Read Grimms' Fairy Tales in German
You are four sentences into a German story and it is going well. Then one word stops you. Not a rare one, just one you have not met yet. You look it up, you read on, and two lines later there is another, and this time the look-up takes you off the page and into a dictionary, and the thread goes. Nothing about that is a failure of effort. It is what happens when the one word you cannot guess turns out to be the word the sentence was carrying.
Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich
Text: Brüder Grimm, Deutsche Märchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm (1921). Public domain.
In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, lebte ein König, dessen Töchter waren alle schön, aber die jüngste war so schön, daß die Sonne selber, die doch so vieles gesehen hat, sich verwunderte, so oft sie ihr ins Gesicht schien. Nahe bei dem Schlosse des Königs lag ein großer dunkler Wald, und in dem Walde unter einer alten Linde war ein Brunnen: wenn nun der Tag sehr heiß war, so ging das Königskind hinaus in den Wald und setzte sich an den Rand des kühlen Brunnens: und wenn sie Langeweile hatte, so nahm sie eine goldene Kugel, warf sie in die Höhe und fing sie wieder; und das war ihr liebstes Spielwerk.
Nun trug es sich einmal zu, daß die goldene Kugel der Königstochter nicht in ihr Händchen fiel, das sie in die Höhe gehalten hatte, sondern vorbei auf die Erde schlug und geradezu ins Wasser hineinrollte. Die Königstochter folgte ihr mit den Augen nach, aber die Kugel verschwand, und der Brunnen war tief, so tief, daß man keinen Grund sah. Da fing sie an zu weinen und weinte immer lauter und konnte sich gar nicht trösten.
der Brunnen: a well, not a fountain, which is the meaning that arrives first. This is a hole in the ground, deep enough that a small gold ball drops in and you cannot see the bottom, and the story turns on that depth. In the passage it is des kühlen Brunnens, genitive, because she sits an dem Rand of it: masculine nouns take -s there. One word, and the scene changes shape. Not a decorative spring, but the reason the frog gets to bargain.
The frog has only just arrived at the door, and the tale has barely started. In the reader you pick it up from the exact line where this passage stops, and every word you do not know arrives with its meaning and its grammar without leaving the story. keep reading in Booklings
Why reading beats drilling
Every German teacher gives the same advice: read for the gist, do not stop at every word. It is good advice that almost nobody can follow, and the reason is not discipline. Gist-reading assumes the words you do not know are skippable. They are not. The word you cannot guess is usually the one the sentence was built to deliver, so skipping it does not leave a hole you can read past, it leaves a sentence you cannot use. So you stop, you look it up, and the looking-up is what ends the session. That is the loop Booklings exists to break: the help sits on the word itself, inside the page, and the story keeps its momentum. Reading is also the thing that transfers. A hundred pages of German in working condition beat a hundred exercises on the same rules, because in a story the grammar turns up attached to something you wanted to know. If you are practising for the telc B1 reading paper, the same habit is the exam skill.