Changes Are Coming to Learn German with Herr Antrim

Big changes are coming to my YouTube channel and subsequently to this website. Some are subtle like the new art at the top of the page, on my YouTube channel and on my social networks, but others are going to be more obvious. Find out what is going to change in the video below or read about it in the text that follows.

Hallo Deutschlerner. I think it is time for a change. I know in December I said I was going to stop looking so much at the YouTube stats, view counts, subscriber numbers and all of that, but there has to be something to be said based on the numbers that are available. Subscriber numbers for this channel have slowed to a crawl since introducing my new Beginner and Intermediate series, but not because fewer people are subscribing. The number of people subscribing has actually increase as expected, but the number of people unsubcribing has skyrocketed. It literally doubled in the first month I uploaded a video in the new series and hasn’t decreased since. Views have gone down by 30,000 per month. That sends a pretty clear message. My new series are not resonating with viewers.

The solution is simple. Stop making boring crappy videos. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been very excited myself about the new series. The videos have lacked a certain passion that was evident in my older videos. I have gotten lazier in the way I write scripts. I have allowed my style to suffer and for those things, I apologize.

I’m going to be making a few changes effective immediately. Monday’s video was the last video in the Beginner German series. It is all I ever planned to do for that series. I was planning on starting a similar A2 series next, but I will no longer be doing that. The Intermediate series will also be discontinued. You’ll just have to live in unending suspense about what happens to Rainer Steiner.

I’m going to cut back to one video each week. This will allow me to put the amount of time and effort I used to put into my videos over a year ago (before I had two kids). I’m also going to stop limiting myself to levels and series. I’m just going to make videos about whatever topic I want. As long as it is about the German language and culture, I will cover it.

There have been some requests for videos that I will cover. There are also a few video ideas I have always wanted to do, but never had a chance to make, because of the schedule I had prescribed for myself.

To give you a taste of what you can expect from this channel going forward, here are a few video ideas I have.

• Differences between similar German words like aufbrechen and brechen or brennen and verbrennen.

• Why your teacher has been teaching you wrong. Little things that teachers tell German learners that simply aren’t true about the language. For example: that the Perfekt uses “sein” when there is motion involved.

• Common misconceptions and myths about the German language: For example the myth that the Konjunktiv 2 expresses wishes and possibilities.

• Fun with German compound nouns

• Also, my daughter Sophia has expressed an interest in doing some videos on this channel, which hasn’t happened for quite a while.

For those of you who support me on Patreon, I will still make the same materials as always, but the formatting might change a bit. You will still get a copy of the script. If the video is entirely in German, you will get the version that has English and German side-by-side. There will also be a worksheet with answer key and an mp3 file for every video. If you are a channel member, you will still have access to the video scripts.

That’s it. That’s my plan. Like it? Hate it? Wish it were something else? Have an idea for a video that you want to add to the list? Let me know those things in the comments.

Danke fürs Zuschauen. Bis zum nächsten Mal. Tschüss.