German cases are killing me at A2 — did an app ever teach you these, or did it take a grammar book? Plateau

A book, and a specific kind: one that puts the whole table on a single page early and then drills it to death. Apps avoid tables because tables look like homework and homework loses users. German cases are one of the rare things genuinely easier learned as a system than absorbed by exposure. Two hours with the table and a week of drills beats another six months of colour-coded guessing.

What made it click for me was learning verbs and prepositions with their case welded on, as one unit, rather than learning case rules separately. You don't remember that 'mit' takes dative, you simply never say it any other way because you learned the phrase that way. Both approaches work and honestly you want both — chunks for speed, table for the sentences you've never heard.

Free drill that fixed it for me: take any paragraph of German and, for every article, say out loud why it is that one. Slow, tedious, about ten minutes a day. Three weeks and I was doing it silently while reading without any effort.

Also accept that you'll be wrong out loud for months. Germans understood me perfectly well with wrong cases. My fear of getting it wrong slowed me down far more than the wrongness ever did.

If you're living somewhere German-speaking, community and integration courses are often heavily subsidised and much cheaper than anything private. Worth checking what's actually available locally before you buy a course online.