Learning German? Ja, genau!
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to show you some useful tips about learning German
A little introduction about my experience with German
I started to learn German during the high school, so I was 16 (O - EM - GI, I am almost 31!) and I continued it while studying at the university in Milan. My BA teachers were really competent but also quite hard. Failing a written language exam (no matter which language) in the middle of other many other yearly exams was perceived as a disaster. Well, I failed the German written exam of the second year once, and I passed it the second I time I did it. As you can see from the picture above, when I read texts I underline all the words I don’t know and I write the translation in my mother tongue (Italian) above them. In this text from a university book of mine I didn’t know many words. It was frustrating reading and understand almost nothing. Why do I show you this picture? Because now my German level is much higher, but this was my starting point.
What can you do to improve your learning experience?
Here I share some tips that may be useful How to learn a foreign language. but in this article you’re currently reading I want to share some specific advices for German.
Gender: In German there are three genders, which are masculine (der), feminine (die) and neutral (das). Since there is no general rule to understand which gender corresponds to a specific word, it is better to study every new vocabulary with its corresponding article. However, there are some useful rules, as for example, nouns ending with prefixes such as -(ig)keit, -heit, -ung, -schaft, -tät… are feminine → die Möglichkeit (opportunity), die Freiheit (freedom), die Erfahrung (experience), die Wissenschaft (science), die Universität (university).
You will surely hear that nouns with foreign origins are neutral, and this may be right in some cases such as: das Handy (mobile phone), or das Büro (office), but das Messer (knife) does not refer to other languages. Indeed, Handy comes form English, while Büro from French. Speaking of Messer, you will surely hear that nouns ending in -er are masculine. As you can see, NOT every noun ending with this suffix belong to this category, as Messer is neutral. This is why there is no fix rule that tells you 1oo% the gender of a noun, as there are many different endings.
Cases: Things I hate the most about German → I still may have some troubles with them. German has four cases: Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative. I recommend to study every preposition (mit, in, auf, aus…) with their corresponding case. The same applies to verbs, because some of them require a specific preposition + corresponding case. Some examples: aufpassen auf + accusative (be careful to do/look out) → Ich muss auf meine Cousine aufpassen = I have to look out for my (female) cousin.
The nominative case refers to the subject of the sentence, accusative to the object (sentence above: meine Cousine), dative refers to the indirect object (to whom?), while genitive to the possessive (whose).
Sentence structure: The structure of the sentence is quite different from English (and maybe from your mother tongue as well). In German there is a rule to follow if you want to speak/write properly: time, manner, place (Italian speakers would know: TECAMOL, which is “tempo, causa, moto, luogo”). Basically when you have several adverbs in the same sentence, this rule helps you to follow the right sequence. (It has happened to me to use the German word order when speking/writing English, as German has become my second language…).
In case of modal verbs, subordinate sentences or auxiliary verbs, the word order changes completely, as the second verb may occur at the end of the sentence: I went to Rome → Ich bin nach Rome gefahren. Bin is the auxiliary verb to be for gefahren (gone). (you can also translate the sentence saying “ich fuhr nach Rom”, depending on the usage and meaning you want to convey). I must do my homework → Ich muss meine Hausaufgabe machen. Muss represents “must” and machen “do”, so the modal (and conjugated) verb is at the second place in the sentence structure, while the second verb is put at the end.
Regarding the sentence structure, I do recommend what helped me while I was studying German: Do not think about the word order of your own language, but learn by heart an example that will always help you with every sentence. I still remember one phrase I learnt when I was in the school: Ich habe keine Lust ins Kino zu gehen → I don’t want to go to the cinema. It helped me to understand this “zu gehen”, because in Italian you put it (“di andare”) before “ins Kino” (the cinema).
Passive: Even though I studied the grammar very well at the university, passive forms were something I did not wish to use it everyday. However, I understood how to employ them by listening to Austrians who spoke with passive forms and I started using them as well. The grammar knowledge gave me the information about passive, how to recognise it and how it works, but when I became aware of the right structure of the sentence actively, I was then confident to employ it while speaking.
Read a lot: The more you read, the more you will learn. Not only different words, but also phrases and their structure. German is a language that has many specific words, such as frühstücken (have breakfast), gehen (go by foot), and untranslatable nouns such as Schadenfreude (to be happy of someone’s else disgrace), or Wanderlust (you know it, right?). I learnt to express my emotions in German, because in Italy it was not allowed (by my parents) to show what I had inside. To me, German is the language of my inner side, and it’s a pity that almost nobody in my tribe knows German. Why almost? Because I’m bei-bringing (beibringen = teach) it to my nephews.
I hope you enjoyed my tips and I suggest you to follow me here on Medium and my IG profile Laura Papavero
