Make Daily Practice Easy– My Methods

The adage goes, “Practice makes perfect.”

Fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s hard to be “perfect” in a foreign language– where we ever chase feeling like we’ve earned the title of “fluent speaker” as this other blog post discusses in detail.  But exposure and practice will make you a lot better a lot faster!

If you’re sick of the flash cards and grammar exercises and are looking for less “traditional” means of practice that you can incorporate into your day every day, may I suggest:

1. READING
   • Children’s books, magazine articles, news articles, pamphlets, advertisements, parallel text novels, novels, … just get your hands on it and go! The beauty of reading is that there is no rush to understand, like there is in listening. You have the time to pick apart sentences word-by-unfamiliar-word until you get it. This is also one of the least expensive methods of practice, thanks to the internet.
2. MUSIC
   • Ever hear a song for the first time in forever and surprised yourself that you still knew all the words? The ability for songs to lodge lyrics in your head can also work in your target language! What’s even better is that the songs, if they aren’t too slang-ridden, can give you easily accessible references for noun genders/grammar structures/phrases. Playing through lyrics in my head have helped me get higher German test scores in the past. I would suggest starting out with slower music so you can get the words and meanings without too much struggle, but honestly, listen to whatever you will continue listening to!  Just be sure to have a reliable set of lyrics nearby so you don’t learn things wrong! When you find an artist or two you really enjoy, buy their CDs/Mp3s and listen to them in the car, on your jog or wherever else. I enjoy Lafee, Tom Albrect and Jupiter Jones. 
      
3. TV/Movies/YouTube
   • Listening comprehension is VITAL to ever having a successful conversation. Start out with short clips and then get hooked on something a bit longer. My college German professor had us watch Rote Rosen, a German soap opera because the themes and vocabulary aren’t too complicated to figure out on the fly– and he knew we’d get sucked into the can’t-turn-away-from-the-train-wreck element of the soap opera. (Echte Kanasta!). If you like movies about WWII or spies, I would seriously recommend Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (Die letzten Tage) or The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). These movies have really good German history as well as language practice.
4. Pick a friend from class and practice outside of class
   • Remember writing notes in code in the 2nd grade? Well, this is the super-nerd version. It was fun to be speaking in a language not everyone else around you can understand. It also strengthened the bonds of our language network– our high school German club was an awesome, tight-knit bunch!  People would be able to share their newest German-language findings (a book, a song, a silly cartoon), which increased our overall exposure, which is wonderful. It also has the accountability-partner element to it (like your friend who guilts you to come to the gym with them, even though you don’t feel like it)– which can build a little bit of healthy competition too! Not to mention, friends with whom you can engage with in your target language is likely the closest you will be able to come to immersion learning without the pricey experience of studying abroad. Embrace it!!!
5. Actually write/skype/communicate with your pen pals
   • If you’ve studied abroad and picked up a few native friends, or your German teacher set you up with a random pen pal, initiate (or re-initiate) contact! Write an e-mail/facebook message/snail mail letter or call them on Skype and catch up on all the things you’ve been otherwise spending your time on. Germans in particular seem to be really loyal friends if you can keep up with them. Don’t let the buck stop with you!!!
6. Put your target language in your face all the time!
   • Change your technology accounts’ language settings to German. If you already know the technology, you will have immersion vocab practice, if you don’t know the technology, you have incredible motivation to learn.
   • Sign up for things like Transparent Language’s word of the day e-mail.
   • Follow language learning sites on facebook (put it in your face all the time)
     • Learn German Online
     • Deutsche Sprachwelt
     • Linguee
     • linguisten.de
     • Learn-German-Easily
     • Goethe-Institut – Deutsch lernen
     • German
     • Deutsch Happen
     • DW Learn German
     • Deutsch lernen und studieren
     • Transparent Language

The underlying moral of this story is to do what you would normally do (read/listen to music/watch videos/talk with friends/check social  media) and add a few pinches of your target language into the mix! That way it won’t seem like practice, it will seem normative, natural and (eventually) easy! Plus, by adding it into what you already do, it will likely be tailored to the format you most enjoy engaging with– which will make it both more practical and more fun.

How do YOU incorporate your language learning into your (daily) life? 

Pronunciation & Translation – Sounding it Out & Breaking it Down

Well, if you’re just starting to learn German, it’s best to start at the beginning.

 

SOUNDING IT OUT

As far as pronunciation goes, German and English are actually pretty similar– they are both Germanic languages after all. But there are a few differences. For starters, German is a LOT more phonetic than English; what you see is what you say! Unless words are borrowed from other languages (and sometimes not even then), you will never see a ‘silent’ letter in German (take that French learners)!

The first difference you might notice in picking up anything written in German is the addition of a few letters. Really quick, I want to tell you the names of the “little dots on top” of the vowels and the “squiggily B with a tail”.

The dots are an accent mark called the umlaut. And unfortunately they aren’t just there to make your “u” look like a smiley face (or make the “o” look like it’s screaming in terror”). They are there to denote a different vocalization/pronunciation of the vowel. But, using the face visual is actually kind of helpful because, as you’ll see in the chart, they require you to move your lips differently than the regular, un-umlauted vowel.

The letter that looks like a “squiggily B with a tail” is a letter from the Greek alphabet that the Germans use to make a double “s” noise. In German, it is called the Eszett.

The biggest differences between English and German pronunciation are those listed in my chart below. I have provided you with a short example word that showcases the pronunciation. When I was learning, I found it most helpful to remember a specific, common, word with the different letters in it for reference. This will help your pronunciation by giving you something to try and simulate/recreate on your own. I had issues with the “ä” noise in particular. Whenever I found a new word with an ä in it, I would quietly say my example word, “Mädchen”, to myself before reading the new word aloud.

 

If you are learning German outside of a classroom and you aren’t sure that you are pronouncing a word correctly, the websites www.dict.cc or www.translate.google.de have audio clips for a good number of words. Take a few good listens to the word, and then try to repeat it yourself.

Before you start reading the rest of this post, I want to tell you not to panic! The 11 pronunciation rules above apply in most situations and should get you through most of the strange new words you will encounter in the German dictionary. However, just like in every language, there are exceptions, some of which I will briefly describe below.

• Combinations of multiple letters sometimes produce a different sound. For example, “-tion” is pronounced “tee-O-n”. (A good key word for this is “Nation”).
• Specific combinations of consonant compounds and vowels will play into how the consonant compounds are pronounced.
  • This website has a more specific guide for some of those instances. It breaks down the relationships between the consonants and surrounding vowels that determine the changes.
• Sometimes the part of Germany you are in (or where your German teacher came from/studied in) will affect your pronunciation in the form of a dialect. My first German teacher, who taught me 4 years of German, studied in Freiburg. Because she was versed in the southern, Freiburg-ian, German, that is the dialect/accent that I most closely mirror… and when I studied German in the northern city of Hamburg, people often asked me where I/my German was from. I was usually understood, but sometimes asked to repeat myself for clarity.
  • A good example of this is in the adjective ending “-ig”. In southern German, “-ig” is pronounced “-ish”. In northern German, “-ig” is pronounced “-ig”.
  • The word “ich” (meaning “I”) also changes drastically. In southern German it is pronounced “ish”  while the northern Germans will say “ick”.
• German also borrows a lot of words from other languages, which sometimes determines what the reader has to do with pronunciation rules. For example:
  • The word for Jeans in German is “die Jeans”, borrowed from English. So instead of following the “j” = “yuh” rule and saying “dee Yeens”, the correct pronunciation is “dee jeens”, just like English.
  • The German word for the color/fruit orange is borrowed from French. The word (noun) is “die Orange”. Instead of following the German rules and saying “dee oR-ang-uh”, with “-e” = “-ah”, it is pronounced more like “dee oR-an-zjuh” (sorry, my French transliteration is probably horrible).
  • The best way to work around these oddities is to learn them, make some strange memory association between the word and the language it is borrowed from, and repeat the word out loud a lot. I always pictures the jeans in question to be Levi’s– which I associate with American (English-speaking) cowboys. For the word “orange”, I think about how orange is an obnoxious color, and that I find the French language (specifically its spelling –>pronunciation) to be obnoxious. Like I said, find whatever association works for you, no matter how weird, and run with it!

Practice and exposure to audio/visual resources will be your greatest aids! Especially when you’re trying to differentiate the pronunciation between words like “Kirche” and “Kirsche” (“Church” and “Cherry”). And context will be your greatest rescuer in conversation, should you make an error. Lucky for you, most Germans are just tickled when you try to speak German instead of demanding to be catered to in English. In almost every instance, German people I encountered in Germany were understanding and willing to try and explain my faults so I could fix them.

BREAKING IT DOWN

Another large portion of German pronunciation comes with learning how Germans “build” words. You’ve probably heard of German words that are longer than the English alphabet. My favorite long word that might come up in a ‘normal’ conversation is “Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung” which has 26 letters and means “speed limit”. I like to think of long German words as an ornate Lego castle, built out of blocks of common words. The Germans like to create very specific, complicated words out of many less specific, less complicated words stacked on top of each other– which is GOOD for new language learners because the big words are usually made out of words you’ll already know how to say. The trick is learning to recognize these familiar words within the compound word. Additionally, although you may not know the perfect translation of a new monster word, if you can translate the smaller pieces it is built out of, you can get a general understanding of the topic at hand.

Let’s take my favorite long word, “Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung”

We can sound it out using the chart I gave you above.

gah-sch-vind-ish-kItes-bah-gren-tsung… (or if you’re a northern German speaker, gah-sch-vind-ig-kItes-bah-gren-tsung)

We can also do a lot of damage in understanding how it means “speed limit”.

Let’s break it into some smaller parts: Geschwind~ig~keit~s~be~grenz~ung.

• geschwind = fast
• “-ig” = a word chunk that can turn a noun into an adjective, or a verb stem into an adjective, or transform a noun in front of another noun into an adjective that describes the second noun, (which comes into effect after the next part) (explanation)
• “-keit” = turns an adjective into a noun. It is used like the suffix “-ness” in English. (explanation)
• “-s” = Genitive ending denoting ownership
• “be-” = a prefix that “inflicts” something on a subject (explanation)
• grenz = boundary
• “-ung” = a suffix that changes a verb into a noun. (explanation)

So, if we mush all of that together, we get something along the lines of “fastness of the inflicted boundary” or “limit inflicted on the speediness”.

Even if you only recognize and understand the nouns, “Geschwind” and “Grenze”, which mean “fast” and “boundary”, you will probably be able to understand the definition of the word in context.

Please don’t get held up in all of the grammar-craziness of the prefixes and suffixes and genitive possession that I gave explanation links for. I mostly gave the explanation links to prove that I’m not just making this up. Again, learning a few words with the key prefixes or suffixes and what those word mean will greatly help your understanding of the prefixes and suffixes. Those key words don’t have to be 26 letters long, but they will help in tearing apart the new vocab words that are 26 letters long.

Please don’t get held up by not knowing where all of the breaks should go. The more words you add to your vocabulary (prefixes and suffixes included), the easier it will be to find the “natural” breaks in the big words. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten scared by a big word, gave up on finding the natural breaks, looked up the definition of the word in a dictionary, and then, all of a sudden, all of the natural breaks seemed to pop out of the page in glaring neon letters. That’s called learning. We will know how to break that word apart the next time we see it.

The longest German word approved by the Duden (the official German dictionary) is still up in the air, because in order for it to be “official” the word has to be in common use, but this news article tells the tale of what used to be German’s longest word at an awe-inspiring 63 letters: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

The same article also explains how German words (specifically nouns) can get really out of hand:

A ballpoint pen that belongs to a captain could be called a Kapitänskugelschreiber.

If the pen happens to belong to a captain of the Danube Steamship Company, it’s a Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskugelschreiber.

Let us now refer to the ink used in that pen. This is the Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskugelschreibertinte.

And, please bear with us, there could theoretically be a shop specializing in such ink. In that case we have a: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskugelschreibertintenfachgeschäft.

That store would presumably have a manager, the: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskugelschreibertintenfachgeschäftsführer.

That’s 81 letters. And we could go on. But for a word to be officially recognized, it must be in genuine use and must have been referred to in published texts.

Apparently German legalese can put English legalese to shame. Check out this 67 letter word:

Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung

Again, this word can be cut down into bite-sized pieces, as this website shows:

Grundstück: plot of land
Verkehr: traffic
Genehmigung: approval
Zuständigkeit: responsibility
Übertragung: transmission
Verordnung: regulation

It just goes to show that gargantuan German words CAN be tamed, pronounced, and understood, if you’re willing to crack the whip and bolster your vocabulary and your ability to identify said vocabulary buried within a bed of other vocabulary/prefixes/suffixes.

What is your favorite long German word that you’ve mastered?