The German language

(I have no idea if I've spelled that right. But it means ballpoint pen.)

talking of which, one of the things I like about German is that all nouns start with a capital letter. I think it looks both exotic and dignified.

Plough rough through

It's not exactly SO, for example the "e" is "Kaiser" is pronounced differently than in "Freund". It's easier than English though. I don't think there's a language in the world where every letter is pronounced the same way every time, though Finnish comes pretty close (with only major exception, the "ng" sound).

(speed limit)

Spanish is pretty much like that. You change the sound of c and g depending on what vowel they're followed by, but that's about it.

brustwarze
handschuhe
krankenhaus

lieblingsfach
kunst

mandarin? (but i guess the characters are more like words than letters)

oh and schadenfreude is indeed a good one, and xpost doppelganger

What about ll? Or j or h in the beginning of the word? Though Spanish vowels are always pronounced the same, I think.

I think you'll find that werkelijk = Dutch and wirklich = German, so

JA WEG

(See, video games help you learn!)

I agree with Ken that the word Handschuh is a total classic.

Can we hear it for German syntax, please? e.g. Today have I heard that a man who for Germany football played has has in England to come decided.

yeah, a double l means a different sound to single l, and same with double r. and j and h are the same sound at the beginning of a word as they are within it - h is never pronounced, anyway.

KIPPIS - cheers!
Hei - hallo!
Moi moi - bye bye!
KRAPULA - HANGOVER!

Hooray!

Stan oughta be ashamed of himself. I ain't translating THAT.

No, the "e" in "freund" is part of the vowel combination "eu", which is always pronounced the same say.

Eliminating the Sz (sorry, I don't know the html code for it), C/D?

Hääyöaie!

Every teach-yrself-Finnish tape I've ever listened to has had two speakers, one of whom observes the difference between a and ä described in the text of the book and one of whom either says them the same or does the umlaut a bit German. HATE. Plus not aspirating my consonants = no chance, and making the difference between single and doubled letters = only if I speak at three words per minute.

Then I listen to Finnish music and they seem to pronounce a and ä about the same, but it's ok for them because they are on Trendy Fonal Records. Even the ones who aren't.

Do real Germans say glückschmerz? That is a good word. I need to learn German.

mandarin?

Not really! A single character can be pronounced with different inflections depending on the inflection of the character immediately following it.

Dingsbums (thingummybob)

Genau (popular one!)

Falls man in einem Buch so ein Wort drük-
ken will, muss man die Zeilenenden beobachten.

Or is that obsolete now?

Strumpfhosen

Spachtelmasse

My favourite poetic object name in German is Gluebirne, the word for lightbulb which literally translates as glowing pear.

Christ my German is terrible despite living in a German speaking country for 6 years.....

Ich lerne deutsch.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,9572,00.html

Dieser kurs ist gut!

Mein lieblingswort ist "lieblingswort."

(I can't say much else -- it's only my third day).

Ich habe durchfall

so I'm basically challenging myself to learn as much German as possible in the three weeks before my trip. I will try to form some sentences from memory. Forgive my spelling and grammar.

Ich heiße Josh. Ich bin neunundswanzig jahre alt. Ich wohne in Brooklyn. Ich bin verheiratet, aber
Ich habe keinen kinder. Englisch ist meine muttersprache. Sprechen sie englisch?

Das ist mein hund. Es heißen Struppi.

Heute ist Mittwoch. Morgen ist Donnerstag. Gestern war Dienstag.

Ich esse fleisch und bohnen. Ist es frisch? Ach, ja!

OK your dog's name is adorable.

Spelling grammar won't matter much as a tourist and if doing this well after only 4 days is a pretty good sign!

It's not really my dog's name. It's the name of the dog in the german program I'm using, but I want to get a terrier and name it that.

I get really obsessive about things like this for short periods of time. I've been reading my german book on the subway and in the bathroom every chance I get, and I use the program after my wife goes to bed.

My favourite German word is Gefährten which according to google translate thingy means fellowship.

lol

I like how they join a load of words together to make huge nouns so you can usually work it out from a literal translation of each segment. German engineering and technical dictionaries are great for huge words that essentially mean "join all the bits together and you've got one of these."
― Onimo (GerryNemo), Thursday, July 27, 2006 5:12 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

That is my favorite part about German too.

Ken picked "handschuhe" as his favorite word and it's one of mine too. HAND SHOES!

Hurting - you should totally get a dog and name it Struppi - it's amazing.

I just learned that stricken means to knit. I think that's funny.

I'm not 100% certain that it still is but for a long time the longest German word was Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän which means something like "the hat of a steamboat captain who sails on the Danube River". Yes, there was actually a word for that.

nurse is krankenschwester. This whole language is hilarious. How do germans not laugh constantly as they talk to each other?

It's a good question.

I've always like the word for oxygen - Sauerstoff.

i like the word for (bicycle) spoke wrench: nippelspanner, i think

OK - here are some other funny ones followed by their meaning and then literal translations.

Flugzeug - airplane - fly thing (or stuff depending on who you ask)!
Brustwarze - nipples - breast warts :-(
Schlagzeug - percussion instrument - hit thing

What might just be the best:

Antibabypille - birth control pill

haha!

ausgezeichnet

todlich verungluckt - learned that in GCSE German class, means "fatally injured in a road accident" (IIRC). Proved very useful on my exchange trip to Nurnberg as a 14 yr old...

Nosebear!

"Handy", which is actually the word for cell phone, which - obviously - is handy, but is not called this in English, despite what they might want to believe.

sehenswuerdigkeiten = sights (i.e. where you go sightseeing) = literally, worthseeingnesses

loving this thread. I think I'm ready to my lifelong German-learning hell next September.

to go back to it, that is

Not forgetting Schaufensterpuppen by Kraftwerk. How much better in German?

hey hurting, i just started learning too. i only have school french, no german, but i'm moving to munich in two months, so i'm cramming. starting with pimsleur tapes, will pick up a textbook in the next week or so. schnell!

You should really look through the deutche welle site linked above. The Deutsch-Interaktiv course is really good and they also have lots of free podcasts, including the news read slowly in German.

ty

I've been taking German evening classes for the past couple of months and they've been fun - usually someone brings a bottle of German wine along - but I don't feel like I've learnt much, partly because I am bad at making time to do the homework and go through my notes, but mainly because the teacher is very easily distracted and usually ends up just talking in English to the one guy of similar age to him. So totally going to check out that site, thanks!

I didn't expect German vowels to be too different to English, but they're really stumping me. They're... higher in the mouth than my native vowels, I think? Like, I can hear that the long E sound is not just English "ay" but almost like "ee" but somehow different to the long I sound, but I can't seem to get my mouth round it at all. So I must have the most English accent ever.

Schornsteinfeger - chimney sweep
add 'in' at the end for female sweeps

srsly tho have degree can help if required

One of the hardest sounds for me to make in German is the "-er" at the end of words, because it's so close to the English but subtly different, and I keep wanting to say it as "airr"

btw, I hate to be a downer and post a holocaust poem, but this is blowing my mind (have side-by-side translation, of course):

Paul Celan - Todesfuge

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen
Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

I wonder if I could pronounce German (or French) as well as I do English? Probably. I have the nasty habit of "losing" my own accent if I talk with someone over a long period. :-(

Meine Mutti fragte mir ob ich Rilke kenne. haha My German is soooooo crap.

Glad Hurting 2 posted a poem. German poetry is beautiful, always overlooked against romance language poetry. Brecht had a great gift, viz the just opening of his 1933 poem 'Deutschland'

Deutschland

Mögen andere von ihrer Schande sprechen
ich spreche von der meinen.

O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter!
Wie sitzest du besudelt
Unter den Völkern.
Unter den Befleckten
Fällst du auf.

the translation can only grab the meaning and the rhythm

Let others speak of her shame
I speak of my own.'

O Germany, pale mother!
How soiled you are
As you sit among the peoples.
You flaunt yourself
Among the besmirched.

There's a film called 'Germany, pale mother' where the poem is recited at the start. Utterly beautiful.

'bleich' is a quality word

Mutter, ich bin von allem abgetan.

Eine No-Go-Area

I thought loan words tended to be neuter but the only one of those new imports to be neuter is "It Girl". Goodbye, any chance of me guessing at genders of German words!

Thanks for the article, whatever. I'm curious about the proliferation of hyphens in German, not least given that the Germans aren't usually shy when it comes to super-size-pile-up compound nouns. Why Olympia-Stadion and not Olympiastadion, for example?

I am having fun doing this. Just about to finish Pimsleur 1, which is 15 hours of tapes, 30 mins per day. We have not done du, or tenses, but I am surprised at how much progress I feel like I'm making.

I will be finishing level 3 when I move to Germany at the end of September, so I hope I can at least get by, even if I will have to rely on friends for things like arranging utilities/accommodation.

Zahn = tooth, Zahnfleisch = gums [i.e. tooth meat]

Textilfrei = nude.

Frei Körper Kultur = going nude.

FKK is a lot more than that. It's a Weltanschauung.

Nipple = Brustwarze ('breast wart').

I was once told that the literal translation of 'imagination' is 'picture making power'.

xpost: The bolted-on conceptualism is why I love it! Das ist so typisch Deutsch.

Same thing goes, markedly less lovavbly, for Wohngemeinschaft: literally "living community", but actually "flatshare". (But then again, so very much more than "flatshare"...)

That thing about cell phone being "handy" is kind of symptomatic, every other word spoken on german tv these days is a poorly adapted english word. "Jetzt wird das team richtig stark fighten", was the last one I caught.

For some reason the Germans also use the English word "slip" for "undies". My German friend was kinda surprised when I told her that English speakers don't actually use that word for undies.

Then again, I've never understood why the term "WC" is used for toilets in many countries except the English speaking countries, even though it comes from the English words "water closet".

It's a privilege of the English to export these words, and then immediately change them for a lark. All those Americanisms like 'fall' and 'pants' and 'gotten', I think they were ditched here just so we could act all snooty.

gotten?

Americans still say "gotten", don't they?

Yes, but so do English people, nicht wahr?

We most certainly do not!

I do

The past participle of 'got' is 'got' in British English.

I've picked up some American syntax in the last couple of years because I work with Americans and Europeans all day long, but I'm pretty sure I've always said "gotten". Maybe it's a Northern thing?

slip

This is the French word too, which is I'd guess where the Germans borrowed it from. It had never crossed my mind that the French was an English loan-word, since we never use it like that (any more?), but I guess it isn't the most French-looking word.

Getting kind of bummed to be going from a supremely disorganised 10-week German course which was all over the place in terms of level to a year-long beginners' course. I had a quick look at the book used for Level 2 and thought my grasp of some grammatical basics was too weak for it, but now I'm worried that after a year I still won't be any further on.

i have nearly finished level 3 of pimsleur (i guess that's 45 hours of tapes), and picking up some stuff from reading adverts on the u-bahn, cereal boxes, etc., but i definitely need some lessons.

45 hours sounds a lot! Impressive.

ILX German speakers, how big a deal is the difference between "du" and "Sie"?

In my first course (taught by English guy who'd lived in Germany for years) we were all calling each other "du" and using it for a lot of example sentences, etc. In my new course (taught by native German speaker) she was explaining to us that calling someone "du" would be a very big close-buddies-forever sort of deal and that people could talk to each other for years and not use it, which makes me think that as a non-German I am basically never going to get to use it unless someone introduces me to their kids. Is this right? Is it regional or age-dependent?

I'm not the biggest expert on German, but I think that might bit of an exaggeration. I've never heard young people who know each other call each other "Sie". "Sie" is something you use when talking to an elderly person, or when a sales clerk talks to a customer. I.e. it's used when you want show respect for the other person, or when you don't know the other person. I guess it's possible for people to know each other for years and still use "Sie", but then they'd have to be business associates or something like that, i.e. their relationship is formal. If you know someone more informally, I don't think there's nothing wrong with "du", even if you're not bosom buddies or anything.

"You can say you to me" is the bad joke Germans tell in English on this subject.

It's dependent on a LOT of age, social, and regional factors, and is a bit of a trap for the unwary. What you have understood your teacher to say, however, is not true -- so either you misunderstood her or she's at least 50.

It is a question of formality more than familiarity, and you do get a feel for it -- at this point my main problem is recognizing when it would be appropriate for me to offer the "du", but I doubt that this has caused me problems.

Don't duz a German cop, though.

You call people Herr X or Frau Y for far longer in a business relationship than you would do in the UK, I think. E.g. friends of mine set me up with their bank manager to open an account and warned me to call her Frau Schneider, so I was expecting some terrifyingly formal woman, but she was just a regular person. They just use the title more.

Yes, new tutor is probably in her 50s, older than my previous tutor, and definitely a LOT more formal about everything - dresses smartly for classes, very precise and posh English accent, even more so than other Germans I've spoken to of similar age.

Also probably some exaggeration to scare us out of saying "du" to the boss or the mother-in-law on our first day, should we get a job over there or have a German partner, and this latter reason is apparently why about a quarter of the class is there.

These things are good to know, thanks everyone.

I found out yesterday that the German for a non-competitive friendly (football) match is Testspiel. I like that.

This thread ist der Hammer.

The German for pregnancy is Schwangerschaft.

i am making progress

relative pronouns are giving me jokes at the moment though

Schönes Wochenende!

Stinktier = stinky animal (otherwise known as a skunk).

Rollgabelschlüssel = "rolling-fork spanner" = adjustable wrench

Stinktier is excellent.

As we discovered last week on http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=77&threadid=90864, the German for sloth is Faultier = lazy animal!

Ooh, I thought it was "faul" because they were smelly!

faul means both rotten and lazy.

Seem to remember in the early days of reunification the East Germans saying "Wir sind nicht faul" but maybe I am making that up.

When I visited Germany in the mid 90s, I visited Berlin with some friends of mine from North Rhein-Westphalia. The girl we stayed with was from a West Berlin family, and she apparently referred to our East German cabbie as "smelly" (in German), like, in the car with him.

I lol'ed:

http://chzmemebase.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/internet-memes-schmetterlinggggg1.jpg

LOL tho schmetterling is a nice word

Yeah! I lold too but as far as German words go it's really not bad. Also, good to know it should be butterfly and not bowtie pasta. I had no idea.

lol, "motyl" is Polish for butterfly ... which is a lot duller than Schmetterling.

'butterfly' can sounds just as harsh and absurd if you drop the associations you have in your head w/ the word and a beautiful colorful creature

can sounds = english not my first language clearly

my favourite word in German is Büstenhalter

Mein deutsches Lieblingswort ist Straßenbahnhaltestelle.

in sheffield that is Superstraßenbahnhaltestelle

Wait what on Earth is it . . . street car stop?

Büstenhalter is a great word. Continuing with the boob theme so is Brustwarze - Nipples - Breast warts!

Wait what on Earth is it . . . street car stop?

yes or tram stop

lol 1980s brit punk rockers using a German word for their song title (and oblivious to the fact that Vikings were Scandinavian not German)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qj5AHm6u80&list=LLn-htGveAWBClerD_TzXNyg&index=1&feature=plpp_video

I suppose the German equivalent of a marauding force of warlike invaders would be a little too controversial

in Germany now, & I lol each time I see "einfahrt"

True story: When we were stationed in Germany, my grandmother came over to visit for a few weeks. She had been there a few days, and we were driving down the Autobahn, when she remarked, "That 'Ausfahrt' place must be huge, you can get there from anywhere.'"

She also somehow managed to plug a US hair dryer into a socket in Paris with no converter/transformer, nearly burning down the room.

Ha at the first story.

One thing that always makes me do a double take is when German and Italian words (and grammar) collide:

Dogenpalast
Gitarrensoli

to noodle, widdle, or shred on electric guitar = gniedeln (gneedeln)
slight pejorative bias.
Spießer (noun, M) - up-tight, stuffy, old fashioned, priggish, jobsworth, whitebread, bug-up-yr-arse, bourgeois, fuddy-duddy (adj= spießig)
still making no sense of die Fälle after two years.
tongue taking forever to get out of glottal stops & lazy english "r", german "r" being like that björkish clicking helicopter impersonation.
also "school german" explanations of pronunciation are largely false.
äu = "oy", eu = "oy", st.. / sp.. etc = "sht.." / "shp..." etc.
germans don't use the past perfect if they can help it.
it's a dang inefficient language for a people lazily stereotyped as dang efficient, & thus this febrile withering brain i have puts up considerable subconscious resistance to learning, despite the fact i know what it's up to. in one ear, out the other. kein Fortschritt ohne Übung, aber es scheint kein Fortschritt mit Übung, auch! so langsam, peinlich.

germans don't use the past perfect if they can help it.

rhinelanders love their plusquamperfekt, but they tend to use it inaccurately.

one thing i am struggling with: should i basically never use simple past in normal conversation (except for to be, to have, etc.)?

one thing i am struggling with: should i basically never use simple past in normal conversation (except for to be, to have, etc.)?

I take it that this list is meant to include the modal verbs? If so, then that seems pretty much right to me. I'm not a native German speaker, but I've been living in Germany since July.

But, another set of verbs that *seem* to me to also be used standardly in simple past in normal conversation are ones that are immediately followed by a Nebensatz, z.B.

Ich wusste, dass ...
Ich glaubte, dass ...

That's only how it has *seemed* to me.

One thing I'm unclear about with using simple past or present perfect, though, is what applies when it comes to what might be called 'formal speech'. I had learned and always heard that, outside of the few verbs that are exceptions, simple past is for writing and past perfect is for speech. But at some point, I was writing an e-mail to a friend, and I was unsure which to use. This was because it occurred to me that the distinction might really be between formal and informal contexts. I asked my German teacher here, and she said that this suspicion was right. That is, one should use present perfect in writing to a friend, just as one would use it in talking to a friend.

But what's confusing is that this doesn't seem to track formal/informal address with 'Sie'/'du'. I've definitely heard speakers siezen an audience while using present perfect. And I *think* I have heard some speakers siezen an audience and use simple past. My guess is that the former use Sie because they are talking to strangers and use the present perfect because they want to be relatively informal (I'm thinking here of speakers who have introduced classical music concerts or something like that). And I'm guessing that the latter just want to be super formal (I'm thinking here of academic lectures). I've been to a number of academic lectures, but I can't really recall for sure which the various speakers used. So, maybe that is all wrong.

I've been meaning to post more entertaining or interesting words here, but I forget. Here's one I came across a few days ago:

Geheimratsecken
- translation: receding hairline
- literally, something like: private council corners

This created some bewilderment when I was sightreading, as I knew what the component parts meant but not the word as a whole.

i guess i'm including the modals, ja. thanks. you're right about the nebensatz thing. i do hear ich dachte, dass... too.

i've been here on and off for two years now, but was deep in thesis writing in an english-speaking environment for most of that, so i'm only now getting around to making any formal effort to learn.

I should really really make a formal effort because while I can understand quite a bit my speaking ability isn't great. I can get by and make myself understood but I'm fairly certain it must sound really broken.

i've been here on and off for two years now, but was deep in thesis writing in an english-speaking environment for most of that, so i'm only now getting around to making any formal effort to learn.

I've guess I've done that in reverse: I started with German classes, but now am mostly thesis-writing in English. My speaking ability has definitely worsened since I stopped doing the classes.

i actually just quit the classes at my work. they were 90 mins twice a week, the teacher wasn't great (very limited english), and they were timetabled to cause maximum disruption to the working day on the days they happened. i'm thinking of doing 3h/day for the month of august to make a big effort to get from A2/B1 to B2.

ich finde dass schadenfreude ein sehr schones wort ist.

also, fuck capital letters. eat that. lol

i absolutely love the german language. but then i am fascinated by most languages. i love pronouncing german words like schadenfreude. it just sounds so lovely

ha i am going to starkbierfest for 14 ppl from 2pm-10pm. gonna die iirc.

with 14 ppl

i am not drinking for 14 ppl

y'r still gonna die

How stark is Starkbier?

jealous

http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/6/68694/1592764-1084633_05_super_super.jpg

this year's brew:

Stammwürze: 18,3 %
Alkohol: 7,5 %
Kalorien: 68,0 kcal/100 ml

new favourite German word: Der Voelkerschlacht. A three syllable word rendered in English as "The Battle of the Nations", another name for the memorable Battle of Leipzig in 1813.

But I don't like the way they put special endings on words for professions etc. if a woman is doing that job.

Like "comedienne" or "actress?"

yes, like teacheress and scientess and lady doctor and admin assistantrix

people don't really say comedienne irl and actress is on the way out

die Merkelerin.

OK, simple past is the single-word past tense (aka preterite?) and perfect is the one with haben/sein, right? I get confused abt the German past tenses because every grammar book I read calls them something different and we haven't done the former in class yet so the latter is just "the past tense" to us.

Which is why I am posting, because it's frustrating that at the end of my 3rd year of German evening classes we still haven't done the former except for haben, sein and "es gab", and we did the perfect in the first year.

So I'm surprised people use the simple past less in speech, because I feel so longwinded forming sentence after sentence with the other one, plus it means I can't read any books! I mean I can read books if I want to guess every time I see a verb, which mostly works, but it's just an extra layer of irritation.

It's kind of frustrating having done something for three years (ok, two hours a week for 3x6 months) and still feel so bad at it, but that is my fault for not putting the effort in, or having any motivation to, since I won't be going anywhere German-speaking in the foreseeable future.

PS I can't really read books anyway as my vocab and my patience for winding through Germanic grammatical constructions are not up to most written German, but I have a v slim "young adult" novel which looks vaguely approachable, except every time I open it I end up getting annoyed, partly at all the verbs

These days I can basically intuit how to say what I want to, but the time when I could reel off grammatical rules or explain my intuitions is long past :(

Austrians use the simple past in conversation more than Germans.

There is no present perfect tense in German -- you have to through in other little nearly meaningless words ("schon" "mal") to hint at it -- and German writings on English grammar are absolutely HOPELESS at explaining what "I've been to Spain" actually means.

I believe the official name in English for those lovely little words is "flavoring particles."

http://coerll.utexas.edu/gg/gr/mis_04.html

A lot of people learning German seem to get v excited by the exclamation "Doch!" ime.

That page looks useful, thanks!

otm

Yeah, that page has the best discussion of those that I've seen. Very helpful!

That page is awesome!!!

My cousin uses "Doch!" all the time.

doch!

I often feel this strange temptation to start all my sentences "naja", regardless of meaning

Entirely too many actual German people do the same thing. A cheesy tic. Worst German verbal tic I ever heard was a dude who began EVERY sentence with "im Grunde genommen" (which is basically "basically".)

Haha, I also had that same temptation. And the one to start any sentence I felt like with "aber."

"doch" is an awesome word.

"naja" lol yeah my family uses that one A LOT.

"also" = another "falscher Freund" for english speakers.

or, my German teacher's favorite corny joke: beware Germans bearing Gift.

In Norwegian, "gift" means both "poison" and "married," since both of these have to do with something being given.

ha I read james redd's post and was about to say "Doesn't "Gift" mean poison in German too? but then finally got Eisbaer's teacher's joke which went over my head yesterday.

The German for dowry is "Mitgift". The words for poison and for giving have a common root in Germanic languages. Dunno exactly how that is.

"lake" is der See(m), and "sea" is die See(f).
why??

http://ia600807.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/32/items/olcovers662/olcovers662-L.zip&file=6623696-L.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9v2XBNVRtw

Sort of german-related Q:

My wife recently taught me two hebrew onomotopaeic words that I think are hilarious. The word for fart is "fletz" and the word for burp is "grebtz." We both guessed that they were probably of germanic origin, but google translate offers completely different german words for burp and fart. Does anyone recognize these words as German-derived?

fletz looks German/Yiddish, but it might come from Latin - isn't the Latin for fart "flattus"? Or maybe FLT is the indo-european root for flatulence that somehow made its way into Hebrew.

Oh yeah it could have been a yiddishized version of a romance language word. Yiddish got cross-polinated with all kinds of other languages.

I.e. a romance language word germanicized via yiddish.

it could also have just been a made-up yiddish word, since it's onomotopaeic

Think those words originated in a Don Martin cartoon

whoa i have the hangover gang over

The Katzenjammer Kids?

stimmt

2-week-delayed Starkbierreaktion?

no i went last night for some research

the trip with 14 people is on sunday

http://i.minus.com/iwuilMSTZBfvA.JPG

there are lolzier photos but my housemate has an amazing ability to look like she's having a stroke in every photo of her drinking, so it wouldn't be fair to post them

lol

what the heck are you all talking about anyway?

on this thread or in the photo?

Wait maybe I need to read back more. Was there a festival or something?

ja http://www.nockherberg.com/starkbierfest.html

that's the spillover room

the main room looked like the fall of rome

Can't believe I missed a chance to rave about the awesomeness of Hildegard Knef a week ago. I love you, Hildegard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz9zFdB5_QQ

One of my favorite beginner German sentences is "Unser fisch ist immer frisch!"

zauberlehrling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYdNMA8wM4

die Tausendfüßler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_%28filmmaking%29

popular (presumed to be mythical) origin theory is that MOS stands for broken-English "Mit out sound", that is, "Without sound" as a 1920s German-émigré director might have said it.

anmaßend

die Scham = shame/disgrace or vulva

However "Schamhaare", for pubic hair, is used regardless of gender.

re: Scham. cf. 'pudenda'

at the moment we're covering recent german history. heute in deutschkurs habe ich den plot von das film carlos beschrieben. meine erklarung war absolutely awful.

Überrascht bin ich irgendwie nicht.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Wankbahn_poster.jpg

Aw - is that as in Garmish Partenkirchen? It's so beautiful there. That's where my grandmother met my grandfather and my dad spent the early years of his life in a town called Grainau. I've been there a couple times and it's just so lovely.

I understood what you said Caek! I mean it's pretty obv even for someone without any knowledge of German but being able to read little bits just makes me wish I knew more. Fuck it. I'm gonna do an online course or something.

also lol wank

it is a bavarian holiday tomorrow so i am going to wank (lol)

gute Fahrt zu Wank

change of plan. because of the weather i am not going to wank tomorrow.

sorry for lost wank opportunity

schade, kein Wank für dich!

http://survex.com/~olly/wank/wankhaus.jpg

how very considerate of them ... an entire house where you can Wank!

We have a terrapin, or in USian English a freshwater turtle. Which is in German eine Sumpfschildkröte, or a swamp-shield-toad. Turtles are Schildkröte, shield-toads.

And apparently the German for "peanuts" as in "to work for peanuts" or "that costs peanuts" is ein paar Kröten, "a couple of toads".

i am starting an intensive course next week! 8 weeks, 4 evenings per week. i aced (i.e. got lucky with the questions) on the entrance test and have been placed at B1/B2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages), which is going to last all of 2 days i predict.

this course is high intensity in ten cities

i made use of that great link about doch, zwar etc. (http://coerll.utexas.edu/gg/gr/mis_04.html) to do my Hausaufgabe last night

e, it finishes after the shops shut, so i am going to look for your gummis at the weekend

p.s. omg http://www.dict.cc/?s=m%C3%B6pse

"babylons (coll)"!

"charlies"???

spicy ginger babylons!

good luck with your intensive course, it sounds exciting and terrifying

halt die ohren steif.

ha, ein nützlicher Ausdruck

ich fuhle mich wie ich trinke von einem Feuerwehrschlauch

Stop feeling yourself like that.

they love them some reflexive words

so is your plan to take one of Goethe Institute language proficiency exams?

i don't think so. some of the people in my class are building up to that i think. and there is a section at the end of our coursebook explaining how zertifikat deutsch works. so maybe? i guess i will find out what i've signed up for in 8 weeks?!

do you know when the möpse gummis were released e? couldn't find them in my local (admittedly quite small) supermarkt.

i just wrote an essay about sport in britain ... in german

it is incredibly boring, but i use the genitive case, a relative pronoun, and konjunktiv ii

Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen

haha "Use Konjunktiv II" was a permanent fixture on my German exam checklist at school

konjunktiv ii würd ich die pfoten von lassen. especially the missingsche version displayed in the last sentence, which will get you derben respekt irl, but in tests, not so much.

wait, that was konjunktiv i. hätt ich besser nichts gesagt.

haha, yeah konjunctiv i is a battle for another day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB4TqRTWxgE

this course is amazing. i am giving a 5 minute talk about the curiosity rover in class tomorrow

not sure how grammatical i was, and pretty sure i invented some words, but i seemed to get my point across

Yay!

Toll!

das Sonnensystem

i refereed to mars curiosity as mars neugir throughout, but nobody laughed

ausgezeichnet

can anybody point me to a half decent resource on "die Fälle" which isn't just tables & metalanguage, and would hopefully be example sentences of things people actually say in pos, neg & Q sentences?

cough http://www.sendspace.com/file/hoyxrb

cough cough http://www.sendspace.com/file/6vxew5

Umgebung = best German word?

pp33-50 in the first one

ctrl-f nom, acc, dat, gen in the second one

Ich habe eine meerschweinschen in die umgebung gegessen

I was disappointed when I realised you pronounce it umGEbung not UMgebung

thanks caek - that looks to make more sense than most!

the schaum examples are particularly good, i think

and don't worry about genitive until you know you need to

if you're british (this doesn't work for american english), the classic example is writing a letter:

"i write a letter"

i = subject, i.e. nominative

a letter = direct object, i.e. accusative

now i add the recipient of the letter:

"i write a letter to my friend"

"my friend" = indirect object, i.e. dative

two groups of words i am struggling with at the momen

vorschlagen - suggest
vermuten - assume
verinbaren - stipulate

die Ausrede - excuse, pretext
die Ausnahme - exception
ausreden - dissuade
angeben - declare
der Angeber - showoff
abreden - stipulate

also

eigen - own (e.g. at your own risk)
einzig - only (e.g. the only people)
einig - a few

vereinbaren, verabreden. es herrscht unmut im klassenzimmer.

caek, where are those definitions from? Langenscheidt (emphasis on the last syllable)? They are not good, and very oversimplified. Generally speaking, German-English dictionaries where Germans have the final editorial say SUCK -- German has a much smaller usable vocabulary set than English, and as a result, they present the English words as if they were simple direct cognates much more often than is usable in reality. German words do a lot of heavy lifting, and most of the verbs you listed have a lot of different meanings, including ones more closely related to the noun forms.

Basically, I think you're better off with a German learner's dictionary or school dictionary than any given German-English dictionary once you've got a year or two under your belt.

mittwoch

my favorite german sentence

ich habe ein audi

not sure about the conjugations in that one, i did manage four years but it was half a lifetime ago

The conjugation is correct. The pronunciation is "eech bean ayn oarschloch."

du bist ein affe

i think mostly get what those words mean. the one-word definitions there are my own, for this thread. but yeah i should probably graduate to a D-D dictionary.

http://megacycles.tumblr.com/post/13800349009/schones-foto

what is the plural of Glas, Glassen oder Glaese?

Ich habe zwei Glassen Wein getrunken, wer werden mit mir Deutsch sprechen?

bitte, ich möchte gern ein Glas Bier.

und auch Wurst für meine Schlange.

:D

you want a wurst for your schlong?

ilx history:

I got an A in German GCSE but can now remember nothing at all of the language except for one poem I wrote when we had to write a poem. It went like this:

Ich habe eine Schlange
Meine Schlange hast viel Durst
Er geht in zum Kafe
Er hat Getranke und eine Wurst

I may not have remembered the proper grammar.

― Tom, Monday, August 20, 2001 8:00 PM (11 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

schlong = schlange....... i never made that connection.

what is the plural of Glas, Glassen oder Glaese?

neither. when ordering drinks, it's glas ("zwei glas bier"), for all other purposes it's gläser.

haha, E you will like this: Ted has been dubbed in bayerisch dialect rather than german for release here.

lol, nice. Boston accents = Barvarian. I like it.

in the spot where they usually warn you it has subtitles (which people don't like here), they warn you that ted is in bayerisch

http://www.munig.com/kino/kinoprogramm.html?suche_tag=2012-09-07&suche_zeit=&suche_genre=&suche_art=kino&x=8&y=1&options=ov

Bayerischer Dialekt

How funny! It's been a long time since I was there so I don't really remember much about the dialect. How is it viewed over there?

I took a German class when I lived in London and I remember the teacher there telling me that the accent in the area my dad comes from and where my fam still lives (Rheinland Pfalz) is the worst in Germany and considered to be a farmers accent and is looked down upon. He likened it to a really thick US Southern accent.

i get the impression it's not really looked down on because bavaria is historically so rich, but i'm not sure tbh. as an accent, it sounds pretty idiotic to me. when people are speaking full on bayerisch i can't understand any of it.

you should check out small town murder songs by the way. it's not a great film, but it's only 75min. lots of canadian plattdeutsch. i didn't know about that going in, so all the way through i was like, 'what is this crazy language and why do i feel like i understand it?'

"canadian plattdeutsch"

The language (or groups of dialects of Low German) is spoken by over 300,000 Mennonites (Russian Mennonites), most notably in the Latin American countries of Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay,[2] Honduras, Belize, and Argentina, as well as in the United States and Canada (particularly Manitoba and Saskatchewan).

I had no idea about any of this! So weird. Will check out.

"For example, Homer Groening, the father of Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons), spoke Plautdietsch as a child in Saskatchewan in the 1920s, but his son Matt never learned the language."

reygadas' last film silent light is set among the mennonites in mexico & mostly in low german dialect

Yes, just saw that too. That is so weird. I'm into this though. Going to see if I can find these online.

I remember the teacher there telling me that the accent in the area my dad comes from and where my fam still lives (Rheinland Pfalz) is the worst in Germany and considered to be a farmers accent and is looked down upon.

Huh, Interesting! It is sort of funny accent. My cousin's is so so thick. I actually love listening to him and his friends talk but it can be tough for me to understand sometimes if they're speaking really fast and using slang on top of the dialect.

on the last day of my course we did a "spot the accent" exercise. the only ones anyone could get was schwäbisch

lol i was under the impression that the Saxon dialect is the one German accent that people in Germany make fun of.

avoid:
01 fränkisch
02 sächsisch
03 pfälzisch

instead learn to speak in these cool dialects:
01 plattdeutsch
02 kölsch
03 münchnerisch

03 pfälzisch

>:O

03 münchnerisch

ugh no

Zugzwang

Sächsisch drives Austrian women wild, apparently.

Also, "Zugzwang" is a terrific word which is used very often in colloquial speech, to refer to real life situations where, oh shit, I have to DO something. It should be borrowed into English immediately.

as that wiki article says, it's used in English to refer to a chess situation

I read that as well. I them described a non-chess usage in German, and suggested that that usage should be borrowed into English. Now that I have repeated this, would you like me to comprehend it for you as well?

when you put "it should be borrowed into English immediately", I read that as meaning the word itself, not that particular usage

Fair enough.

Today I have learnt that ein Otter (masculine) is an otter, and eine Otter (feminine) is an adder. As in the poisonous snake.

(just crossing out any plans to work in a zoo in Germany, in case confusion of the two could lead to my demise or that of several cute, if also slightly vicious, aquatic mammals)

even worse than otter: umfahren.

I'm trying to learn German and decided to get a subscription to a magazine so I can practice. So far I've narrowed my choices to de:bug and texte zur kunst, but since this is all internet research maybe I'm doing it all wrong and was wondering if you guys could recommend something?

Der Spiegel is always an interesting read.

But it can be a tough one. A very specific style of writing, but would fit with the other stuff.

empfohlen: http://www.dw.de/dw/0,,8030,00.html

vielen Dank

Möchte jemand meine Hausaufgaben machen?

I know collective nouns always take a singular verb in German, unlike English (especially UK English?). So, if I say "das junge Paar" in one clause, and then want to use a pronoun, do I use "es", because "Paar" is neuter?

Feels wrong going "the young couple goes to dinner, because it is celebrating its anniversary" but I can't think of any other way to do it!

that is probably correct though? tbh I don't remember that grammar detail but exceptions to rules don't usually follow the same pattern as English IIRC

well, it's the logical thing to do, it's just I'll feel extra silly if it isn't right, since it sounds so horrible in English! I'm sure there are about 50 worse mistakes I haven't even noticed on my homework sheet however

(thank you)

No, that's right. After speaking German long enough that you get out of the translation phase, it becomes more natural -- er, sie, and es aren't he, she, they, and it. English pronouns base themselves on actual or perceived gender and number of the object or concept described by the antecendent, while German pronouns are based on the grammatical gender and number of the antecedent. In English, Larry and Horst are always "they" because they they are two people; in German, they are "they" if you use a plural noun and "es" if you use a singular neuter noun.

the young couple thing has another pitfall: "das junge paar geht fein essen, denn es feiert seinen jahrestag" - this could refer to some obscure anniversary of the male half of the couple, because "seinen" is the accusative case of "its" as well as "his".

saying "denn sie feiern ihren jahrestag" is actually common in colloquial use, because if you stick with the singular neuter, later on people will have a hard time associating the freshly formed idea of your couple with this "it" you keep referring to. nb "ihren" is the accusative of "their" and "her", so this might refer to the female half's obscure anniversary ;)

yeah I remember this discussion around "das Mädchen" as well, it seems to be correct to follow that up with "es" rather than "sie" although it feels intuitively wrong

The real solution to the fake problem: "es [das Paar] geht fein essen, weil er [the dude] feiert seinen Jahrestag". She isn't feiering, he is; she's just feiering mit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0

Learn the German in a breeze with these Berlin hipcats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4v4bCFGL28

HAHAHA that was awesome. Macro is super cool!

That complete Deutsch Aktuell series is on youtube and is absolutely drop dead hysterically funny to native and fluent speakers, and accessible to and probably also funny as hell to people who remember at least a year's worth of school German. Maybe particularly funny to me 'cause I work with German theater directors and dramaturgs, so watching these young actors attempting to wring multiple layers of emotional subtext out of sentences like "Ja, das ist meine Cousine Claudia. Sie kommt aus Frankfurt am Main." just destroys me.

So my aunt and uncle are coming over for Christmas apparently and this probably sounds dumb but I want to brush up and impress them. Is that actually a good series to use? Are there better free ones? I have pretty excellent comprehension skills but my speaking isn't nearly as good mostly because I get nervous and clam up. I'll sit and listen to a whole conversation and understand it all but then resort to English when it's my turn because I don't want to sound dumb. :/ So I mostly need something where it gets me to repeat back. Or conversational partners. Hmmmm.

In all seriousness, it seems to me to also be a good series -- the language is pretty elementary, but the speed, pronunciation, and speech melodies are close to reality.

I warn English speakers who want to converse with me in English that I have a comedy Lower Austrian accent.

like ahnie?

No, he's got that that Styrian thing going on, but yes in that, like Arnie, I have a mostly-Austrian-slightly-American accent that Germans find hysterical.

Thanks btw, I'll check it out. It's not like I can't converse with them but I'd like to do so and not feel awkward or resort to English as often as I do. My uncle's English is pretty great so it's easy to do. My aunt doesn't speak any English though so I have to speak German to her.

Ooh, just noticed big mistake above -- I have a comedy Austrian accent in German and a comedy Maryland accent in English. I am a native speaker of English.

Ah!! I was confused for a second. That makes more sense. Wait so how did you wind up with the comedy Austrian accent then?

Been living in comedy Austria with a comedy Austrian wife for a bunch of years.

Ah, makes sense. I have been there! We went skiing in St. Anton and then went to Innsbruck. So so beautiful. I'd like to go back someday.

my recommendation is pretty much always the pimsleur course, although it depends on what level you're brushing up from

it's not free but it can be found for kostenlos on certain websites

so apparently i've completed B1, which means i've reached the standard required for german citizenship. tbh it's not a very high level, but that intensive course this summer, and i'm so much better than i was before the summer.

i have two "tandem partners" now, they are germans i will meet for an hour who want to learn my muttersprache. i think the idea is like 30m in english, 30m auf deutsch.

Does Pimsleur have Our Hero rescuing his cute Turkish girlfriend from evil Neo-Nazis with hilarious results, though?

crucial quesion!

Thanks Caek! I mostly just need practice.

langsam gesprochene nachrichten is good for a daily dase of spoken german if your level is up there, but it's always, always about the crisis in the eurozone for obv reasons, so it can get a bit samey.

slowly spoken news

See, I get it! I mean not that that was difficult but I think my comprehension is good. I guess I could watch some news online. That's a good tip though. Maybe tv shows too! Any good German TV shows I could find online?

bauer sucht frau

The summer I lived in Germany, I bought a bunch of Asterix comics and read those to help improve my reading comprehension, which was good because of the various pun names; I also read a book by the dude who wrote The Neverending Story that I can't remember the name of (maybe Momo?)

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauer_sucht_Frau

Doku-Soaps!

link to langsam gesprochene nachrichten upthread iirc

DW has lots of lessons. i found them a bit slow for learning, but i think they're useful once you've reached say B1 to kick on with just listening to lots and lots of german at an appropriate level.

http://www.dw.de/learn-german/german-courses/s-2547

Who knew that "Farmer Wants A Wife" was a successful export of British TV?

Huh so the neverending story is german, that kind of explains why some germans love to say say 'neverending story', in english, when something goes on and on.

The movie was also directed by the same guy who did Das Boot.

http://i1326.photobucket.com/albums/u641/Lixenixen/mitt.png

okay lol

learnt some weird german watching the master in OmU

"das Versuchskaninchen"

ha

Did anyone else learn German using suspense thriller audio/books "Gefahrliche Wege" and "Geheime Mission?" I can still remember parts many years later.

fremdschämen

Wait, is Versuchskaninchen rabbit hunt?

ha. almost. der Versuch = attempt/trial

Ah, just looked it up. hahahaha!

what a beautifully literal language

"das Versuchskaninchen"

lol ... no wonder that the German equivalent of "scaredy cat" is "Angsthase"!!

come to think of it -- since the best use that Germans apparently have for rabbits is to use them as Versuchskaninchen and as the main ingredient in Hasenpfeffer, it's only right for Germans to have a LOT of Angst.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4QlZmS5gO7s/SnptC75rgSI/AAAAAAAAAaE/r3Q3cNE8BM4/s320/Hasenpfeffer05.jpg

German RABBITS, that is.

Fremdschämen is a bullshit word for a bullshit concept, and fuck everyone who uses it.

native german speakers: please tell me "blackbeat" doesn't mean what i think it means

Non-native, but fluent -- it does mean that. "Black Music" gets said without flinching and almost always in English. But German's not alone there (have heard this in Swedish, Dutch, and French as well).

oh je

The expression 'you are what you eat' is much better in German: man ist was man isst

yeah -- it's even better w/t the ess-tset.

you get marked down on language tests if you put a ß in isst.

i miss ß

;_;

ripß

The expression 'you are what you eat' is much better in German: man ist was man isst

― Daniel Giraffe, Monday, March 18, 2013 4:26 PM (1 month ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22490560

die Kuh ist über die Fence gejumpt!

"Kopfball"

how's the class going, caek?!?

Abgeschlossen! That was an intensive thing at the Goethe inst last summer. Had a couple of tandem partners this year too. Much improved imho. But I'm moving to the US next month tho. I'm still doing my vocab flashcards but I've given away the text books :(

Don't give up! Deutsche Welle has a ton of stuff here you can use: http://www.dw.de/deutsch-lernen/s-2055
(or http://www.dw.de/learn-german/s-2469), especially the daily Langsam gesprochene Nachtrichten and the various weekly podcasts such as Sprachbar, Alltagsdeutsch, Wort der Woche, Top-Thema. OK, I see a Video-Thema as well, let's see what that is about.

yeah the problem isn't opportunities to hear/read german, but obligations to hear/read and especially speak it when i have to start a new job.

i do like langsam gesprochene nachtrichten tho (linked it upthead i think)

That Texas German report is kind of pathetic -- if there was a Texas German dialect, it's long dead -- what's left is old Texans who kinda remember how their grandparents spoke.

Fwiw I've spoken German in Hill country and been understood.

True the ppl in that report in their 60s were v basic, but that old lady the professor was recording sounded pretty fluent.

Oh, sure -- but I think it's total German academic self-parody to say "one aspect of this dialect is that it's highly individual" rather than admit that he's at least 10 years too late.

tbf to him, i assume he's talking to more ppl than that old lady, and it was the bbc person who found those good old boys in their back yard claiming to speak german it sounds like they got from a michel thomas tape. maybe it's the bbc that's 10 years too.

the longest german conversation i ever had in texas was in a mall in el paso but that was girl who was basically fluent from school, but had never left juarez/el paso.

Liebe Grüße zu Fronleichnam

q. abt. 'zu tun haben':

i think that in english, we use the expression 'to have to do with' almost always negatively, e.g. 'what does that have to do with me?'. there's an implicit denial of any connection to the thing at all.

but apparently in german positive usages are routine? a la 'to be concerned with', 'to deal with'?

q: as a consequence, is there a stronger implication of literal dealing-with, being-concerned-with, when the expression is used negatively in german?

doch! personally i use "have to do with" neutrally more than negatively in english, but i agree it can be negative.

it's certainly my impression that "hat zu tun mit" is neutral, although i don't see why it couldn't be negative in context. "warum erzählst du mir? es hat nicht zu tun mit mir!"

"das geht dich nichts an"/"das ist nicht meine Sache" has more of the the "that's none of my business" meaning.

i don't know an idiomatic expression that means "why should i care?"

"es geht um" is kind of in this area, but i think it's closer to "it's about..." as in "it's a book about a an old man trying to catch a marlin"

(native british english speaker)

donkey, caek!

can you think of circumstances where 'zu tun haben' would be preferred to e.g. 'behandeln' or 'sorgen'?

i'm guessing here so wait for one of the more fluent speakers to chime in before mailing any letters, but i just use zu tun haben mit as a direct translation of "to have to do with" and behandeln (in this context) as "to deal with" or "to cover". i'm struggling to think of an example in english that makes the differences between those two clear though. "to have to do with" is certainly a bit more coloquial. i guess it's also a bit less specific about the nature of the connection, whereas "to deal with"/"to cover" implies that the coverage must be comprehensive.

sorgen is something different. or can it be translated as "to concern" kind of like betreffen? in which case, i was not aware of that.

j., i don't personally have seen 'what does that have to do with me?' in an especially negative context yet but i'm no native speaker.
if it should express a negative attitude to a certain topic and is at the same time used for distancing from it the most fitting german equivalent should be "nichts angehen" -> "das geht mich nichts an", esp. "was geht mich das an?"

although "und was hat das mit mir zu tun?" / "damit hab ich nichts zu tun" can be meant negative as well, per se it's more neutral.

i guess i can imagine the question being asked genuinely, presupposing that it doesn't have anything to do with the asker but believing that the answerer is going to be able to provide the relevant connection to the asker. i just usually hear the question as a form of denial ('that has nothing to do with me; what's to say otherwise?').

Umgangssprache

that's a lovely word

Talking of lovely words...

"...when Chancellor Merkel used it at a public meeting, nobody batted an eyelid, our correspondent adds."

Uhhhh, what??!?! *checks calendar to make sure it isn't April 1st*

awesome

nebensächlich

a lovely word

Geheimdienstaffäre

The German for the stiffness you feel the day after exercise is Muskelkater, which word for word means 'muscle hangover'.

das WAP-Handy

BH Ideas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck

ach, schiesse!

Wunderbarbara... Thanks Lo Ambient

i miss germany! it is a good country. everything is very well made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejuK8_12Fmg

ffs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejuK8_12Fmg

made-up German words: http://www.benschott.com/schottenfreude/

Somehow that reminds me of a friend who said "Es ist fast Food, aber nicht Food"

Special German Words on Mother Language Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxVcgDMBU94

Thanks for the Special German Words. Some I was familiar with, some were new to me.

Ohrwurm
A personal favorite, Ohrwurm is the phrase you use to describe a song that is stuck in your head.

qvestion:

what sort of a feel is there for a relation/parallel between 'dastehen' (occurring as 'steht da', actually) and the question, 'wo steht…?', used to mean something like 'where does it say…?'?

i have a text where both occur, and i suppose some parallelism could be intended, but 'stehen' seems like -such- a wide-ranging verb to me that i wouldn't want to over-stress any superficial similarity between the two given that a native speaker probably would emphasize what the latter means rather than the fact that it is spelled like w/ dastehen.

or, alternative question: can anyone recommend a good way to get comfortable w/ the crazy range of things 'stehen' is used to say w/r/t the seemingly less-verby english 'stand'?

This is the very thing that defeated me ultimately. My German is not that bad but the pick-a-prefix-any-prefix + verb proliferation combined with the literal and figurative meanings overloaded on each of these makes a dense thicket of meanings very difficult to unpack. I believe Three Word Username, who was indeed able to master this stuff, commented upon this once, although I'm sure he managed to express it way better than I could.

My only consistent advice on getting comfortable with this stuff is that although it is super difficult and a bit of a mind fuck to try to get it together without comparing it to English (or any other first language except maybe Swedish or Dutch, and even then), it is in fact completely impossible to do it while consciously or subconsciously referring yourself to your first language. The "stehen = stand" cognate won't mess you up, but the prefixes will, because although they have meaning, they don't have a meaning that is consistent with any English cognate, really. So you have to train yourself to forget any notion of translating when you are reading, writing, or speaking German. Fluency is associating the word with an abstract or concrete concept, not with an English (or French or Korean or Swahili) word. The first time you know what a word exactly what a word means and can read and use it, but would have to stop and think and say "but not really" a lot to translate it, you are on the right path. Does that make any sense?

it does! i have found myself doing that more often, thanks in large part to getting a feel for syntax and sentence structure so that even phrases with unknown words fall into a natural order. but words like 'stehen' mess me up!

Try this: "stehen" is "stand", sure, why not; look at the prefixes and see if you can associate them with a hand gesture, a certain kind of motion. So "dastehen" is to stand (thrusts my hand downward, securely, indicating "here we are").

That looks like pretty good advice. Thanks.

Fever in the Funkhaus now.

http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/10-extraordinarily-german-phrases/

langsam langsam...?

OK, that's pretty good.

to have pig : )

Warning; "bescheuert" is very close to "retarded" in meaning and usage; I avoid it.

This seems like the best thread to ask this:

I am currently reading quite a lot of German Lit in translation. Partly its to further the depth of what I know, a mixture of re-reading and reading more by writers I love: Kafka, Rilke, Schnitzler, Musil, Joseph Roth, Bernhard.

But also finding new writers, some of whom are poets: Bachmann, Trakl, Heine, Peter Weiss, Brecht (what a poet he was, had no idea!)

I wasn't really going to tackle Goethe. I read Faust years ago, making little impression. ...Werther just isn't appealing. I told myself Buchner made much more of an impact upon the 'expressionist' mode of German writing and thought that appeals to me (I love the essay by Canetti detailing his encounter w/Lenz).

Upon reading The Diaries of Franz Kafka this isn't going to do. His notes on him, his awe of him...I need to read some of his poetry but what else is there? Any partic translations. He is someone who is quite hard to get a handle on.

there is an older penguin selected verse, available only used in the u.s., that pairs originals with prose paraphrases. i think the newer penguin is from the same translator david luke, but there apparently the verse is all translated.

faust can make an impact but, i dunno, i think you have to see it as more pop / mythic. i used to maybe read the kaufmann, or taylor, translations and they didn't do much for me. i had better luck with the oxford one, which i think is also (coincidentally, i don't have any great love for him) david luke. iirc luke emphasizes his effort to preserve the verse-forms: different speakers (and the same at different times) will say each part in its own little poem, so certain translation choices (or worse, prosification) will obscure one of the charms of the thing.

i've been poking away at the thomas carlyle (yes that one) translation of wilhelm meister for several years (i want to get a handle on mignon's character because of some shit schopenhauer said about one of the songs she sings). i couldn't really say why, but it has such an odd texture.

Can't speak to the accuracy of any of the translations but vol. 1 in the Princeton Collected Works, ed. Middleton, has a good spread of contemporary takes and a few older ones, all in verse and set against the original. I like Middleton's "Song To Mahomet" there.

Thanks both.

bentelec you've just reminded me I used to have one of the Princeton vols, studies on colour. Never felt inclined to crack that open.

Frohe Ostern Euch allen.

Speaking of Kafka, I probably just got this link off ILX in the first place, but it doesn't seem to be on this thread, so:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/01/on-translating-kafkas-the-metamorphosis.html

That's a great link, thanks.

Thanks, earlier this week I was just reading Susan's intro to her translation of Walser's Berlin Stories (NYRB books), part of my lol project.

Yes, thanks for the link. Didn't Nabokov actually claim to know the type if insect, some sort of beetle? This makes more sense.

nabokov always claimed the beetle had wings, and could have flown out the window, but gregor didn't know.

Oh yeah

How often is there a new translation? Seems like every few years. Maybe not quite as often as Can reissues but...

Truth be told it took me ages to parse the second sentence of Die Verwandlung- classic overstuffed German syntax.

part of my lol project.
What lol project? lol = learn other language?

http://www.vox.de/cms/index.html

^ for lovers of the fernsehen

Hier Komme Die Warum Jetzt

(possible future display name)

^ deutsch aufklärungshändler schlagzeile, klicken sie jetzt um herauszufinden!

"enlightenment dealer"?

du kennst… wie die weltberühmt voxjournalist ezra klein, oder die statistikenwunderkind nate silver

ja natürlich!

Pretty essential infographic:
How to Name Animals in German

Though sadly not covering Dickmaulrüssler-territory.

http://www.babbel.com/magazine/favorite-german-words

Original meaning of "toll" is closer to "crazy", which makes tollpatschig an even cooler word.

Keypad slipped into Deutsch mode and "overcome" was autocorrected to Obervolta and Obertönen.

Received a report from my German teacher which concludes "deine Fortschritte ist unverkennbar", except I spent a good couple of minutes staring at it because my first attempt at deciphering the handwriting was "...unverzeihbar"

my favourite recently discovered german word

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konfokalmikroskop

Here is a weird translation thing. If you look up the word "die Wanze" in a German-English dictionary it merely says "bug." But if you look it up in a German-only dictionary it seems to be more specific, that it is a flat, blood or sap-sucking insect.

Huh. DE -> NO dictionary gives what I'll literally translate to English as "wall louse".
Wikipedia DE's Wanzen page points to this English page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroptera

Heteroptera is a group of about 40,000 species of insects in the order Hemiptera. Sometimes called "true bugs",[1] that name more commonly refers to Hemiptera as a whole, and "typical bugs" might be used as a more unequivocal alternative since among the Hemiptera the heteropterans are most consistently and universally termed "bugs".

Learned about this word the other day: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompetenz-Kompetenz

THanks, Øystein. Guess I should have thought to look at DE Wiki. Actually one reason I decided to start to stabilize my German is I had reached a dead end with the the Scandinavian languages.

funkelnagelneu

Kugelkopfschreibmaschine

Kuckucksuhr

Kuddelmuddel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_placeholder_names_by_language#German

hard to pick one but even on this i found myself bustin up at weitfortistan

Reichhaltige Sammlung.

"The German equivalent to the English John Doe for males and Jane Doe for females would be Max Mustermann (Max Specimen) and Erika Mustermann, respectively."

Erika Mustermann! lol. I had no idea. I did know that Erika is considered a grandma name in Germany but this is pretty funny.

Erica Specimen should be my new alias.

i'm not sure about the reasoning behind that one. i think it should be the equivalent of 'anne sample' and the like (which you do see on anglo id-card samples); so there must be other 'jane doe' equivalents?

There's my friend Rainer Fahrzeit, who tells you how long a trip should take if traffic is normal and you don't take breaks.

when i took a tiny bit of academic german for grad school i heard of instructors who, for feminist reasons, would not teach noun gender and would use the relevant personal pronouns indifferently (or maybe they preferred one to the others, i don't know). of course this was regarded as pedagogically dubious, radical, etc.

given its much more rigorous official standards (duden as centralized authority, uptight speakers in general etc), how has a thing like deliberate contra-grammatical shifts in pronoun usage—'they' instead of 'she' or 'he' for trans subjects or anyone who elects that it be used—been being received in german?

five years ago i taught at a private college, religiously identified but quite liberal, and never heard anything remotely in that direction from administration or anyone else. i just started teaching at a different private college, no less liberal but significantly more secular, and i got some student-elected-pronoun-usage-guidelines thrown in with all the other (optional) policy language that was dumped on me during 'onboarding'.

A national newspaper in Germany (taz) uses ...Innen forms. I think it's still seen as something belonging to the left, even though, govt agencies sometimes use varieties of it.

For those who aren't familiar: there's no simple gender neutral way to refer to a group of people, e.g. the voters = die Wähler implies a group of men. There's a long neutral form: Die Wähler und Wählerinnen (the voters and voteresses), and this is sometimes abbreviated (as by taz) to WählerInnen, Wähler/innen, Wähler*innen.

I can't imagine how gender neutrality could work in speech, like, when referring to a significant other, you can't say mein/e Freund/in

i was always struck by the fact that job ads have to say Xer/erin

and 'eine Freundin von mir'

you could put a stop in there

mein…e freund…in

would be funky

this guide to gender neutral speech really does advocate a glottal stop in that situation, pg. 25 (it's a pdf)
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCMQFjAAahUKEwiFgtPOj53IAhWDGT4KHdkSCis&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gb.uni-koeln.de%2Fe2106%2Fe2113%2Fe5726%2F2014_Leitfaden_UeberzeuGENDEReSprache_11032014.pdf&usg=AFQjCNF_6ZpHwwCY0FldkMYG8iGt8dKPpw&sig2=_fE6h4Y_I0dhBLjsxpLleA