> The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.
As a native German speaker I would say that grammar plays a much larger role in German than in English and I personally cannot even imagine how one can learn German without grasping the grammar (I wrote more about that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328906 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243298). So my recommendation is (as I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196101) to do brute training on the grammar until you are very confident that you know it inside out, since otherwise you will always have to stop in the middle of a sentence how this verb is conjugated or this adjective + noun is conjugated - not good for fluent conversation.
EDIT: I have read multiple times that many people have problems with learning German on Duolingo since there is too less focus on grammar. Doing this might work for English and perhaps for Spanish but surely not for German.
As a native German speaker I would say that grammar plays a much larger role in German than in English and I personally cannot even imagine how one can learn German without grasping the grammar (I wrote more about that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328906 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243298). So my recommendation is (as I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196101) to do brute training on the grammar until you are very confident that you know it inside out, since otherwise you will always have to stop in the middle of a sentence how this verb is conjugated or this adjective + noun is conjugated - not good for fluent conversation.
EDIT: I have read multiple times that many people have problems with learning German on Duolingo since there is too less focus on grammar. Doing this might work for English and perhaps for Spanish but surely not for German.