For those who learned German, how long did it take you?

Question

I'm going to learn German and I wanted to know, for those who learned it, how long it took you and how you went about learning it.

Answer 1

It took me about 2 years to be able to feel comfortable with the German language, mainly because of the different dialects that are spoken here. I've been living in Germany for about nine years and am still learning...dialects you know.

Answer 2

My mom was raised in Frankfurt for long bit and my Aunt her sister was born there) and she was pretty fluent years ago. And my grandfather spoke it all my life fluently. It's the closest in sentence/grammar structure to English, more than any other language. It would be Great, if not being able to live withing a German household or in Germany or Austria or somewhere in Europe where you could use it, you can find a German speaker to practice it with regularly, then you'd learn very fast and it would retain well. (I tried Vietnamese and was doing well because that language has a LOT of cognate words and is the only Asian languages that uses an alphabet and not character but it's hard to remember anything I learned now because I did not use it regularly when I was beginning to learn it) But it's not that hard if you love American English Grammar, in fact, if you've tried to learn other languages and succeeded, this one might be the easiest, next to Spanish.

Answer 3

Well, that wouldn't be a fair question as I started learning it as a baby and spoke it regularly until I was 15, when I taught myself English out of comic books.
For someone learning it as an adult, the time it takes depends on how much time you put into it and how good you are at remembering. To speak a language fluently, figure on investing about 2,000 hours.
Children are usually faster, since they have a much smaller vocabulary.
Also, it is much easier if you learn it where you have to speak the language.
Just to make yourself understood, you can probably get there in about 200 - 400 hours.
The real problem you will encounter, since German has special rules about things that have to be capitalized, and all things have genders attached that have no equal in English.
For example, table (der Tisch) is male, so is a chair (der Stuhl). The moon (der Mond) is male and the sun (die Sonne) is female. Spoon (der Löffel) is male, fork (die Gabel) is female and the knife (das Messer) is neutral, 'it'. And all that is shown by the articles der, die and das. That is 'the' expressed as male female and neutral. And all nouns start with an uppercase letter (der Großbuchstaben), not just proper names.
Also they have words, look in a dictionary what the word 'put' is in German. You'll find 2 pages of translations. You better figure out which to use when.
And that doesn't yet address the difference in how you address people who are strangers and those you are friends with. Du, the familiar is like the old 'thou', the formal Sie is what you was back then.
Consider that your first lesson in German ;-)

Answer 4

It's hard to answer this question, as you don't say whether you mean to speak German, or to write it, or both.

It took me only a few months in high school to get to the point where I could read and converse at a simple level. By my third year, I was able to read novels. By the time I got to college--that would be year five into my studies, I was reading German literature and taking a course that was conducted entirely in German.

But I bet if you went to Germany for a few months, you'd learn it much faster.

Answer 5

To learn German in public school takes years, plus college. I studied it for four years, and then two in college, before I passed the German as a second language test.

If you go there to live and study German intensively, one year.

Answer 6

I took 3 semesters in college and it was damn near impossible. I never felt like I learned anything.

Years later, though, when I traveled to Germany, I started speaking like crazy. I was amazed at how much I had actually learned years before. Now, whenever I go to Germany, I always make it a point to speak as much as possible.

Its a hard language to learn.

Answer 7

It took me 11 months to learn the German language. I learned it through repitition, writing, reading, speaking, and spending money calling Germany up.

Answer 8

I'm a linguistics major who's good with languages going into my sixth year of German this fall, and I'm still not anywhere near fluent. (I'm assuming that's what you mean by asking how long it takes to learn a language. That is a very vague question.)

Answer 9

13 years at German School + 1 Jear of Ex-change in Germany.... I got Sprach Diplom I und II

Grammar is difficult

I sincerely don`t believe that somebody can learn GOOD German in 1 year...

Answer 10

Sprechen Sie Duetsch?
Took me about 9 months to learn it