Lifelong Learning – German

Hier ist eine gut gemachte Webseite aus Singapur mit vielen Übungen zum Deutschlernen.

Klicken Sie auf diesen Link, um zur Webseite zu gelangen. Besuchen Sie im 2. Stock das linke Zimmer für Anfänger, oder das Zimmer im 3. Stockdarüber für fortgeschrittene Anfänger, oder das Zimmer im 4. Stock für Fortgeschrittene.

Klicken Sie auf das Bild, um den Text zu zu vergrößern.

… nicht nur in St. John’s! Auch in der Schweiz!

Hier ist ein Ausschnitt (excerpt) aus einer Sendung des Schweizer Fernsehens.

To give you the gist:
Es geht um Überstunden (over time) für die Stadtarbeiter, über Strafen (fines) für nicht frei gekratzte Autofensterscheiben (for driving with car windows that have not been cleared from ice and snow) und über gesperrte Eisenbahn-Tunnel (closed train tunnels, I think they talk about the St. Gotthard-Tunnel)

Listen how some of the speakers use only Standard High German and some speak Standard High German with a more Swiss German sound.

Well, nothing really! Johann Sebastian Bach’s rare worldly Cantata is just the opposite of a Valentine’s day music. Which seems natural in a way, as Germans do not have the reputation of being, to put it mildly, overly demonstrative when it comes to matters of the heart.

In this cantata’s aria #4, an exasperated father wants to make it clear to his daughter that it is time to look for a husband, become more serious and she absolutely has to kick this bad coffee drinking habit of hers. She on the other hand says:

Ei! wie schmeckt der Coffee süße,
Lieblicher als tausend Küsse,
Milder als Muskatenwein.
Coffee, Coffee muss ich haben,
Und wenn jemand mich will laben,
Ach, so schenkt mir Coffee ein!

In other words “Oh! How sweet coffee tastes, sweeter than a thousand kisses (makes you wonder, how Tim Horton’s coffee would compare), sweeter than muscatel. I have to have coffee, coffee and if anyone wants to refresh me, just pour me some coffee!”

(Grammar points: Look for the two modal verb constructions. Which are the meaning carrying verbs in those sentences? Die Antwort finden Sie hier.)

So she definitely is not into the Valentine’s Day “hysteria” (no offence meant, it’s just a different cultural perspective)  that seems to grab all of North America in the short month of February. In fact even today, Valentine’s Day is not  such a big thing in the German speaking countries. Since however, there is a lot of money to be made for florists, jewellers and restaurants, mention of this date in the media is becoming ubiquitous. However, I am not sure how much it has taken hold in the consumer psyches yet.

Übrigens, wussten Sie, dass Kaffee im 17. Jahrhundert in Preussen Schmuggelware war? Nur dem preussischen Staat war der Import von Kaffee erlaubt. (More at German Wikipedia).

Die Kantate wurde ca. 1734 komponiert, um in diesem Leipziger Kaffeehaus, rechts an der Ecke, aufgeführt zu werden:

Hier ist der komplette Text der Kaffeekantate.

Finally! I found a website that will show you interactively how to produce certain sounds! Just click on the speakers. You need Flash 7 or higher plug-in to view the animation. Follow this link to the University of Iowa website to explore the world of phonetics and articulation.

An example of the [ç] sound can be seen here:

So, you are taking a German class, because you are moving to the German speaking part of Switzerland and you assume they speak German there. Well, you are right, kind of.

A Norwegian lecturer in Zürich writes:

Swiss German has its own pronunciation, many different words, its own grammar, and most Germans have difficulty understanding this funny language. The German-speaking Swiss write standard German, that’s true – there is no Swiss German official language (but still some literature, e-mails etc. using the dialect). The Swiss can also speak standard German very well, but to them it’s a foreign language that they have to learn how to use when they start school.

EDIT: 17th February 2009. This link is broken. Will try and find new one asap. So, check out what is spoken in Switzerland here.

Blumenwerbung bedeutet “Werbung für Blumen”. In diesem Video-Clip geht es um Werbung für den internationalen Blumenversand von Fleurop.Die Firma Fleurop ist aus der Schweiz.

Der Video-Clip ist vom britischen Regisseur Anthony Minghella, der einen Oscar für den Film “The English Patient” bekommen hat.

Der Clip ist in drei Sprachen: Schweizer Deutsch, Französisch und Englisch. Schauen Sie zuerst den Clip an und lesen Sie den Text erst später. Den deutschen Text können Sie hier als  Word Dokument lesen.

Können Sie die Personalpronomen im Akkusativ finden? (Tipp: Denken Sie auch an Präpositionen!)

Learn and donate! For every correct word, 10 grams of rice are donated at Free Rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Several languages are being offered: German, French, Italian, Spanish and English as well as other subjects.

Look for this button at the bottom of the right sidebar, under the Quizlet link to Free Rice. Click the link and then select the subject.

This is my first voicethread, which I hope you will find helpful.

It consists of two parts: part 1 – the image, and part 2 – the text, with my added video comment for both parts. You can click on the small “windows” to get from one part to the other.

You can get a Voicethread account for free and comment in writing, in a voice comment, or a video comment. You may also doodle on the image and point out certain functions in the sentence that you would like to have elaborated further. This could be the start of interesting class discussions. Let me know what you think of this Voicethread tool.

OOPS! In the video I talk about the “song” while I am actually talking about the “illustration of the song”, which,  of course, is something entirely different and the information about the illustrator somehow went missing too.

The illustration was done by Tomi Ungerer, an illustrator from Alsace, best known for his erotic and political illustrations and -what a combination- children’s books.This illustration was featured in “Das goße Liederbuch“. You can visit his official website here.

Warnung: Bitte bekommen Sie keinen Herzinfarkt! Ich verliere nur ungern Studenten. Machen Sie sich auf ein lautes Geräusch im zweiten Teil gefasst. Finden Sie heraus was das ist.

In our class, Rex came up with a complicated sentence. During the introductions, he wanted to explain why he is learning German. I would like to use this example to demonstrate that even sentences with modal verbs and sub-ordinating conjunctions can be conquered and are not really as confusing as may seem at first sight. (I hope you don’t mind me using your sentence, Rex. It makes for an excellent example!)

He started off with

„Ich lerne Deutsch, weil …“

He continued to say that he wants to go to Germany to spend a biking vacation there.

So how can you avoid the pitfalls of the German word order with modals and sub-ordinating conjunctions?

Let’s start with a more bare bones sentence and work our way up to the final sentence.

Let’s first say „I spend my vacation“.

to spend a vacation/ to holiday in German is „Urlaub machen“, the verb machen combines with a complement (Urlaub) to an idiomatic expression. Verb complements most often behave like the separable prefix part of verbs, which means they move to the end of the sentence.

So „I spend my vacation“. will be „Ich mache Urlaub“.

Now, let us add the place: „I spend my vacation in Germany“.
This translates into „Ich mache in Deutschland Urlaub“.
(Remember, Urlaub machen behaves like a separable prefix verb and splits.)

Let’s go for the bicycling part: „I spend my vacation [bicycling] in Germany“.

Using gerundiums as nouns (–ing nouns as in Bicycling is fun.) is theoretically possible in German, but would not be a wise choice here. So we have to come up with a different construction, in this case a preposition with a noun will do: mit dem Fahrrad (mit is a dative preposition, therefore the article das that accompanies Fahrrad in the nominative case changes into dem).

Bear with me, we are halfway there now!

„I spend my vacation [bicycling] in Germany“. would thus be

„Ich mache in Deutschland [mit dem Fahrrad] Urlaub“.

Let us introduce the modal verb now. Rex said, he wants to spend his vacation bicycling in Germany. Remember: modal verbs take the place of the finite verb and send that verb to the very end of the sentence. Thus verb complements and verbs are reunited at the end.

„I want to spend my vacation [bicycling] in Germany“.

„Ich will in Deutschland [mit dem Fahrrad] Urlaub machen“.

Next is our last step: we will string the two sentences together:

„I learn German“. + „I want to spend my vacation bicycling in Germany“.

To put the two sentences into a causal relationship we will use the conjunction because.

„I learn German, because I want to spend my vacation [bicycling] in Germany“.

As you see there is no change in the word order in English.

Now for the German counterpart:

„Ich lerne Deutsch.” + „Ich will in Deutschland [mit dem Fahrrad] Urlaub machen“.

The conjunction that corresponds to because is weil. Since weil is a sub-ordinating conjunction, which means the main clause it precedes turns into a subordinate clause, it sends the finite verb to the final position.

„Ich lerne Deutsch, weil ich in Deutschland [mit dem Fahrrad] Urlaub machen will“.

That’s it. There seem to be countless steps involved, but as you have seen, these steps follow logic rules that always apply. So if you understand this example, you will be able to handle any sentence with that complexity. It requires a bit of practice of course to be able to do all the transformations with more ease, but really there is no magic to this and we will be practising these “transformations” in class.

Does this shed any light on the matter for you? I appreciate your comments!

You can download the above text as a Word document here. Or as a PDF here.

Welcome to your very own, brand new Lifelong Learning Class Blog! No more piggy-backing with other classes! All old links have migrated here from the Deutschlernblog plus oodles of new ones and new features have been added as well.

What is new?

• The “Ausdruck des Tages” (phrase of the day) widget presents a new expression or phrase each day with its often very different counterpart in German.
• The “text to speech” widget lets you insert any kind of text and will read it to you. It does not work for poetry, since it is machine read, but any other text works really well. So if you want to hear a text read in German, try this one.
• The “LiLoLe”-Shoutbox allows you to post questions that are not specifically related to a post or you can use it as a guest book or you can start a discussion there.
• A newspaper widget, so far for German newspapers, displays a random front page. Clicking on the front page image takes you to the page, which you then can enlarge into a readable size.
• The “Polyglot Word of the Day” widget displays a photograph with the corresponding word in a cornucopia of languages beneath, among them German. (The pictures sometimes are a bit far fetched, but you will get the idea.) Click on the speaker icon next to the word to listen to the pronunciation by a native speaker.
• VodPod – A growing Video Blog (VLog) Collection of German language (teaching and/or fun) VLogs.
• There is also a “Useful Books” section. I have not added this widget to make money off of the Amazon link, but to give you the opportunity to browse the books, read other peoples’ comments and form your own opinion. If you have books you would like to recommend, we will add them there, too.

So, play around with what is here and look for handouts, poems, articles, music, videos etc. to come on this page. If you have any suggestions for other things you would like to see here, please, let me know.

The header image is part of an original digital artwork I created in 2007 titled “Chihuly’s Barge”.

Pia B.