German A1 - How This Works

Selbststudium Deutsch - A1 in 60 Tagen. Ein Tag, eine Seite, zwei Stunden.

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One day, one page, two hours. Sixty of them gets me to A1, which is the first third of the road to B1.

Every page is a full session: warm up, sounds, new material, drills, scheduled review, listening, translation, speaking, and a block to copy into a paper notebook. The work is typed or spoken, never clicked from a list, because recognising an answer is not the same as producing one.

Nothing here is saved. That is deliberate.

No account, no progress bar, no cookies, no local storage. Scores live in the browser’s memory and a refresh wipes them. Two reasons: I do not want a dashboard to perform for, and the spacing does not need saved state anyway. The review schedule lives in the content - Tag 20 is built to re-drill items from Tag 19, 18, 15, 8 and, later, Tag 1. That is Pimsleur’s graduated interval recall, encoded as pages instead of as a database.

The nine blocks of a session

1. Aufwärmen, 5 min. Ten items from yesterday, typed cold.

2. Aussprache, 10 min. Days 1 to 10 only: vowels, umlauts, diphthongs, the consonants that trip up English speakers. After day 10 this slot becomes shadowing.

3. Neue Bausteine, 20 min. Twelve new chunks, each with exactly one unknown element, recalled three times at widening gaps inside the page.

4. Drills, 25 min. Four drill types borrowed from the old Foreign Service method: substitution, conversion, response, translation. Roughly sixty prompts.

5. Wiederholung, 20 min. The scheduled review - yesterday, two days back, five days back, and later twelve and thirty.

6. Text und Hören, 12 min. A short dialogue built only from chunks I already know, read while listening, then heard again without the text.

7. Bidirektional, 8 min. Eight sentences translated one way today and back the other way two days later, then compared against the model. The gap between my version and the model is the actual lesson.

8. Sprechen, 10 min. A ready-made roleplay prompt to paste into a voice AI, tuned to the day’s grammar.

9. Auf Papier, 10 min. Dictation by hand, five sentences about my real day, and the errors the drills caught. Every third day, a Goldlist page.

Why these blocks

Production, not recognition

No multiple choice anywhere. Multiple choice lets you coast on recognising the right answer, which is a much weaker memory than pulling it out of nothing. Everything here is typed, written by hand, or said aloud.

Chunks, never bare words

A word learned alone has to be assembled into a sentence under time pressure later. A chunk arrives with its grammar attached. Every item here is a usable fragment of speech.

Spacing built into the calendar

Graduated interval recall works on a fixed, known curve, so it can be baked into which page re-drills what. No app required, and no data about me stored anywhere.

Paper does a different job

Handwriting appears to recruit motor, visual and spatial systems that typing bypasses, which suits encoding new forms - spelling, umlauts, noun gender. Typing is better for volume. Both are used, for different jobs.

The rules I am holding myself to

1. Never miss twice. One day off is noise. Two is how streaks die.

2. Produce from memory on paper. Copying German off the screen into the notebook feels productive and teaches nearly nothing. Written blind, then checked.

3. Say every answer out loud, even the typed ones. Silent German does not become spoken German.

4. Speak badly on purpose. The ten minutes with a voice AI are for making errors at speed, not for composing perfect sentences.

5. Sunday is review only. Every sixth day adds no new material.

Week 1

Tag 01 - Erste Wörter

Vowels, greetings, saying who I am and where I live. Start

Tag 02 - sein und Fragen

Umlauts, the verb sein in full, and the question words wie, wo, was. Go

Tag 03 - der, die, das

Diphthongs and hard consonants, plus the three genders and why nouns are capitalised. Go

Tag 04 - haben und kein

haben, ein and eine, negation with kein, and numbers up to a hundred. Go

Tag 05 - Verben im Präsens

Regular present tense, the pronouns, and the rule that the verb comes second. Go

Tag 06 - Wiederholungstag

No new material. Review, a longer dialogue, and twenty minutes of talking. Go

Tag 07 - Fragen stellen

Yes-no questions with the verb first, negation with nicht, and the week’s consolidation. Go

Sources and honesty

The situations and the drill types come from two United States government courses that are in the public domain: the Foreign Service Institute German Basic Course and the Defense Language Institute’s German Headstart. The audio on these pages is from the FSI course for the same reason.

Every German sentence on these pages is written for this site, not copied - they are about Hamburg, an MBA, and the work I actually do. Word ordering leans on the Leipzig Wortschatz frequency data, which is CC-BY licensed. Hammer’s German Grammar is used privately to check that my explanations are correct; none of its text appears here. The Goethe word lists are copyrighted and are not used at all.

Note

This is week one of sixty days. It is a prototype: the point is to run a real two-hour session on Tag 01 and find out what is too slow, too fast, or too easy before the remaining fifty-three days get built to the same template.