Learning German

On May 28 2014 11:29 r.Evo wrote:
Ich bin = I am
Ich habe = I have

"Hunger" in German is a noun (the adjective is "hungrig sein" = to be hungry), in English you're not using the noun if you're talking about wanting food so you can't translate those literally. Keeping this in mind the proper one to use is "Ich habe Hunger" which literally translated would mean "I have hunger" while "Ich bin hungrig" would be "I am hungry". Since the former one isn't used in English you can use either German expression to express the English one.

e: For articles, you're shit out of luck and I don't think there's any shortcut besides just learning words with the specific article. It doesn't get easier with other languages either. For Frenchies for example the sun is male and the moon is female while it's the other way around for Germans.

On May 28 2014 14:48 cesmin wrote:
There was this crazy guy at the language school I went to in Dresden who kept talking about Sprachmelodie and getting a Gefühl.

I didn't understand this until I became fluent.... your brain changes dude and it's a very unconscious process
That doesn't mean you don't need to make conscious effort to get an unconscious change

You just learn, there are no shortcuts... but in my opinion emotionally connecting to a language is super important.

I think I learned so quickly because I fell in love with someone while there...

I didn't start learning Turkish well until I listened to the song Haberin yok ölüyorum

Hard to believe now, but you truly get a feeling for the articles and they're not completely arbitrary, but, although it sounds contradictory, there is no rule.

Listen to music, the first song I listen to in German and understood completely was this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jngOXijPLqk
Which resonated with me at the time (emotional motif)
Watch movies/tv
I watched every available episode of Futurama and How I Met Your Mother in German... Germany has a really well developed dubbing industry with great actors... sometimes imo better than the original actors (see Johnny Depp)

Also, the only reason I'm on this site is because I started watching German casts of Starcraft 2.... homer J circa fall of 2010... then later TakeTV (much better)

TakeTV is still super active (super professional) and there is plenty to watch, plus they use all the same english SC2 terms, just German everything else, so you will always more or less know what they're talking about

Finally, true secret to real fluency is reading.
I was fluent after I read JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye in German... read something you love and know already for same reasons as watching SC2 in German

My flatmate always said you're fluent after you reach 1000 words... native is like 12,000–17,000

As with everything, you will always fall short, but try and try again.
Ars longa, vita brevis
Viel Spass beim Lernen

P.S.
Although both are correct, you 9.9/10 times hear: ich habe hunger... maybe the other one is old, veraltet, like hör mal zu instead of horche mal... both are correct but I've only heard one 93 year old ex patriot tell me horche mal.

Hopefully this is coherent

On May 28 2014 14:48 cesmin wrote:


P.S.
Although both are correct, you 9.9/10 times hear: ich habe hunger... maybe the other one is old, veraltet, like hör mal zu instead of horche mal... both are correct but I've only heard one 93 year old ex patriot tell me horche mal.

Hopefully this is coherent

I'm not language student, so forgive me for errors.

I think most major languages outside Indo-European group don't have articles

Japanese, Hindi and Russian, Turkish for sure do not

Although my bro is dating a Chinese girl, I don't know for sure, but I don't think so either.... so we're actually a linguistic minority internationally.

Within minority, German and French are difficult (sagen wir anspruchsvoller) versions... as compared to English.

Not shit out of luck, but every language has its difficulties.... and don't feel bad about making mistakes, even native speakers screw up...

TL community so awesome!

On May 28 2014 16:01 GeckoXp wrote:
Fun thing though, while we use Ich bin hungrig mostly, we use Ich habe Durst instead of ich bin durstig. I don't think we make much sense.

On May 28 2014 18:50 r.Evo wrote:

The Indo-European and Semitic languages aren't exactly a minority internationally. =P

Most languages in both those families (+Polynesian languages) have articles with the vast majority having gender specific ones. English is on one side of the extreme (having just one article), so is Arabic. The other extremes are German and Italian if I remember correctly. Germans go specifically nuts when it comes to possession articles (a/an = ein/eine/einer/eines/einem/einen) and Italians are insane when it comes to talking about a specific mass (where it's "Would you like some wine?" they have like 5-6 different versions of "some" depending on gender).



God, that reminds me of us going nuts 10 years ago because we had a word for "not hungry" (satt) but no word for "not thirsty". There ended up being a contest (yes, really) which resulted in the word "sitt". No one ended up using it and I don't think it's in any official dictionary nowadays. I'm pretty sure there should be some references about this out there, enough to prank some poor German teacher at least.

On May 28 2014 20:25 Monsen wrote:


To me that episode was/is a brilliant example of scientists (linguists) cooking something up in their lab and completely forgetting about real life. Language is a living process. It's not the rules that make the language, the language makes the rules.

On May 28 2014 10:44 SigmaoctanusIV wrote:
My problems have been use of articles and where some of the words go in a sentence verbs a kind of tricky. For any English speakers who have learned German do you have any tricks or hints that could help me with the Articles or when to use certain forms of you and stuff like that?

On May 28 2014 20:48 GeckoXp wrote:


It wasn't scientists who came up with it, but Lipton. It was more of a marketing gag than anything, so it's not that surprising nobody remembers.

On May 29 2014 01:20 AmericanUmlaut wrote:
Oh, that's a great idea, too. I forgot about that, but I watched all of House in German during my first year here. I highly recommend that series, the guy who does Hugh Laurie's voice is really good, I actually got to prefer his vocal performance over the original.

On April 21 2014 10:28 hp.Shell wrote:
I have been using memory palaces to store vocabulary and their definition as mnemonic imagery. Actually I haven't started the actual storing part yet, but I have begun to make large memory palaces so I can easily learn any language quickly when I decide to start. For more palaces, I highly recommend using the homes you can buy in Skyrim, fully furnished. It's easy to memorize each piece of furniture, and once you have a rule for each type of furniture (e.g. "each shelf will have three images or loci: one on the left, one in the middle and one on the right side of the shelf") it's easy to go through the stations and keep them ready for new vocab. I like to count them so I know how many loci I have in that palace, so if it's full of words and you're walking through recalling all the images/definitions, you don't miss any.

Another thing I recommend is this guy's youtube channel. His passion in life is languages, and his major method is intense study beginning with memorizing conversational phrases in a beginner's book. He then goes to a public place and looks for people who he thinks might know the language he wants to practice. E.g. if he's learning Russian he goes to a Russian corner store and talks to the workers there, etc. For this reason, he also will learn a few questions and answers to get him into those first few conversations. Stuff like "How are you learning the language? I'm teaching myself. Why are you learning it? I like [insert language here] and I think it's fun to talk to native speakers." etc.

I think those two methods are probably the best for rapid language learning. It's easy to recall words you've learned using the palaces. Conversational fluency builds by talking to strangers. Combine that with reading in the target language and chatting on voice chat or text chatrooms in the target language via the internet, and you've really got something.