German has a reputation for difficulty that it only half deserves.
The half it does not deserve is pronunciation. German spelling is close to phonetic: learn the rules once, and a word you can read is a word you can say. There are no silent endings to trip over the way there are in French, and no tones to get wrong the way there are in Mandarin. Your accent will be bad for a while and you will be understood from the first week.
The half it does deserve is grammar, and it is concentrated almost entirely in one place.
The thing that is actually hard
Every German noun has a gender. That gender changes the article in front of it. And the article changes again depending on what job the noun is doing in the sentence.
That is why German can move the parts of a sentence around without losing track of who did what, and it is why a learner who has not internalised the articles cannot read German at speed. The information English puts in word order, German puts in three letters at the front of the noun phrase.
Everything else follows from that. The cases, the adjective endings, the relative pronouns: all of it is the same system seen from different angles. Learn it early, and German becomes fairly gentle. Defer it, and you will spend years being understood without understanding.
How long it takes
The US Foreign Service Institute, which trains diplomats full time, puts German in its Category II: about 36 weeks, or 900 class hours, to professional working proficiency. Spanish and French sit one band lower, at 600 to 750 hours. Those are full-time classroom hours with homework on top, so at half an hour a day the honest unit is years, not weeks. The good news is that the early stages go quickly: simple reading and everyday conversation come long before 900 hours.
What this course is
Ten chapters and about 1,000 words, taught in the order you will meet them, with the grammar placed where you first need it:
| Chapters | What you can do by the end |
|---|---|
| 1 | Greet people, count, use , die and , conjugate a verb in the present, ask for things with |
| 2-5 | Put the verb second, use pronouns and the cases, say days, dates, colours and the time, order food, talk about yesterday with war and |
| 6-8 | Talk about the past in the perfect, describe things with adjective endings, compare, talk about the future |
| 9-10 | Join ideas with and , read the passive, be polite with and |
Every chapter closes on a short graded story written only with words you have been taught, with narration you can listen to. By the end you are through A1 and well into A2: you can read simple stories, handle everyday situations and follow most of the grammar a textbook throws at you.
Taking the GCSE? The German GCSE track follows the AQA specification topic by topic, with its own vocabulary lists, phrase sets, exam tasks and graded readers, using the same word pages and grammar guides as this course.
When you finish the ten chapters, the GCSE track, its graded readers and the German grammar guides are the next step.