Related to that, I also seem to have an unusually strong tendency to notice patterns and connections. I say \u201cseem\u201d very deliberately, because I have no scientific basis for claiming that I am objectively better at pattern recognition than the average person. I can only say that, I always notice this whenever learning something new, not just with German, I often found myself noticing recurring structures, word-building patterns, and grammatical relationships quite quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also had what might be an even more practical advantage: I was never particularly attached to the digital distractions that consume a lot of my generation\u2019s free time. Minecraft and Reddit were, realistically, the only two things in my digital life that ever had much potential to become distractions I could sink too much time into, and even those were easy enough for me to put aside when I had something more important to do. I could therefore give them up in favor of German without feeling like I was sacrificing something I genuinely valued. Better yet, I could sometimes find ways to incorporate German into the things I was already interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, there were the study habits and discipline I had developed long before I ever touched German. I could sit down and study something for a long time, and more importantly, I could do it consistently. That turned out to be rather useful when the initial novelty of learning German wore off and progress became more dependent on simply putting in the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As one of my favorite parts of growing up with English immersion, Mickey Mouse once put it rather well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat’s a surprise tool that’ll help us later!\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It turned out that past me had, quite unintentionally, been preparing for German all along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the year, I maintained a small but noticeable gap between what the curriculum covered and what I was actually learning. Not necessarily because I was dramatically ahead, but because I did not have much of a practical environment in which to use German. That made it surprisingly easy to forget how to handle a particular topic, or, even worse, to assume that I had been comfortable with it all along simply because I had once understood it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, I kept up a consistent amount of German practice throughout the year. By the time the school year was coming to an end, around June 2026, I was not quite at B1 yet, but I was certainly beyond A2. More importantly, I had reached the point where I could see that the German I was learning at school was only the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around the same time, I was becoming increasingly interested in coding, rocket avionics systems, and various other projects that I had started taking seriously. One of the things I wanted to experiment with was my Apple Watch. In particular, I wanted to make use of its cellular capabilities by building simple apps for it, such as a YouTube client or a Google Gemini client.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was, however, a rather small problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My main computer was a perfectly capable gaming PC. By today’s standards, I would call it low-end, but that is mostly because the definition of \u201clow-end\u201d has become rather absurd. Compared with the decade-old laptops I had been using before it, it felt like a supercomputer. For coding, it was more than enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was just one catch: when you want to develop for Apple devices, you need a Mac. Period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, despite having a perfectly good computer for practically everything else, I suddenly found myself needing a completely different machine just to enter Apple’s little walled garden. I won’t bore you with my failed attempts to set up a Hackintosh<\/a> on my PC; after hitches with performance and compatibility, I had to accept that I needed a real Mac. In any case, this post is more about my German learning journey than a technical deep dive with a bit of German sprinkled in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, I told my father about the problem. I explained that I could not really develop for Apple devices, particularly my Apple Watch, without a Mac, and then thought nothing more of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He, on the other hand, apparently had other ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few days later, he came to me with an offer: get to around B2 in German in roughly three months, and I would get the newest MacBook Air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did not see that coming. At all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After getting over the initial surprise, I got to work. I needed a plan. My entire routine had to be reorganized around German, not in the sense that everything else in my life had to disappear, but in the sense that German needed to become a much larger part of what I was already doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three months is not a particularly long time to gain control over a language. In a period that short, or really in any serious attempt to make substantial progress, consistency matters enormously. So I built myself a fairly intensive daily routine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wrote two texts of roughly 150 words each day. Sometimes they were paragraphs, sometimes letters, and sometimes they dealt with completely different subjects. I had AI choose the topics for me so that I would encounter as wide a range of subjects as possible instead of repeatedly writing about the same things. Once I had finished them, I had Claude Sonnet 5 evaluate them according to various German-language examination standards. At the time of writing this, it had been giving me the most reliable results out of the models I had tried. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I also spent around twenty minutes a day speaking German with ChatGPT. I specifically mention ChatGPT because, at least in my experience, it was the strongest model for practicing spoken<\/strong> language at the time. With the right prompt, it can interrupt you and correct mistakes while you are speaking. One limitation is that I’ve yet to find an AI model that can meaningfully evaluate accent and pronunciation with the same reliability as written grammar or vocabulary. That means this is one area where you still have to evaluate yourself to a significant extent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another twenty minutes went toward reading. I used German short-story books published by Dorlion Yay\u0131nlar\u0131<\/a>. This specific example only applies to Turkish, but I am pretty sure this concept would also be available in English-German. They take familiar stories, such as The Little Match Girl<\/em>, and present them in both German and Turkish. The German text is accompanied by its Turkish translation on the same page, so if I got stuck on a word, I could look it up almost immediately. It is not the most demanding reading material in existence, but it was convenient, accessible, and useful for keeping a steady amount of German in my day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The largest part of my routine was input. I spent roughly two hours watching YouTube videos on a variety of subjects. I particularly enjoyed channels such as Quarks and its sub-channel Quarks Dimension Ralph (both linked below), because they covered subjects I was already interested in, including science, technology, psychology, and health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the first couple of months, I also made a point of watching the news from tagesschau<\/em> (linked below). I would get up at around 10 in the morning and watch the morning news, then watch the evening news again at around eight or nine. Later, I shifted more of that time toward channels like Quarks in order to broaden my vocabulary beyond everyday news language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One recommendation I would make to anyone doing something similar is to watch tagesschau every day until you can understand roughly 80% of it. Aside from being excellent listening practice, it also gives you a much better sense of how life and current affairs are discussed in Germany. Additionally for Turkish speakers, I’d like to mention that if you want to understand how Germany works beyond the language itself, I strongly recommend looking into the excellent book Yabanc\u0131 Diyar\u0131n Yerli Hikayesi<\/a> (A Native Story of a Foreign Land).<\/p>\n\n\n While watching videos, I used a browser extension called Trancy<\/a>. It can display German subtitles alongside English or Turkish ones, allowing me to quickly check unfamiliar vocabulary without leaving the video. I could hover over a word to see its meaning, or select an entire sentence to see its meaning together with information such as pronunciation and emphasis. It also allowed me to save unfamiliar words into a vocabulary list. It supports exporting saved words to Anki, but I have never tried doing so, so I will spare you a claim I cannot verify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also changed the language of my devices to German. It is a small change, but it meant that I was constantly encountering German in places where I would normally have seen English or Turkish anyway. Even things as mundane as system menus, settings, buttons, and notifications became opportunities to reinforce vocabulary. The channels I used most often included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quarks<\/a> \/ Quarks Dimension Ralph<\/a><\/strong> for science, technology, psychology, and health reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Easy German<\/a><\/strong> for German-language learning, street interviews, and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Was kostet die Welt?<\/a><\/strong> for business, economics, and analyses of companies and their histories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n tagesschau<\/a><\/strong> for national news and current affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/keremgurevin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image.png\")
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The same principle applied to the things I did for fun. I started playing Minecraft in German, for example, and it turned out to be surprisingly useful for vocabulary because I already knew what everything was supposed to mean. When you already understand the game itself, the German words become much easier to associate with their meanings. Of course, your mileage may vary. Whether this works well depends heavily on the game, the amount of text it contains, and how familiar you already are with what you are doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n