After a year of being utterly confused at restaurants, grocery stores, governmental offices and doctors appointments, we have finally buckled down and started official German lessons.
Once a week for an hour & half our teacher Frank attempts to teach us German A1 (these levels for languages are a big deal over here - I often see on resumes “German, mother tongue; English, C1; French, B2” etc - all of which just shows how fluent (or in the case of A1 NOT FLUENT) you are based on the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. It consists of 6 levels of reference: three blocks (A or basic user, B or independent user and C or proficient user), which are in turn divided into two sublevels, 1 and 2. You have to achieve C2 in either French or German to pass the Swiss citizenship exam. Our A1 level is described as: basic users of the language, i.e. those able to communicate in everyday situations with commonly-used expressions and elementary vocabulary.
Things I’ve learned in class so far.
German has four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neutral), and strong and weak verbs. The word ‘the’ alone has about six options that I’ve come across so far - and no real rules as to when to use which one - you just have to memorize it.
As a written language, German is quite uniform (written the same in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). As a spoken language, however, German exists in many dialects; the main difference being in the sound of the consonants. Swiss German is the primary spoken language in our area which sounds very different to High German and has no written form. If you’re really curious about this one, I found
this article really interesting.
Compounding words & making things into one word is a big thing in German.
Water = wasser (pronounced: Vas.er), Bottle = flasche (Flash.a); Water Bottle = Wasserflasche.
That’s rather helpful. Not helpful when I wanted to order a bottle of wine.
Wine = Wein (Vine); Wine Bottle ≠ Weinflasche.
This will result in the waiter bringing you an empty bottle. (I have learned: Ich möchte bitte eine Flasche Wein bestellen; I’d like to order a bottle of wine, please)
A few of my other favorite compound words:
- die Nacktschnecke (literally: naked snail), meaning: slug
- der Kühlschrank (literally: the cool cupboard), meaning: refrigerator
- die Handschuhe (literally: the hand shoes), meaning: gloves
- der Regenschirm (literally: the rain shield), meaning: umbrella
- das Stachelschwein (literally: the spike pig), meaning: porcupine
- die Wunderkerze (literally: the wonder candle), meaning: sparkler
- das Zahnfleisch (literally: tooth meat), meaning: the gums (in your mouth)
Numbers and time are wild. Like truly wild. Numbers take the compounding situation to the extreme.
14,673 = Vierzehntausendsechshundertdreiundsiebzig (ALL. ONE. WORD)
Literal translation: Fourteen thousand six hundred three and seventy
2:25pm = vierzehn Uhr fünfundzwanzig
Literal translation: Fourteen hour twenty-five
Or you could say fünf vor halb drei; literal translation: five before half three.
It’s alot of thought to get the words in the right order and do all the math needed to say a number.
Like alot.
In addition to our weekly classes, I’ve started DuoLingo for daily practice. I’ll leave you with a few screenshots of my favorite phrases.
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Genau is used as the term of agreement. Anytime I hear it when attempting to speak
German, I get excited because someone has understood what I said and agreed to it. |
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| And when would a fish need a chair? |
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| Someday ... hopefully |
