German for beginners - Deutsch für Einsteiger

[Elrohir]

Dear Students, welcome to our THLLLanguage Lessons GERMAN.

Taken from Wikipedia:
German (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers. Standard German is widely taught in schools, universities and Goethe Institutes worldwide. It is overall the third most learned language worldwide.

Taken from www.germanlanguageguide.com
Facts   
    * German is the most widely spoken native language in the EU.
    * Germany boasts a 99% literacy rate.
    * German belongs to the three most learned languages in the world as well as the ten most widely spoken languages in the world.
    * German is among the top five most widely used languages on the Internet.
    * One fourth of the tourists in the U.S. are German speaking.
    * Germany is the second most popular European destination for American tourists.
    * German is the official language in seven countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, as well as parts of Italy and Belgium).
    * German is spoken by over 100 million people world-wide.
    * With 22 %, German-Americans represent the largest ethnic group in America today (according to the 1990 Census). Some prominent examples include Albert Einstein, Levi Strauss, Henry Kissinger, and Werner von Braun.


Taken from wikipedia:

Word order
Word order is generally less rigid than in Modern English except for nouns (see below). There are two common word orders: one is for main clauses and another for subordinate clauses. In normal affirmative sentences the inflected verb always has position 2. In polar questions, exclamations and wishes it always has position 1. In subordinate clauses the verb is supposed to occur at the very end, but in speech this rule is often disregarded.

German requires that a verbal element (main verb or auxiliary verb) appear second in the sentence. The verb is preceded by the topic of the sentence. The element in focus appears at the end of the sentence. For a sentence without an auxiliary this gives, amongst other options:

    Der alte Mann gab mir gestern das Buch. (The old man gave me the book yesterday; normal order)
    Das Buch gab mir gestern der alte Mann. (The book was given to me yesterday by the old man)
    Das Buch gab der alte Mann mir gestern. (The book was given to me by the old man yesterday)

    Gestern gab mir der alte Mann das Buch. (Yesterday I got the book from the old man, normal order)
    Mir gab der alte Mann das Buch gestern. (As for me, the old man gave me the book yesterday (entailing: as for you, it was another date))

The position of a noun in a German sentence has no bearing on its being a subject, an object, or another argument. In a declarative sentence in English if the subject does not occur before the predicate the sentence could well be misunderstood. This is not the case in German.

Please visit the following website I have found: Paul Joyce German Course
Aufgaben (Tasks): Read and hear the pronounciation table of the alphabet.

[legolas3333]

learning German from wikipedia... now i've seen everything

[Anautikus]

Intense language.

[Elrohir]

Some more facts From Paul Joyce German Course, before we actually start:

"The Awful German Language"?


The first encounter with the German language can be a disorientating experience. English speakers find it hard to decide which of three genders a German noun possesses, especially as many nouns have a gender which defies logic. The disentangling of the precise meaning of lengthy compound nouns requires training, and the chains of genitives stretching ever onwards in official documents can bring the beginner to despair.

The fact that many sentence structures place the verb right at the end of the clause means that the listener often has to wait like a frustrated commuter for the meaning of the clause to come along. It also renders the task of simultaneous translation a particularly tricky one. French writer Madame de Stael once complained that it was impossible to have a good conversation in Germany because the grammatical construction of the language always put the meaning at the end of the sentence and thus made impossible "the pleasure of interrupting, which makes discussion so animated in France."

All of these complaints and many more were famously gathered together by the American author Mark Twain in his essay "The Awful German Language". It appears as an appendix to his travel book A Tramp Abroad (1880), which chronicles a journey through Europe which Twain undertook between April 1878 and September 1879. Below you can read a selection of the many points that Mark Twain had to make about the German language not only in this essay, but also from comments in his other printed works and notebooks:

1. On how the German language was created: "In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language."

2. On how difficult it is to read German: "It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script."

3. On the effects of the German language on the brain: "It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter."

4. On the amount of time that it takes to master German: "My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it."

5. On German genders: "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."

6. On German separable verbs: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

7. And in more detail on German separable verbs: "The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab -- which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, -PARTED."

8. On German sentence structure: "An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished."

9. On the German subjunctive: "It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No--and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business."

10. On German compound nouns: "July 1. -- In the hospital yesterday, a word of thirteen syllables was successfully removed from a patient -- a North German from near Hamburg; but as most unfortunately the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place, under the impression that he contained a panorama, he died. The sad event has cast a gloom over the whole community."

In a speech given in Vienna in March 1899, Twain imparted to the audience an 95 letter word which he claimed had recently been sent to him in a telegram from Linz:
"Personaleinkommensteuerschätzungskommissionsmitgliedsrei sekostenrechnungsergänzungsrevisionsfund".
Twain added: "If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep beneath it in peace."

[Gate Troll]

I know it's thread necromancy, but still, better than starting a new one. I have a question for the native German-speakers here. How do you remember which 'the' to use- der/das/die/dem/den in conversation? Is it something you memorize, much like English's awful pronunciation irregularities?

Also, would anyone be willing to chat in German on the TLHH chat sometime? I need to improve my vocabulary, and a realtime chat might help.

[ununtrium]

Hi!
You are absolutely right. There are some morphological rules, e.g. all nouns ending with '-heit' are feminine, but otherwise it is pretty much knowing what is what. I guess, the best you can do is read, listen and talk as much as you can. ...and use high-register sources. You can pick up colloquial German easily enough afterwards. The other way round is much harder.

English is pretty hard to speak well, too. There is a pretty limited basic grammar and vocabulary, so it is easy to get the ball rolling, but after that it is actually harder to learn than German, because English vocabulary is infinite and beyond the basic grammar you are left with memorizing idioms and collocations for the rest of your life.

Cheers!

[Legolis]

I have been learning my German from these guys....

Links 2, 3, 4 Lord of the Rings version

Had to add the Lord of the Rings video to it!

[Olorin]

Interesting Thread!

take a look at:
http://lotrtcgwiki.com/pages/LOTR04111.html

Whither goest thou? --> wohin gehst du?

or

This is my beer.
Dies ist mein bier.

[Gate Troll]

Interesting Thread!

take a look at:
http://lotrtcgwiki.com/pages/LOTR04111.html

Whither goest thou? --> wohin gehst du?

or

This is my beer.
Dies ist mein bier.

The first one is an excellent example! Now in English we would say, "Where do you go?" The word 'thou', our derivative of 'du' is no longer used in conversation, and is remembered primarily because of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Interestingly, as German has 'wo' and 'wohin', we used to have 'where' and 'whereto'/'whither', but we have stopped using 'whereto' and 'whither', and now use 'where' in both cases.

[Elrohir]

I like whither