How Can I Make German Into A Special Interest?

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I've been having terrible trouble with this language in college.

I know if it suddenly turned into a special interest and I just drifted into looking up and listening to German stuff I could get it in a couple of weeks.

I know just studying it a lot isn't going to do it. There's a distinctively different feel when I'm immersed in a special interest like being on autopilot and starting into it without even really thinking about it either, versus when I'm just doing something I have to do. That's the problem if I have to think about it I can't make it into a special interest, but in order to make it into a special interest I have to think about it.

I speak German as a native language, if you want to we could talk about autism or some other stuff in German together!

I think special interests happen by themselves. I don't think you can "decide" them. Just as in normal interests, really.

study your special interests and/or write about your special interest, in German.

That's been my experience. I've tried to force myself to become interested in different things before, but it just doesn't work. If something doesn't click, it doesn't click. Same with trying to force an interest to end prematurely. It seems as though our special interests choose us rather than the other way around.

Yes, this.

You cannot make a special interest happen, but you can harness existing special interests.

One way to get people (e.g. illiterate adults) to learn to read is to give them material in a subject that interests them. For example, if they are interested in motor bikes, you give them motor bike magazines and sales brochures about motor bikes. They look at the pictures and you point out words - they are motivated to learn those words, they want to understand the articles and sales descriptions.

I improved my ability to read a German dialect by reading translations of the first two Harry Potter books in that dialect. I already knew and liked the books in English, and they were written for 9 year olds anyway. So reading them in translation was fun, and I re-read them in that dialect many times because I enjoyed them so much. My strong interest in HP and my special interest in the dialect worked together, to do lots of reading drill and improve my fluency and literacy.

So, get some German books about your (non-German) special interests, whatever they may be. You can buy them online from Germany, or sometimes from American booksellers (e.g. Amazon in the US carries some German titles, and amazon.de in Germany sells heaps - I have bought from there).

I don't think that is necessarily the case. I get a kick out of learning and repeating back information to myself, whatever the information may be.

So I think the way to turn German into a special interest would be to initially forget about rules, grammar, syntax etc and just memorise a paragraph of German and enjoy saying it back to yourself. Then another. Then another. Hopefully you will find this process becomes addictive. As you do this you will naturally become interested in the intellectual side of German: what the words in your paragraph mean and the grammar rules of German. You will become motivated to research these things.

German is part of a broader special interest of mine - Language. I have a BA in German (and International studies, with a minor in History). I also did teacher assistant work at a German immersion school, and I've taught at day camps and things like that.

For me, honestly, the books didn't help much, and classes didn't help much, at least once the upper levels started. What helped the best was simply reading and translating, and what REALLY helped the best was being around a lot of native speakers, as well as second-language but fluent speakers, immersed in a german speaking environment 5 days a week.

For a lot of things, you're just going to need to memorize them somehow - mainly things involving articles. One thing that helps is memorizing which prepositions can do what (for example, aus ausser bei mit nach zeit von zu are always dative), things like that.

If you can, listen to as much native speaker speech as you can - listen to things like news reports in German, movies in German, just lots of things in German, and try to find many German speakers to practice with. I recommend this - and with the side note that I've never done it myself because I often get too much anxiety talking with strangers one on one - if you can, and it's free, go to the language tutors where you study German, and just have conversations with them in German.

Find a method that you like - one that makes you enjoy learning the language - or one that you find very easy - and go with it. Viel Glück.

In my case, I never chose my special intrests, it's as if they chose me. Trying to force something into a special intrest never works for me and I would refuse to do anything not related to my special intrests. My mom had to incorperate them into the lesson when she homeschooled me, even something as simple as changing the names in word problems was effective. Extactally why do you want to study German? Are you trying to impress someone who is from a German speaking country or plan to visit a German speaking country someday?

The system I use to force me into a language (and it works) is to access some information I really want in this language.

So, for example, if I'm very interested (the right word would be 'obsessed', but well, let's make it more politcally correct) in some subject and I check blogs about that subject regularly I force myself to read blogs only in this language.