[panglott]

Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying—these are methods that adults can use to make use of the metalinguistic knowledge acquired from their native language. There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Lan...

People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so.

How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.

[4ad]

> Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying [...] People acquire languages, they don't study them.

I know. Absolutely agree.

> There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015).

Thanks, I will check it out.

> Is your main problem comprehension or production?

I think my main problem is production.

> If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think.

You might be right, I know a lot of words. When it comes to cooking stuff, sometimes I know words my german-speaking friends don't know (I like to cook and buy lots of less-than-usual ingredients).

But I can't create meaningful sentences.

[wolfgke]

> The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.

As a native German speaker I would say that grammar plays a much larger role in German than in English and I personally cannot even imagine how one can learn German without grasping the grammar (I wrote more about that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328906 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243298). So my recommendation is (as I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196101) to do brute training on the grammar until you are very confident that you know it inside out, since otherwise you will always have to stop in the middle of a sentence how this verb is conjugated or this adjective + noun is conjugated - not good for fluent conversation.

EDIT: I have read multiple times that many people have problems with learning German on Duolingo since there is too less focus on grammar. Doing this might work for English and perhaps for Spanish but surely not for German.