Recently I’ve started the process of learning a new language, ahoy!

This is officially my third one. After learning my first foreign language (English), I got very excited about the whole thing. It can be fun, interesting, refreshing, challenging, but most of all, rewarding!

So, I would like to share with you, dear English reader, my first impressions since I began it in October this year (2016). This is not intended to be an exhaustive discussion about the German language, but I will talk about all the important things that I think you should know about as maybe for a first contact with the language. To keep the post better organized, my ideas are divided into headers so you can skip to whatever most interests you.

For the record, I spend likely two hours daily; but I will blog more about this subject in the after time.

English-German entanglement

Fun fact first! English is a Germanic language which branched off from west proto-Germanic language; For more on the topic, I suggest the following video, or you can just save it for later.

And if you are willing to spare a few more minutes, this other one might interest you as well.

Simple nouns comparison

Now I want to make some comparisons between the languages. Probably the easiest place to start is with nouns, after all, they are likely the first thing we are able to produce while developing our first language as babies[1, ch. 14][2, p. 1-2], yet there is a lot more going on behind the curtains[1, ch. 13].

Here is a table of interesting words to start comparing.

German English Haus House Mann Man Jung Young Kinder (plural) Children Garten Garden Milch Milk Apfel Apple Buch Book Maus Mouse Stuhl — keep reading 🙂

Most of the words look similar. I won’t comment the obvious ones. For some others, you may be thinking they don’t look that much with each other. That’s when pronunciation plays an important role in understanding them. I will explain some words with the help of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In case you are not acquainted with it, check out this interactive page. I want to talk more about this in a future post as well.

For the pair [Jung /j ʊ ŋ / – Young /j ʌ ŋ/ ], we can see they share an alike construction of consonants also with similar enough vowels. Listen to them: Jung & Young. The German letter J works mostly like the English letter Y.

Another pair which doesn’t look similar, yet you could imagine its meaning is [Kinder – Children] just like as in Kindergarten. Also, Garten means Garden. Kindergarten is nothing more than the ‘garden for children’. Neat :]

[Milch /m ɪ l ç/ – Milk /m ɪ l k/] † are clearly related and we can see the English word is most likely and evolution of the written form probably based on how the sound have been changing throughout the years, where the voiceless palatal fricative / ç / sound probably became a plosive / k / either because the place (in the mouth) where they are produced are not too far way, or because people from distant regions would, in the course of time, listen to it but lack the ability to distinguish and produce the exact same sound. Just speculating here.

[Buch /b u: x/ – Book /b ʊ k/] is a little similar to the milk example, but it is easier to imagine how the /x/ sound could become the /k/ sound because they are both voiceless velar sounds, i.e. they are produced in the same back area of the mouth, but one is plosive (puff of air) and the other is fricative.

The last one is quite intriguing for me. The word Stuhl /ʃ t u: l/ translates to English as chair. But guess what it sounds totally similar to? The English word Stool /s t u: l/ (the one you sit on, please). That’s how I remember this one.

As you see, there are many of those interesting cases that help us to keep motivated during the process because it feels familiar. Of course, there are tonnes of other words that do not resemble anything we are used to. So far, the pronunciation of words and their similarity with English has incredibly helped me out.

Capitalized Nouns

In German, all nouns are capitalized. This is a very distinctive feature of the language. I don’t know another language which capitalizes all its nouns. We are fairly accustomed to it in English, such as doing it for proper nouns, country names, language names and so on. In English, we use it to emphasize the importance of some name. In German, it makes reading and learning a bit easier, so I find. Take a look at a full sentence.

Die Ochsen hinter dem Wagen spannen.

I assume you don’t understand the sentence. Nor do I! (I’m still learning) Yet, I know beforehand which are the nouns. Doing so, you quickly realise the articles and it is easier to see the building blocks of the sentence (once you learn a bit about German articles and cases).

Noun genders and the definite article

Different from English whose nouns are genderless (grammatically speaking), German has three genders. Latin languages, as far as I know, have two (grammatical) genders: Feminine and Masculine. In German, though, we have these two and an extra one: the Neuter gender.

Things are easy in English since we only got one definite article: the ‘the’ article (sounds funny, eh?). As for German, we got Der (masculine), Die (feminine) and Das (neutral). But that is only for the nominative case. Look the table for all the cases of both definite and indefinite articles.

About the genders, for a few words like man and woman (Mann and Frau), the grammatical gender will match their biological gender. (Der Mann and Die Frau). What about a word like child (Kinder)? In English, child could refer either to a boy or a girl. In that case, it’s neutral (Das Kind). Alas, that beautiful logic doesn’t go too further. For the majority of nouns (if not all else) you got to learn them by heart. There are, of course, some patterns and rules to help you out, yet they are obnoxious for me. Once you learn it, what about the plural form of words? Guess what? They are not simple as simply adding an -s or -es. Oh no, you’d be waaay wrong about that. I wish they were, though (sob).

The strategy here is the follow: learn the word together with its article as if the two things were just one. Don’t think about Auto (car) as a neutral word, thus it goes with the article Das. Learn car in German as Das Auto, as a whole thing.

German cases (Warning!)

Talking about cases, this is so far the greatest challenge in order to learn German. Not because the cases per se are difficult to understand, but the endings for each word changes if it is an article, pronouns, adjective and so on, which are ambiguous in some cases, plus you need to know by heart the gender of the nouns to correctly make use of the cases. Which means a lot of tables to remember… Sigh…

The following table, which is a vast oversimplification of matters¤, represents the four German cases and their counterpart in English.

German English Nominative Subject Accusative Direct Object Dative Indirect Object Genitive Possessive

English used to have cases as well, but nowadays only a few particular ones have been kept (refer to the first video for more about this). Take for example the pronouns I and me. The former is in the Subjective case, and the latter is in the Objective case. They represent the same thing, but they change form depending on what they are doing in a sentence. But notice that the article ‘the’ never changes, despite the noun being the subject, direct object or indirect object of a sentence.

The ball is new. (the ball = subject)

The boy kicked the ball (the boy = subject; the ball = direct object)

I passed the ball to the boy (the boy = indirect object; the ball = direct object)

‘the boy’ works as the subject in the second example, but it is the indirect object in the third one. Regardless of that, neither the article nor the noun changes their form to indicate if they are a subject or object in a sentence. In German, the same sentences would be:

Der Ball ist neu. (Der Ball = subject [nominative])

Ball ist neu. (Der Ball = subject [nominative]) Der Junge trat den Ball (Der Junge = subject; den Ball = direct object [accusative])

Junge trat Ball (Der Junge = subject; den Ball = direct object [accusative]) Ich habe den Ball an den Junge n weitergegeben. (den Jungen = indirect object [dative]).

One English remnant of cases is the possessive ‘s (genitive case), which usually can be written in the ‘of the’ form.

The boy’s ball.

vs

The ball of the boy

One last thing about these declinations is that they don’t seem to follow an always predictable pattern. You will find many of tables like this one on the Internet to help with the endings:

Even when they seem to resemble some sort of pattern, I just feel that they don’t. That is frustrating at the beginning, but I’m confident that in the future it will be second nature and feel more natural. For that reason, I believe that German requires a lot more of dedication from the student than compared to, say, learning English.

Alphabet

German uses the conventional roman alphabet with letters we are already familiar with. An extra observation, as a Portuguese speaker, it resembles A LOT how we say the alphabet letters. For English speakers, I feel it doesn’t mean too much. Learning about the writing system and alphabet, in case there is one, is one of the first things we should pay heed when going to learn a new so dreamed (or not so much) language.

Of course, besides the ä, ö and ü umlauts, which are just another set of vowel sounds, the most noticeable thing about German is their unique letter ß ( es-tset, literally s-z). This special guy always captivated me before I met with him. But it turns out despite his curly B-shaped form, although it has nothing to do with the letter B, it is, and take it with a huge amount of salt, only a double s (ss) letter. Except not! That’s is a fair quick explanation only to demystify the letter in case someone ask you someday. According to Wikipedia [3]:

ß and ss: In reformed orthography (1996) the grapheme ß (a modernised typographical rendering of how sz appeared in traditional Gothic script) is considered a separate letter that is to appear only after long vowels and diphthongs.

But don’t listen to me, listen to this guy who properly explains it.

Footnotes:

† Previously, I wrote that Milch was pronounced /m ɪ l x/ , with a voiceless velar fricative sound. The reddit user ‘rewboss’ pointed out to me that the pronunciation actually is / m ɪ l ç / with the voiceless palatal fricative sound; unless I am a Swiss :). Thanks rewboss.

¤ Again, another reddit user pointed out to me other things that I could improve on my text. Thanks ‘averagemonkey’. 🙂

References:

[1] Crystal, D. (2005). How language works. London: Penguin.

[2] LIGHTBOWN, P. M., & Spada, N. (1999). How Languages are Learned, Revised Ed (2nd ed.). Oxford: OUP.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996#Sounds_and_letters