I studied a language 30 minutes a day for 1 year, for free. Here’s what happened.


I knew my mother tongue and some English I had learned with language classes, which I found insanely boring. My English was good enough and I didn’t want to hear anything about learning any other language.But my fellow students kept talking about the importance of learning German. That baffled me. “What? In an engineering department? Why? I’m here to become an engineer, not to learn languages, let alone German!”Lecturers, however, insisted that learning German would help me significantly in the engineering field, as many books and regulations are written in the language. It would push my career forward.

That sounded interesting to me, since all I cared about at the time was becoming a great engineer.But learning German meant doing those pesky language classes again. “Not that nightmare again!” I heard a cry inside me.Scared of what awaited me, I tried to find a different way to learn the language.I paid for a mail-order German course with textbooks: a coursebook, a workbook, a study companion full of vocabulary, and some exercises that I’d send every month to a German teacher, who would correct them and send them back to me.Basically, the difference was that I’d teach myself German instead of paying for language classes.