r/German

so we knew each other for more than 7 months now, they started calling me darling VERY early into the friendship. once i asked why they said "oh it's a thing that friends call each other in germany", is it true? i'm so freaking curious

Hey everyone,

I could really use some advice because I feel a bit stuck in my B1 journey.

My daily routine is working with Starten Wir 1 for 1-2 hours a day, alongside ChatGPT (using my native language for explanations). When I chat with AI and we do grammar drills, everything clicks. It all makes sense, and I feel like I'm getting it.

The problem starts the second I open the Arbeitsbuch.

Even on a super short exercise where I just need to plug in 6 words into a 3-line text, I crash—especially now that I'm dealing with the Plusquamperfekt.

It usually goes down like this:

• Whenever a tense shifts, it suddenly feels like a completely foreign concept.
• ChatGPT keeps telling me to learn in "chunks" and stop translating word-for-word. Makes sense in theory. But the moment I'm staring down an exercise or a test question, my brain panics, defaults back to literal translation, and the whole sentence just turns into nonsense.
• If there's a new expression or chunk I haven't memorized yet, I completely freeze.

So here is my main question: Is using my native language as a crutch the actual issue here? Should I completely ditch my language and force myself into a 100% German-to-German learning style? Or is there a trick to bridge this gap between "understanding the grammar with AI" and "actually surviving an exercise"?

Would love to hear how you guys overcame this. Thanks!

I am at B2/C1 level for about a year now, when I talk to a individual person, the communication usually functions, maybe they are kindly adjusting to my level. But when I'm talking with a group of German friends, I can hardly be part of the conversation, because they will talk a lot faster and more casual comparing to when they talk to me individually, and I start to not understanding and not having time to think out my sentences.

How they talk is very different from the usual language learner materials, like podcast, news, etc., in which the hosts speak most of the time very clear.

Does anyone have similar experience and know how to improve this?

Hi guys, can you please suggest me an Institute (other than Goethe) or a teacher, who teach B2 German in India? I gave B1 exam and now looking forward to give B2 Goethe exam.

So I wanna study for telcb2 exam by myself but I Keep jumping from resouce to resource like I pick grammtik aktiv a1-b1 which I find like too hard to understand on your own then I did practise makes german perfect which I did almost complete but I cant remember most of the rules and verbs.

The only correct thing I do daily is learn 20 words on anki.

Grammar and exam prep is absolute mess for me. Please advice me. Any proper resource to learn in order or just pick some random grammar topic and learn it?.

Hallo zusammen,
nachdem die Schreibweise von Tod-t schon verrückt ist, habe ich bei einem Use-Case mir folgende Frage gestellt:

Heißt es Tod an/von Person.
Kontext: Es geht um einen Racheakt, der nach dem Tod einer Person passierte. Darauf wollte ich eine Schlagzeile kreieren.

Hi all, I'm mostly a beginner learner and I was wondering what are some common ways to say you're sorry, and the contexts in which you'd use them? Is "Entschuldigung" the standard word? If I wanted to say something more akin to "my bad" (i.e. a quick casual apology), what would be the closest equivalent? Something like "Mein Fehler"? Thank you!

I'm learning German as my Gen Z niece told me to: Memrise, Praktika, a teacher in iTalki, and I keep noticing that literal translations of ordinary phrases are like almost aggressive in English.

Take "Was willst du?" word for word it becomes "What do you want?" That sounds confrontational in English, and in German it's a neutral way to ask what someone needs. Germans also skip the "could you please" that English speakers add to requests.

I suspect half of the "Germans are rude" stereotype comes from English speakers hearing the literal translation and making it harsher than it is meant to be.

Are there other phrases like this, where the German is ordinary, and the English version sounds harsh?

It's okay if it includes an app, but not for the sake of promoting the app, but actually being best in your POV

The time range a day is 2 hours, do you think that's long enough?

Do you think 100 words is a good rate or high or not enough?

I would like to go from A.0 to B.1 in 6 months

Hey everyone! I am currently a B2 student and after finishing B1, I noticed a huge difference in the amount of verbs I have to memorize and it is becoming very overwhelming.

My big issue is that, unlike nouns, verbs in German are very confusing because they are all very similar especially the ‘Trennbare Verben’ like zunehmen, annehmen and aufnehmen all have completely different meanings.

What method would you guys suggest to use for memorizing all the verbs specifically?

In some regions (Berlin for one), there is a somewhat weird way to indicate possession.

- Maria ihr Auto ist gelb.
- Ich habe Thomas seinen Bruder getroffen.
- Ich habe ihm ihm sein Geld gegeben. (pushing it here)

Now I just had an idea where this MIGHT have come from or at least have been facilitated by:

- Der Dieb hat Maria ihre Brieftasche geklaut.

This is a proper possessive pronoun, but you can also read it as this exact colloquial structure above.

Native speakers... what do you think? Does it have some merit or nah? Or do you have some insight as to where the sturcture comes from?

(asking in English so all the beginner learners in this sub can read it)

hi i need some help with writing 😭 i know the basics of how to identify formal and informal and how to address and end them. i need help with sentence forming any tips ? and any sentences i can memorise than can ALWAYS be used like for example informell i can always use “wie geht’s es dir” thank youu

Do both of these sentences work? And if so which sounds more natural? Is there any nuance between theme -

* Ich wohne hier nicht.

* ich wohne nicht hier.

I feel like the first one is better, but I am not sure. And if they are both valid, is there a difference in connotation / nuance between them?

Just a random thought, you use Sie to formal situations, people you don't know, people older than you..etc.

Then I wondered do parents teach their 5 year old kids the difference between du and Sie? Sound a bit too much grammer for a little kid.

Hello all!

I started A2 recently, and there is one thing I am really struggling with ever since I started learning German.

I take too much time to form a sentence in my head when I have to use a correct Präpositionen, and Dativ/Akkusativ.
I suppose my first issue is not knowing the gender of a word by heart, so I don’t know then should I use dem, der, den, etc. I have to think a lot before saying the sentence outloud.

Does anyone else struggle with that too? How did you overcome it? What is your way to learn this faster?

Thanks a lot for any suggestion!

Edit: Corrected the typo / autocorrect issue ("dolls") in the first sentence. Didn't mean to offend US guys. Sorry for this!

I had a few voice calls with folks from the US for language exchange. Quite a few of them started with something like "Wie heißen Sie?" and stuck to the formal form.

I immediately "offered them the Du" as we say in German. Some of them were not able to speak in the informal form while being quite okay with "Sie"-sentences.

I recommended that they focus on "Du" since this is friendlier and doesn't feel so distant.

I have to admit that I live in cologne and this is an area where nearly everybody is using Du. Even government employees can be addressed with "Du", as long as you obviously don't use this to offend. At least the "formal Du", where you use the plural even when talking to just one person, is safe to use 😉

What do you think about this? Are you German learners learning both forms or focus on a specific form?

Edit: Corrected the typo in the first sentence. Didn't mean to offend US guys. Sorry for this!

what are the best sources(yt/websites) and books to learn german A1 level - A2 level

Hi all, I have the following text I am working through to understand - (the person's name is Marco) "Als ich vor drei Jahren mein Studium abschloss, wusste ich, dass ich etwas Neues erleben wollte."

The homework question is richtig/falsch to "Marco hat sein Studium vor zwei Jahren abgeschlossen."

I know the answer is falsch because the text says Marco had finished history studies 3 years ago, not 2 years ago. But I am not understanding the conjugation of abschließen in the quote. Would abgesclossen not be used instead of abschloss?
Are both correct for some reason? Is it a special kind of phrasing for conjugating a wish somebody had made in the past for the future? I am also seeing Präteritum being used for the written past tense with wollte, which I understand, but am not sure if related to the conjugation. Thank you