5 tips for learning German on Twitter

Are you on Twitter? If yes, do you use it for learning German? I read the other  day that 51% of all tweets are in English, the rest in other languages, including many German tweets.

So, how could you use Twitter to learn or improve your German? Depending on how much German you already know you could follow one or all of the following suggestions:

1. Find tweets that teach you German
There are lots of Twitter accounts which teach you German. To find them just type into the search bar ‘learn German’, ‘Deutsch lernen’ or ‘German word of the day’, or start with these 10 people I wrote about in a blog post: Learn 10 new German words per day with Twitter

2. Find German tweets about things that interest you
For example, if you are interested in sport, then you might like to follow WELT Sport, or  Motorsport-Total.com for racing updates.
If you’re interested in German football, find your favourite team’s tweets, like Borussia Dortmund
If you like  German bands or singers, find out if they have a Twitter account.
Anything, really, whatever you are interested in, chose some German keywords and search for them on Twitter. You should find somebody who tweets about your interest in German.

3. Read their tweets or click on the links
Depending on how good your German understanding is, you can either just read their tweets or click on the links to read whole articles. In the beginning, the tweets will be enough to pick up new vocabulary. As you get more confident reading German text you can read longer articles.

For example, if you like finding out about the weather in Germany, you could follow wetteronline.de
I took a screenshot yesterday. Just look at some of the weather words. I think even beginners can work them out:

I then clicked on the link and found slightly more advanced sentences:

4. Find Germans who tweet in German and interact with them
Those are a bit more difficult to find, but one way is to look at some of the accounts you already follow and check who is following them. When you find somebody whose tweets look interesting, follow them and just read their tweets to start with. If you find that those tweets aren’t quite what you thought, you can always unfollow them again. But if they tweet similar things that you would tweet in English, start interacting with them. You could also search for ‘deutsche tweets’, it might lead you to some interesting people.

5. Make a twitter list
If you use twitter only for learning German, then your timeline will be easy to digest. If, however, you already follow hundreds or thousands of people on twitter for work or any other reasons, then those German tweets will not be found very easily.  So make a Twitter list with your German learning tweets (or use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck) and then scan the list once a day for something interesting – another way to spend 5 minutes or more per day on learning or improving your German!

Bonus tip ☺
Here are my tweets, in case you’d like to follow me!