etc. :-)
I don’t read a long article thinking i’m going to absorb it all in one hit. I see it as a resource I can come back to, that i can find relevant information in. And thats not bad.
I don’t necessarily see articles as neat bite sized lessons or the only resource I’ll use to learn german.
The reality is shorter articles , with a “friendlier” length would have to omit depth and really its the in-depth explanantions of nuances that makes this site such a treasure trove for anyone around b1 and above.
Perhaps if you are just starting its overwheleming but once you start looking for a more nuanced understanding of the language the depth of the articles is unique for an english language guide to german imo.
To be honest on the subject of memory I’ve never been so good at just absorbing stuff so do make a concious effort to memorize words using flashcards etc.
That said where i do find i can memorise something effortlessley is if there is a specific encounter with a german speaker where a certain word has a memorable place in the encounter – and then i narurally remember the word. This i think relates to what you are saying in the arrticle..
I see where you’re coming from and I totally agree that it’s important to not feel like you have to remember everything at once. You have to give yourself permission to forget. Because you will forget things, and that’s A-OK. You can:
I don’t fully agree that the teacher should do most of the work. You need a good teacher, no question, and there’s a lot of trust involved in that. Getting a good explanation makes it so much easier to learn, but no one can learn it for you.
If you read something, take it in, and move on, you’ll learn a certain amount. But if you play with it and get hands-on, you can learn more. It can be simple things that only take a few minutes.
Oh yeah 100% agree.
The more you engage and DO stuff, the better.
My main point is basically that of all the things you can DO, “remembering” is not one of them. You can say “I REALLY want to remember that” all you want, but it’s not up to you. Your brain will decide that.
If you do some activity like transforming examples or something… well that makes the job for your brain easier.
How do you go about trying to remember stuff?
I do think of remembering as a skill that can be learned, for the most part. It can take a lot of practice, figuring out what works for you, and being OK with failure. There are limits, and everyone’s different, but our brains are pretty amazing.
Me personally, I do it by feeling really self confident in the moment I learn it. Like… I think “I can remember this.”
And I indeed can learn a lot of vocabulary quickly by just sheer mass exposure, without any context. But I have trained this quite a bit, so I know it works, which does give me that self confidence.
Whatever technique works is fine, but in my view it’s still NOT us that does the remembering. It’s the brain.
Techniques we use are just thing we do to HELP the brain. But we don’t get to decide. Like… you can set the intent to wash your hands in five minutes and then set an alarm and do it, regardless of what you do in the meantime (unless something external prevents you). But you cannot set the intent to remember something in five minutes and the reliably remember it. “remembering” something is something we can influence but not control.
My main point is that we should trust our brain more. It’s good at what it does. And if we help it, train it, then it gets even better.
Have you ever checked out LanguageTransfer? I think you’d find it interesting, in terms of what you’re talking about.
The guy is really intelligent with learning sequences, so that going through his course is almost a passive experience where your knowledge of your NL basically gets massaged into knowledge of your TL. So, it really does feel like being guided down a certain pathway. I think the way he puts it is something like – if you think certain thoughts in a certain order, you’ll come out with a certain knowledge without having had to study it or do anything artificial.
Some of his courses are better than others – he’s got this philosophy about learning that he kinda brazenly (IMO) applies to languages he doesn’t actually speak, and I had some criticisms of his German course (but there were some really cool things about it as well). I really liked the French one and the Spanish and Greek courses are supposed to be excellent.
Your long articles suit me pretty well – maybe because I don’t view them as a course, exactly, maybe to me they are more like encyclopedia entries. As an autodidact I enjoy the process of figuring out what exactly what it is I want to learn and distilling it from the context. The context is interesting and helps me to understand what I end up taking away, and the process of deciding what I want to take and putting it into my own words makes it inherently “sticky.” And I can always come back later for the rest.
Meanwhile the fact that it is stream-of-consciousness, naturalistic, nuanced etc. makes it easier to digest overall than a normal “encyclopedia” article.
So I guess it’s a question of whether any article in particular is a lesson specifically, or whether it’s more for general reference.
I’m with you on that. I imagine there’s a business aspect to it too. Shorter articles probably “sell” better and rent sadly doesn’t pay itself. Although some topics kind of need the extra space to explain them. But I have noticed that some of the older articles are easier to understand now after the re-write.
I don’t know if they sell better, I have no metrics on that, but I feel like the reader walks away calmer and more satisfied overall, which does transfer to more sales, I guess.
I feel like a lot of readers regularly feel overwhelm with my content, not because it’s too difficult but simply because it’s too much at once.
But it’s not about the length in words. This here article is 1600+ words, but there are only three things discussed. So this is very manageable. An article covering all the prefixes for a verb might be 2400 words but it has 20+ things discussed and I actually often cut or shortened explanations. I often like to paraphrase key points and repeat them or go at them from two angles, but if I have too much plot, I can’t give enough space to the scenes, so to speak.
I always felt some kind of spiritual similarity between Language Transfer and Your Daily German. I think it’s because they both feel about learning first, and the language second
If you feel confident in your learning ability you can learn pretty much anything. It’s a bit like giving a person a fish vs teaching them how to fish :)
They definitely both cut out a lot of the BS of a lot of other language learning methods, which is great. I think it’s because they’re responsive to the actual qualities of German as a language instead of teaching it monolithically like “Here’s basic grammar! Here’s a bunch of words for things a tourist might encounter! Here’s another set of grammar!” Like the pacing is actually intelligent and responsive and works, and it makes them both revolutionary (even if Michel Thomas did it first haha).
So I guess I would kind of phrase it backwards from how you phrase it but probably make the same point. Ultimately they are both more clued-in to how the learning process actually works. What courses did you do, did you do German?
I think the guy was in an Easy German video way back in the day, but I’m not sure.
I now checked out the German audio course very briefly and this seems to be pretty much EXACTLY inspired by (stolen from) Michel Thomas.
He used the exact same methodology and class setup, but way earlier.
Generally, I like the idea of this method, but I think it only works in a real life format where you sit in a classroom with a teacher. I would get so bored listening to this and reach for my phone in 3,2… oh already have it.
As for my articles – I do intend to shift them a little more toward lesson, but that doesn’t mean I’ll skip things that are important. I just might split up articles more often into parts. I think I actually skip MORE if I try to cram everything into one article. Some things I then just skip because they’re too much, but in a more limited scope they have space to breath.
That makes sense about skipping things if you try to cram it all into one article. Space to breathe is definitely a good thing.
And yeah, it seems to be basically MT. I can’t say because I’ve never paid for MT. But he never has anything to say to counter the MT comparisons, except to be really pissed off and defensive, and to talk about how MT sued him about the pause button on his app, rather than for the content.
I can see it being boring haha. I always listened to it in the car, I don’t think I could have sat and listened to them in my room without playing minesweeper at the same time or something. I don’t have any attention span for audio material in general unless it’s in the car.
A note about the translation in your email that announced this post:
You translated “Macht euch bereit für mittelmäßige Cartoons.” as “Get ready for ‘mid’ cartoons.”I would say the better vernacular translation for “mittelmäßige” here would be “middling”; more formally would be “mediocre.” But “middling” is a great word, which sounds very Middle English to me, though I don’t know what I am talking about here! The -ling suffix feels like the “-li” that the Swiss add to everything, and we have in English “duckling” for example. In any case, “middling”is not a middling word at all! Nor is “mittelmäßige”. Ein schönes Wort.
Lisa
Hmm, I’ve never heard middling so it doesn’t feel very authentic to use it. I do know mediocre of course, but like you said, I was going for a more colloquial option.
I don’t recall what part of the English speaking world you’re from. Is “middling” used in the US ? Or GB?
“Middling” is definitely a word but I think it’s old fashioned at this point, or possibly a bit high-register. I think I might hear it three times in four years (in the US)
“I think I might hear it three times in four years (in the US)”
Oddly precise :D
I live in the USA (native). “Get ready for ‘mid’ cartoons” sounds natural, if you are speaking casually. Using the word “middling” would not sound natural at all. You wrote it the right way!
Middling was used in my family (Great Lakes area), but I don’t hear it much elsewhere, though I suspect people would know what it meant. Much nicer than mediocre, in my opinion. I don’t think they’re completely synonymous, though. Mediocre definitely has a sour tone to it, while middling is very neutral.
As a teacher of German to foreigners for nearly thirty years, perhaps the best strategy is to try learning contextually, even at the very beginning of the journey!
Watching target language videos with target language subtitles will accustom the foreign-born learner to the native rhythms, cadences and nuances of the daily vernacular, thus gradually eliminating the need to continuously translate from one’s native language.
50+ years ago, I was taught here in the US from “German: A Structural Approach” by Lohnes and Strothmann. Despite the title, the 5 weekly hours of class were accompanied by at least as many hours of “language lab” which included lots of Diktate – writing out the normally-spoken German as it was dictated, with understanding rather that translation the point of the exercises. That old-fashioned method was terrific – so much easier and useful to do the dictation if you got the Gestalt (to use le mot juste <g>) rather than getting stuck on the literal “meaning” – Doesn’t work quite as easily in one’s 70s, but it is the best way to learn.
Did you have any hints in writing to help you figure out what they were saying, or was it all by ear? And did they ease you into it at all, like giving smaller chunks to start?
That kind of thing can be a real challenge. The easiest way I’ve found is to take a short video with subtitles, something like Super Easy German. Listen once or twice with subtitles, then listen again to small chunks and don’t look at the subtitles. You can close your eyes or put your ear up to the speaker. See what you can hear and compare it to the subtitles. Pause and rewind as much as you want, and stop when you get tired.
I did something similar when I was “preparing” for my semester abroad in Finland and my English was very bad. I watched Futurama director commentary track and I would rewind SO MUCH. With normal movies too. I would rewind until I actually heard that they said what the subs said they said. It’s work for sure, but it works.
The channel Natürlich German is REALLY good for this kind of content. She does a lot of repeating and gestures in the video so you don’t have to stop and rewind.
Oh, I remember “language lab” from French classes in school. We were all sitting in a room with separated booths with headphones and had to listen and write down some French, either as dictation or just to answer a bunch of questions about what we’re hearing as we’re listening to it.
Know the book well, came out roughly around the same time as “Verstehen und Sprechen”, an old-fashioned type US -textbook in English but with a drab German title, mostly for college-age students.
My problem with the standard grammar-translation method from years back is that, a la Berlitz, there’s oodles of mind-numbing repetition with practically no interactive, contextual application, cf. with source language textbooks from Germany such as “Berliner Platz 1-3”.
I’m speaking only from my teaching experience.
As we say in German, “Jedem das Seine [und mir das Meiste]”. LOL
An excellent overview with helpful comments. I agree with each point. Thanks.
For some reason, this topic has been following me around lately.
If you can access X, here’s an essay that resonates well with what you have said. Really well.
https://x.com/Morphenius/status/1640811637031723008
If you cannot, then I will be happy to forward it via email.
“So most “math” class induces math TRAUMA.”
OMG, this is so true!!
I was very very good in math, it came easy to me. But there were other people in the class who were REALLY bad and I think the field divides fairly early. I don’t think there’s much of a middle class in math too. So either people are good or bad, but they’re not just okay.
And I believe that the people who are bad, at least some of them, are so bad because they had a few bad experiences with math early on and they identify as bad. Most people are able to follow logical reasoning chains so most people are capable of doing math on school level is my opinion.
There’s just a block there that has nothing to do with math and a lot with how you “feel” about yourself in relation to it.
Great thread, thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome, of course.
Notice that the author points out that this trauma-inducing authoritarian method of education applies to all the subjects, not just math.
Yeah, I was good at math too. A lot of the time I got the correct answers, but I couldn’t tell you how I got there. I had to memorize their approved proofs. I loved the puzzles and the logic exercises anyway.
At any rate, your own approach to teaching is playful, and induces curiosity — yeah, even for German cases and prefixes.:-D Thanks for putting that out in the world.