#15

Kann deutsch aber habe seit 10 jahre gar nichts gesprochen, also heutzutage fuhle ich mich sicherer wenn ich auf Franzosich reden

#16

Ich bin ein wellensittich

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#17

Deutsch hat viel zu viel Grammatik.

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#18

Ein bischen. Ich habe für eine deutsche Firma gearbeitet, aber alle sprachen Englisch. Es war etwas lästig.

A friend once introduced me to his new Luxembourgish girlfriend and I asked her what language she spoke. Was very embarrassed when she replied ‘Luxembourgish’. I assumed it would be German or French like an ignorant fool.

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#19

I think it’s sad/embarrassing the amount of British people who move to Berlin and make no attempt to learn any German. Better to try, and make mistakes along the way.

#20

Ich lerne Deutsch auf Duolingo, aber ich bin nicht sehr gut. Es macht Spaß, manchmal ist es schwer, aber ich will es beenden. Danach, keine Ahnung!

(this took ages to write and is probably nonsense or not anything that anyone would actually say/type IRL in German, but I wanted to try and use words and stuff I actually know. I still struggle to remember words outside of the app, so if it asks me what X means or what the German for Y is and there’s a list them yep, all over it. if you ask me on the spot what Z is though I’m much less likely to get it, which makes it a bit useless)

#21

Duolingo is fine for drilling vocab in the earlier stages, but the higher levels are a bit shit. A couple of years ago I had a work situation where I had a few days where I had to sit around and be ready to leap into action when something arrived, but there was pretty much nothing that needed doing until then.

So I ploughed through the whole German Duolingo. I thought the upper levels would have good exercises for some tricky grammar points, but the whole thing was a mess. They clearly hadn’t paid a teacher to come up with a course plan that made sense, it was a weird hodgepodge of crowd-sourced stuff (including sentences that no one would ever phrase like that) and if you didn’t already know the grammar points you would never ever learn how to use them properly from the way they were showing.

If you want to learn stuff outside of Duolingo, I can’t recommend this grammar book highly enough. It looks really intimidating and huge, but it explains everything really clearly with good examples.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/hammers-german-grammar-and-usage/martin-durrell/9781138853713

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#22

Ich verstehe Deutsch besser dan ich sprache.

#23

Thank you, I strongly identify as both sad and embarrassing.

I have passable enough German to get through most everyday situations. But since my work is in English, and most German speakers I know find it easier to speak English than wait for my broken Deutsch, it’s difficult to build up enough momentum to get significantly better.

All the folk I know who have learned German while living here did it in cities other than Berlin. :woman_shrugging:

#24

I meant more like people who can barely order a beer or understand a menu.

I work in Austria going round schools doing English workshops normally, and sometimes you encounted (mostly older) teachers who have this attitude of “I am here to teach English, not to learn German”, and it’s not like people in rural Austria have the hottest English.

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#25

They don’t always have the hottest Standard German either, admittedly.

#26

How people sound in Vienna (old man in the 80s complaining about the cost of living and calling far-right politican Jorg Haider a piece of shit)

#27

Ja, ich kann. :slightly_smiling_face:

When first learning, I also tried out all sorts of things like audiobooks, textbooks and apps, took lots of language school lessons. Found lots of those quite useful for getting the fundamentals, but I just didn’t seem to be able to get past a certain level learning the normal way like that.

For me, it was much much more so in just making it a part of my every day life. Podcasts about topics I was genuinely interested in, original German tv series that I actually wanted to watch, so it didn’t feel like ‘homework’. (One of my favourite shows of all time, the Norwegian series Skam, got a German remake, highly highly recommend that for anyone wanting more exposure to how German is actually used by The Youth today!)

Also, somewhat helpfully, my fiancée is German, so we started off doing one day a week speaking only German. Used to play lots of language driven games on those days (really recommend Rory’s Story Cubes, a great way to get you using vocabulary and putting yourself in unusual situations that wouldn’t normally come up). That was when the real major breakthroughs came and I really noticed a huge improvement, and more than anything, a confidence.

I still don’t really know anyone here (also a Berliner) who’s learned the language and would actually call themselves fluent or not have huge confidence wobbles from time to time.

Applying for German citizenship just now - Daumen well and truly gedrückt!

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#28

I think German is the most attractive language, everything takes on an extra sexy dimension when Deutsch gets spoken.

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#29

I had a temp job (in London) doing quality control for HoH subtitles for ORF. I think they were hoping to get an Austrian student or something in, but German speakers who understood Austrians and needed short term temp work were in short supply, so they got me. I had to sit and watch 10 minute clips of Austrian tv shows, and rate how accurate and well synced the German subtitles were.

The main one I really got into was this comedy-drama about a family in Vienna who win the lottery but don’t tell anyone. Never got to watch whole episodes at work though.

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#30

Sorry, that sounded like I don’t know anyone here who’s learned German. I know lots and lots! Just all so aware about how much we don’t know and how much we’re mostly bluffing our way through most of the time! :blush:

#31

One of my least favourite things are those stupid ‘words spoken softly in every language then spat angrily in German’ videos to show how ‘harsh’ a language it is. Nonsense. It’s beautiful!

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#32

I used to be pretty decent at German

My dad’s parents were German WWII refugees and even though they both died before I was born my dad grew up speaking German and started teaching me some basic German from the age of 8. He actually used an old school textbook of his called ‘Heute Abend!’ (Good Ebening) which I remember from its hardback yellow cover and big fold-out map of pre-wall Berlin in the centre pages

When I started doing German at school for GCSE I was a bit cocky I guess plus I kind of half ironically fancied our German teacher Mrs. Wilson. One time we were given the exercise of ‘Imagine you have recently stayed at a German hotel and returned back to England to find that you have left an important item behind. Write a formal letter to the hotel requesting return of the item.’ So 14 year old me invented the scenario of having stayed in an exclusive Bavarian castle hotel for some Eyes Wide Shut style party and wrote requesting the return of an overnight bag containing a gold Venetian Masquerade mask, a red velvet cape, gold cufflinks and assorted lingerie (which I described in detail).

It was very formal & grammatically perfect and although Mrs. Wilson was obliged to give me an ‘A’ she noted both on paper and in person that she was ‘singularly unimpressed’ with my ‘perverted sense of humour’

Relations were strained after that. I got a B at GCSE and all the German I once knew has long since been evicted from my brain real estate and Swedish lives there now

3 Likes
#33

I will take a look at that book, thanks!

I’m about halfway through the whole German course on Duolingo, just did the level 5 test but I glossed over the last few bits before that to get to the test a bit quicker, so currently going back to finish them off properly.

it gets really frustrating when they just throw concepts in with no explanation (I know that the tips on the website are loads better than on mobile, but I use the mobile version a lot more), seperable verbs are one thing that stands out as being particularly annoying as they don’t teach the verbs themselves, don’t even seem to acknowledge them properly but will throw them in and trip you up.

originally I started all this cos I was going to Berlin for a week, but that got cancelled with a view to rescheduling for 2020. given how this year is going, at least I should know a little bit of the language by the time I actually go!

#34

Yeah separable verbs are a big thing in German with lots of subtleties. First of the all the rules on where to put the separated bit, and also the differences in meaning between them.

For example:
bringen- to bring
umbringen- to do someone in

This website has really good lessons about all this kind of stuff: https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning-bringen/

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