Is there a bad student for a teacher?

Gibt es überhaupt sowas? Is there anyone like that...?

Throughout your time of learning things, you have come across both the good and bad teacher, and the differentiation between these 2 persons lies on how well are they are able to not only to cope up wonderfully with the student, but also the willingness to assist the students to their greatest heights, whether providing homework or providing tips and advices to apply what you have learned right away.

But if the table is switched, on what level can it be considered that a student, or a learner, has the best attitude to improve themselves? What makes a person so great that he or she will be able to make the effort in learning German consistently, during a lesson period with a teacher/tutor and also outside the lesson period?

Here are some factors I would say that I can distinguish between learners who have higher chance of excellency and learners who will be progressing less by the day:

1. Daily effort VS Only-in-class effort

   
   

   If there is a big distinction that I have seen between students who are excelling and those who don't, is that those excelling student rely more on self-efforts than the lessons they are taking. Don't get me wrong, attending classes to bring some level of benefits, but trying to solely rely on lessons with tutor or teacher just limits you to just learning what I or the other tutors have thought in that very particular period of time. In terms of picking up a language to great compounding benefits, extra milestone on your own effort on a constant daily basis is required, period.

   
   

   i) Daily listening or speaking

   The best way to know if someone is good at a language is that if they can speak and listen to a conversation in that language...

   
   
   
   

   

   
   
   
   

   ii) Daily dose of vocabs: I mean, vocabs are after all the building blocks of a new language you are learning...

   
   

   iii) Daily articles: While the first 2 effort styles are very important in terms of building up your sentencing and word skills, reading articles to assist when in terms of reassurance of your German knowledge, whether the sentences you have formulated or the new words that you have learned are put into practice correctly or not...

   iv) Daily dose of short videos - I'm referring here to short videos, as in a min.15 videos, whether from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or any other social media platform.

You can check out more details on these 4 daily practices under the other article of mine: Just 15 min of Learning German

2. No excuse VS 'logical' excuses

   
   

   This is something that is not easy to feel upon as someone who's really wants to help other to improve their Germans, and as a result of it you do wanna see them speak some level German as the lessons goes by.

   
   

   But trust me, sometimes there are always excuses for people not to show up to lesson times. For the most part, the answer is very common and there's a high chance you have guessed it right: I'm BUSY. Yes, there are always urgent matters to deal with on daily basis, whether it's your work, family commitments or helping friends with their irritating issues.

   
   

   Whatever the case may be, there's always time that you can find in the midst of your chaotic life. It may sound silly, but truth to be told, you only need 10-15 min per day to just have a little dose of German langauge. You really need to get off from the thniking that you require somehow 1 whole hour to learn a language. Yes that's highly encourageable if you have ample time or being an freelancer or an expat. But trust me when I say this, a little as 15min of German per day is much much better than taking a lesson for an 1 hour per week, or EVEN attending German lessons 3-4 per week and taking no efforts further before or after the lessons.

   
   

   I mean, try to think of mathematically how beneficial it would be if you just spent a little as 15min or even 10 min a day, I mean you do spent more than 15 min scrolling meaningless TikTok or Insta shorts, if you instead spent just 15 min of your time per day, that compounds to 5,475 minutes per year! So much things you can learn just a short period of time daily, something you can do while doing business in washroom, taking public transport or just chilling in your couch...

3. Want to vs have to

Hmmm, where can I begin with this one..? It's no surprise that you have heard this by now: German is a hard language to learn, especially if you are native to English, Spanish, French or Italian. And with the reasons that you are forced to learn the language due to pursuing education or try to land a job in Germany or Switzerland, there's a high chance that you will be feeling stress every time you are going to learn German. Learning the language while resenting is really hard to have him or her to be thought to, I mean how do you help someone who's not mentally prepared to learn the language? There's gonna be this ''invincible wall'' if you carry on learning German with such mentality.

On the flip side, there are always something interesting that you can find from the German language to build up the motivation for you to learn the language, whether the German rock or hip-hop music, the current creative and amazing Netflix-Series or the football culture! There are always something interesting to find in a language that you can find them to be repetitively likeable, whether the entertainment of a language is popular or not. Of course, having a love partner, a family member or close friends to learn the language from do help tremendously. 💗😀

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End the of the day, it's good that you are making initiative to learn German by attending classes or lessons from teachers or tutors, but to keep in mind that unlike other lessons like history or mathematics, a language is learned much faster when it's practiced outside the ''lesson box'' with a teacher or a tutor.

My simple advice to you is this: No matter how many German lessons. keep learning German, no matter how hard it may seem or how chaotic your life may seem.

Allocate time as low as minimum 15 minutes per day!

Keep it daily, Keep it constant & Keep going!

Gib niemal auf zu lernen, Weiter nach Vorner!