Lesen, aber nicht sprechen.

My learning journey has now been going on for over four months and progress has been reasonable. I think I now understand all of the rules regarding adjective declension, all of the cases, and each time I visit the Spiegel website I find myself able to muddle through a few more articles each time.
The problem arises with speaking. This is a learning journey I am pretty much undertaking on my own, and as a result I never have any reason to spontaneously construct German. Instead if ever I do, it is at leisure and therefore I always find myself translating from the English first. This means that although my comprehension is coming along nicely, my speaking is still at an incredibly basic level.

Is this an issue that anyone else has problems with? Or even better, has someone been through this already and found a workable solution? One thing that springs to mind is some kind of online resource that asks questions in German (or another language) to which you have to reply out loud. The issue though, would be that until such a system could pass the Turing test, it wouldn't be much of a conversation!

Maybe I'll just have to wait until I next get the chance to go to Germany...

Some handy Youtube channels for German learners.

It's been a while. But although I haven't posted here, I can pass on that my knowledge of German seems to be growing apace. I have recently clocked a 100 day streak on Duolingo, and am currently working on translating a manual from a game I bought in when I was last in Germany.

So why am I not writing in German? Well I'm still at the point where my comprehension is far superior to my construction. I guess the only way to get better is to practice, but I'm nowhere near the point that I want to inflict my attempts on the public.

Anyway, both those paragraphs have nothing to do with the title of this post, onwards then... As part of my learning I've been scanning through Youtube a lot, both trying to find materials that are trying to teach German, but also in an attempt to simulate immersion. I have a nice collection now that I thought it would be helpful to share. If you can know of any others, please let me know via the comments.

1) Andrea Thionville
This is a really cute little channel that has some narrated slide shows and some songs that work as a brilliant stepping-stone into listening to German. I'm sure I'm about 20 years older than the target audience, but listen to 'Die Affen fressen Bananen' and you'll see why I'm hooked.

2) Easy Languages
This channel is not exclusive to German, and instead has a wide range of languages. The key playlist for German learners is the 'Learn German from the streets' one. In these videos, German natives are accosted on the streets to give small interviews about their hobbies, jobs and dreams. All the conversations are subtitled in both German and English, which make them nice and easy to follow.

3) Get Germanized
There isn't that much spoken German in these videos, with a large number being about German culture spoken in English by a native German. Despite this, there are some real gems in there for those focused on language learning, while the whole channel is great for those that just want to know more about Germany, without necessarily being fluent in the language. It is due to this channel that I know the words Kackvogel and Treppenwitz, both of which I plan to use at least semi-regularly regardless of the tongue I'm speaking in.

4) Learn German with Herr Antrim
To finish for today, have a look at Herr Antrim's slightly different approach to German learning using cuddly toys in a manner reminiscent of Adam and Joe (bonus points if you remember that TV show). I haven't watched too many of these yet, but what I've seen doesn't take itself too seriously while still getting across the key points. As a bonus, it seems to all be in the target language, which makes it a nice way of getting used to listening to German, even if you already know the rules being discussed.

So that's all for today. If you have any other ideas please let me know in the comments below. If I get round to doing a follow-up, I'll make sure it gets cross-linked with this so all the channels can be found.

Thanks for reading. Bis Bald!

Memrise

Apologies if the writing is a bit rubbish today, I'm not really in the mood to write, but equally I don't want to leave this post too long, or the blog will die!

So for another free resource that has completely blown my mind, Memrise.  Memrise is one of many 'flash card' sites that have popped up over the last few years to aid in all sorts of study. Like many of those sites, Memrise is not specific to German learning, however the subjects are clearly signposted and there is a wealth of German language courses to select from.

Of course, all (or maybe the majority, but I haven't found a memrise created set) the cards on the site are created by the users of the site, meaning that there are different styles for different courses. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but does mean that you have to have a bit of a browse to find a set that suits you. The course that I am motoring through at the moment is based on the GCSE syllabus. It has a great range of vocabulary separated over more than 50 sensible groupings. You have to admire the people that put this together, there are nearly 1500 words an phrases to learn.

So why am I posting about Memrise as opposed to any other one of the many similar sites out there? In one sense it's because one has to be first! But the first highlight is that I have already bookmarked two or three courses that look really well constructed. The other sites have their own learning strategies, each with their own strengths but Memrise is unsurpassed in my experience in making it easy to find well constructed sets.

Memrise also has a good system for refreshing your memory. It is themed on the growing of a plant, with an analogy drawn from each stage of your practice. First you plant a word, and when you have got it right enough times the skill grows and then needs to be maintained  with regular watering. The length of time between practices varies with how well you do with the word or phrase you've memorised. Add this to a leader-board that tracks the amount of points gained by all people studying that set, and you end up with a formula that drives you to continue practicing and improving.

So that's Memrise. The set I've linked above is a really good starting point, but if you find any other sets that are worth studying, please let me know in the comments below. Tschüss!

der, die oder das?

Sometimes you don't realise how good you have things until you see what the alternatives are. This is mainly said of social observation, but I'm finding it's equally true of languages. In English when we have one definite article - 'the'. So when we talk of a specific object known to all in the conversation we say 'the' something; for example 'The woman threw the ball to the dog'.

So far so easy, and in my younger days I wondered what the point was of attaching a classification (definite article) to a word that has no equivalent. 'The' is in a set of one in English, and as such is the only thing you need to reach for when trying to accomplish its task. Of course when studying other languages you come to realise the meanings of classifications such as this. In German there is not a single definite article, but a number of them depending on the gender of the word  and its case.

Gender

If you are reading this in the UK there is a good chance that you were exposed to gendered nouns in French. They say either 'le' or 'la' if the noun is masculine or feminine, and use 'les' if the word is a plural. In German there are not just masculine and feminine genders, but also a neutral gender. These are represented by 'der', 'die' or 'das' respectively. It's important to note that it is the words themselves that possess the gender, and not the object being discussed. Some examples:

• Der Junge - The boy (Masculine)
• Die Frau - The woman (Feminine)
• Das Mädchen - The girl (Neutral)
• Der Hund - The dog
• Die Katze - The cat
• Das Pferd - the horse

So depending on the gender of the word you have three different definite articles. At this point you might think that learning the gender of the word would lead to you getting the right word for 'the'... Sadly though it's not quite as easy as that.

Cases
You'll have to bear with me here as I'm not fully 'down' with the cases in German. If you notice any errors please let me know in the comments.

In English we use cases in sentences all the time, however the differences are minor or non existent so we don't really notice them. Let's use the sentence above to briefly go through them.

"The woman threw the ball to the dog"

In this sentence, the word order tells us what is happening to who. If we were to switch the word order around, then (ignoring the twisted universe where such a happenstance may occur) our understanding of what has occurred will change. So something like:

"The dog threw the woman to the ball"

Still makes perfect grammatical sense, however the scenario described has changed significantly. The reason that the scenario has changed is that we have (by moving the words around) changed their case. The English we refer to these cases as the subjective and the objective, and further we can break the objective down into the direct and indirect objects. So in sentence 1:

• 'The woman' is the subject
• 'The ball' is the direct object; and
• 'The dog' is the indirect object.

Whilst in sentence 2:

• 'The dog' is the subject
• 'The woman' is the direct object; and
• 'The ball' is the indirect object.

More generally, the subject is the part of the sentence that is 'doing' the verb (which in this case is 'to

 throw' in the past tense), the direct object is the thing the verb is being done to, and the indirect object is the recipient of the direct object.

In German each of these states is conveyed in a sentence by a change in the form of the definite article. So if I had been specific in the section on gender, I would have pointed out that 'der' is masculine, 'die' is feminine and 'das' is neutral in the nominative case!

Before you panic about me mentioning a new case, nominative is just another way of saying 'der' is masculine if the noun is being used as the subject of the sentence. So to put the more formal case names to the example above.

• For the subject of the sentence we use the nominative case
• For the direct object of a sentence we use the accusative case
• For the indirect object of a sentence we use the dative case.

You have probably guessed what is coming by now. If we want to show the case of a noun, we have to change the definite article once again! I'm not sure how to do tables on here, so the below bullets are formatted with the case first followed by the masculine (m), feminine (f), neutral (n) and plural (p) forms of the definite article in each case:

• Nominative - Der (m), Die (f), Das (n), Die (p)
• Accusative -  Den (m), Die (f), Das (n), Die (p)
• Dative -        Dem (m), Der(f), Dem(n), Den(p)

So overall that's five different definite articles to use over 12 different permutations! You might wonder what the point is with all that variety, but it does serve a purpose. Let's have a look at the original sentence sentence now, but (hopefully!) translate it into German:

"The woman threw the ball to the dog"

"Die Frau hat den Ball dem Hund geworfen"  

So far so literal (roughly, the past tense is still at the edge of my understanding). The subject, direct object and indirect object are all in the order we would expect them to be in English, however if the sentence is instead written:

"Die Frau hat dem Hund den Ball geworfen"  

The meaning of the sentence is not changed! The definite articles that are attached to the nouns confer their role in the sentence, and as so the word order is less important.

The keen eyed among you would have noticed that there is one more German case (and English one too), called the genitive case which represents possession. However, I have read in a number of places that it is rather going out of fashion in spoken German, so I haven't yet taken the time to learn it!

Ok, that was a surprisingly long post. I hope you found it useful, and if any more fluent German speakers can see any errors, or if anyone has any questions, please let me know using the comments.

To have or to be: Conjugations

German and English share a common ancestry, and as such there are many similar things about the two languages that make learning one from the other easier than it could otherwise be. This shared root branched off many years ago though, so for all the similarities there are also a number of differences some of them really quite stark.

One of the main differences is the level of conjugation of the verbs in the language. Conjugation is just a fancy name for changing the end of a verb (a doing word such as 'go' or 'play') depending on what is 'doing' the verb. So looking at 'play' as an example; in English we would say:

• I play
• You play
• He/She/It plays
• They play
• We play

So if we are talking in the third person singular (He/She/It) we add an 's' to the end of the verb to make the verb match the noun. In German the concept is the same but there are more endings, and instead of simply adding letters to the infinitive (The fancy name for the verb in it's original form, in English this will strictly include the word 'to' as in 'to play') you must first take some letters off. In German the way to say 'to play' is 'spielen' and it is conjugated like so:

• Ich spiele
• Du spielst
• Er/sie/es spielt
• Sie spielen
• Wir Spielen
• Ihr Spielt

So as you can see it's a little more complicated, but it's really not so bad. The majority of verbs that I have seen so far in German end in 'en' and of those, most follow this pattern. There are though one or two more awkward ones and two in particular that you will use a lot. The verbs 'to have' (haben) and 'to be' (sein).

Let's look at 'haben' first:

Ich habe	I have
Du hast	You have
Sie haben	You have (formal)
Er hat	He has
Sie hat	She has
Es hat	It has
Ihr habt	You have (plural)
Wir haben	We have
Sie haben	They have

It's a little weird, but not too out there. If you can remember the rules from the standard conjugations then the endings will at least work as a prod to the correct answer, even if they don't get you all the way there. 

What about the verb 'to be'?:

• I am
• You are
• He/she/it is
• We are
• They are

'Wait a second, that's not German!' I hear you cry. Well, no it isn't, it's clearly English, but I wanted to draw your attention to how odd it would look if it was a foreign language. I mean they all in essence provide the same meaning, but the form completely changes depending on who or what you are talking about. Hopefully with that in mind, the German equivalent won't be so scary. 

ich bin	I am
du bist	You are
Sie sind	You are (formal)
er ist	He is
sie ist	She is
es ist	It is
Ihr seid	You are (plural)
wir sind	We are
sie sind	They are

So, there you have it, haben and sein, to have and to be. Once you have learned these your German journey (like mine) will be well underway! Well kinda... I'll explain one of the things that's causing me a little more grief in my next post. 

Duolingo

One of the aims of this blog is to flag and gather together all the useful resources that are out there on the big wide web for anyone trying to learn German. I'll note the strengths and weaknesses of any utilities and also mark anything that should be avoided.

the first such resource I'd like to talk about is Duolingo. When I first read about it I was amazed that it existed. A structured, gamified learning material that is completely free, and available on web and mobile? It sounded far too good to be true, but real it is. The resource is not specifically for German, but features a range of languages that can be learnt by a speaker of any of the others. The range at the moment includes French, Portuguese and Spanish and there appear to be others in the pipeline.

So how does it work? First you create an account, and tell it what language you want to learn, and which language you can already speak. Once you have done this you get taken to the skills tree.

The start of the skill tree

The skill tree a a tiered set of subjects. All of which need to be completed to advance to the next step, so on completing 'Basics 1', you get access to 'Basics 2' and 'Phrases', but you must compete both of these to move on to the next tier. The subjects then contain anything from two to seven (or maybe more, but seven is the highest I have seen) lessons. 

The lessons themselves are each formed of around 15 to 20 questions. These will often be to translate (in my case) an English phrase into German, or a German phrase into English. The translations give a little bit of wiggle room as to the interpretations of a sentence or any individual word. However it pays strict attention to those things that are harder to remember, such as the gender of nouns or pluralisations. 

During each level you have a number of lives. If you answer all the questions without losing all of your lives you complete the lesson and can move on to the next. If you lose all of your lives then an owl does a sad face and you have to start from the beginning. 

There are incentives along the way in the form of lingots, an in game currency that can be used to unlock bonus lessons and XP that is given for every competed level. This XP is effectively your running score, that you can track against other users, if you are of a competitive bent. It also provides gentle nudges via e-mail (that can be turned off) to keep your streak of consecutive days played going.

A sample question

The whole adds up to engaging experience that, when at its best enables you to learn without realising it, your desire to get to the next level being more of a driving force than the growth in your vocabulary. It isn't all good however. Much of the wiggle room surrounding particular sentences is crowd sourced (by a user not having a correct answer accepted). As a result I have read of the interpretations becoming more mechanical towards the end of the skill tree. As more people use the tool though, this may become less of a problem. 

A more serious pedagogical issue is that although it takes pluralisation, cases and gender quite seriously in the answers there isn't a structured way of learning them, instead it is a case of translating enough sentences that you learn the concepts through osmosis. There are some tips and hints on the subject pages, but they often lack the detail required to get the ideas stuck in your mind.

That doesn't stop Duolingo being a great learning tool, but it does mean that it's probably not sufficient on it's own to learn an entire language. That said, it doesn't truly stand alone though, as anyone using it can access the internet and thus all the other resources. If you are planning or currently attempting to learn German it should definitely be part of your repertoire, even if only for a quick lesson or two while on the bus.

Mission statement

So here it is, a statement of intent. My good lady wife and I have spoken for a while of potentially moving abroad for a bit. It's still not something we are certain about, and yet may be all pie in the sky, but after a number of these conversations we decided that if we were to go anywhere it would probably be Germany.
Of course one thing that would make living Germany a harder task than say Australia or Canada (for example) is the language. It's different, you see. And thus if this is ever to become more than a pipe dream, the language barrier will need to be broken.
So why the blog? Such a task takes a motivation that can't always be achieved by telling yourself 'I must do this'. So I've decided to write about it, hoping at the shame of having nothing to write about will force me to re-double my efforts should I get lazy. There is a more altruistic edge to writing about this plan too. There are a huge number of free resources online to aid in any language-learning journey. I hope that over time I can document and review a number of these resources, as well as providing a few tips (should I encounter any) for any one else that may be attempting the same thing.
That is all for another time though. For now, thanks for reading.