Just Finished The Entire A Level In German Language, Here Is My Review

Hallo liebe Leute! My name is Gigi and I am from Egypt. I have been self learning the beautiful language of Germany since the very beginning of this year. And I have just finished the entire A Level, phew! What a ride!

There are 6 levels of German language. These levels are classified as A1 for beginners, A2 for elementary, B1 for intermediate, B2 for upper intermediate, C1 as advanced, and C2 as mastery.

It took me five months and a half to complete the A1 level, yes the beginners one. And I was very proud of myself to the point where I bought a custom made cake for myself and my loved ones celebrating one of the greatest milestones ever.

As for A2 level, it took me three months of intensive course self-study

Obviously another cake this time won't be enough. So, I had to create Deutschzeug and have my first article reviewing the language and my fun experience learning the beginners level.

A1 is quite long

A1 is the very basic level and it is for absolute beginners. But holy cow! It is so long. It is overwhelmingly unbelievable that all of those grammatical lessons and vocabularies are just the basic level. They are only one sixth of the German language. I feel this should be a third of the language and that I am on my way to speaking intermediate German, but naaaaah. I am just a German language infant.

I didn't feel like I knew anything about the German language, after I finished the A1

After I celebrated finishing the A1 level, I was asked to speak some German and my brain went into full frozen mode. I felt as if all my efforts were in vain. My self- confidence was not at its best, I gotta say.

However, the pieces of the A1 level started to come together as soon as I dived deeper into the A2 level.  

Now I can say that I am much more confident than before. I still stutter a lot when I speak, and have to go back and forth with my German studies materials *cough Google Translate cough*, but there is so much improvement and I can say that I am getting on track.

A2 is shorter and more fun than A1  

A2 felt much shorter than A1 to me. You will find yourself revising a lot of the A1 grammatical lessons while studying the A2. The A2 basically goes deeper into those lessons and adds new ones.

For me A2 was not as overwhelming as A1. What I liked about A2 is that a lot of what I was learning is used in the German I hear on TV or read on social media. So it felt that I was getting closer to the heart of the language.

German pronunciation is quite difficult but not as what I expected 

Yes, of course I know the German language is quite a challenge when it comes to pronunciation. It is common knowledge, duh! But it was completely different than what I expected.

You see, as a native Arabic speaker I knew I wouldn't struggle with the pronunciation of ch like in Loch (hole) and r because we have those sounds in our language, which made me believe that I have the advantage over a lot of my fellow language learners. Cough * Americans* cough.

I thought the only difficulties I was gonna face with the pronunciation were the umlauts (ö, ä, ü,..) and how long the German words are.   

But boy was I wrong!

My jaw got really sore from trying to learn German pronunciation in my first month of learning the language.

It has a bunch of letter combinations that are such a huge struggle to pronounce. It is like letters that are not supposed to be alongside each other, are so in a lot of German words. 

German sounds as if all letters in its words are pronounced heavily, but guess what! It's a mixture of heavily and lightly pronounced letters. Sometimes there are letters in words which are pronounced very lightly that are not easily heard by a non native speaker.

To my surprise, the Umlauts were not that difficult to learn how to pronounce. 

German long words are not a nightmare to pronounce

The German language is heavily memed for its ridiculously long words. While I cannot deny that they can be are extremely very challenging, they are not as nightmarish as it is propagandized.

The reason would be that a lot of the long German words are in fact several words together with no space between them.

For example, if we were to have the English language follow in the footsteps of the German language long words wise it would be like this: an English teacher would be an Englishteacher so if you already know the word English and the word teacher, then pronouncing them as one word won't be that hard.

The German grammar is very straightforward    

I have always hated studying grammar in any language. Grammar was always tricky to me. You spend so much time trying to understand and figure out the grammatical rules and then when you move on to exercise, you get overwhelmed and confused.

I didn't find that in German grammar. Most of the time, the grammatical lessons are very straightforward and precise.

The downside of it is that it is very extended, meaning that a grammatical lesson in the English language is several lessons in German grammar.

The German sentence structure is an absolute nightmare!

Forming a German sentence is quite a puzzle. It is very hard to get used to. I honestly believe that the German language wouldn't have been that difficult, if it weren't for its challenging sentence structures.

My brain is always on a loading mode whenever I form or try to understand a sentence in German.

Bottom line, I find the German language to be very challenging and requires double the amount of the energy and effort needed to learn easier languages like Italian and Spanish for example. It also takes you a while in order to be able to comprehend it or get used to it.

However, the good news is that it is not rocket science. It is not the kind of language/skill that is not for everyone. Anyone can learn it and perfect it. It is also a very rewarding language considering how useful it is.