If you own a Kindle and have an Amazon.com Prime Membership, you get it even better: you can read the books for free. Starting June 19th, the whole series will be available through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

It’s certainly not something that is going to replace serious study and reading target language material, but every little bit helps, and it’s a neat way to sprinkle some language exposure into your daily web routine.

I was just perusing the website for LWT, and saw that it offers a way to export to Anki. It’s not simplistic by any means, but there’s some fine instructions at Living in the Middle Kingdom on how to get your terms, definitions, and sentences into Anki. Certainly a match made in language learning heaven, these two pieces of software.

But, the siren calls of difficult grammar, unknown words, and streams of unintelligible gibberish are too strong, so I’m starting to get back into it. A news article here, a podcast listen there. I’m planning on focusing on German, French, and (perhaps) Russian for a while. I might dabble a tiny bit with Italian, perhaps doing an Assimil lesson every day or two. We’ll see.

Unrelated to my hiatus from language learning, there’s a cool, new (to me) toy available: Learning with Texts. It is, for all intents and purposes, an open source copy of LingQ. You can run it on your own web host, or you can set up a dummy web server on your computer to run it. Lots of thorough instructions on the site, so do check it out. I’m pretty excited about it personally, as I always liked the idea of LingQ, but just thought the price point was a bit too high.

In the middle of July, I was in Florida with a couple of people to see the last shuttle launch. While we were in Florida, we also visited Universal Studies for two days. Somewhat surprisingly to me, Universal Studios was absolutely flooded with people from foreign countries. I would probably estimate that out of 10 people, perhaps 2 were speaking English.

It just so happened that there was a German family behind us when we were in line for the Harry Potter ride. We were in this line for nearly an hour and a half, so I had plenty of time to covertly listen in on their conversations. (You know you’ve done it before, so don’t act like you haven’t.) The frustrating bit, however, was that despite untold hours of learning German, listening to German, reading German, I could understand nearly nothing of what they said. I’d occasionally catch a word here and there, but mostly it was like listening to a language I’d never studied at all. Their accent was one I wasn’t entirely accustomed to, but even with that in mind, I found the experience to be really, really frustrating. Living in southern Ohio, it’s not often that I get to hear German spoken on the fly by people in “real life” (okay, so it basically never happens). Hitting a brick wall while in Florida has me thinking that I need to be listening to less “news” type materials and more stuff similar to how people really talk, like in movies and T.V. shows.

Have you had any similar experiences where you thought, alright, have I learned anything in all this time? The whole thing had me seriously considering throwing my hands up in the air and calling it quits. But I’m far too stubborn for that.

Languages contain many nuances which can be misunderstood or overlooked by the non-native language student. Without the ability to comprehend these nuances, it can be very difficult to know how to tackle them. So you’ve looked in a dictionary and found a direct translation for every word in the sentence, you’ve applied your reasonable grasp of German grammar, but you still can’t make sense of that one word in the sentence and your native speaking friends or German tutor tell you your translation doesn’t sound quite right. The chances are that you are dealing with a modal particle – a word which gives a certain nuance to the German sentence – words such as doch, ja, eben, halt. These words may appear in your dictionary with English translations, but a dictionary is unlikely to tell you how these words work. Modal particles can either stress the focus of a sentence or express the attitude or mood of the speaker and are essential to German language – there may be more words in the English language which might appear to make English a more expressive language, but German more than makes up for it through the varied deployment of these tricky modal particles.

Mastery of German modal particles is essential for everyday communication in German speaking countries. Although their use tends to be more colloquial, the huge number of levels of expression possible through their use makes them very important. If you listen carefully to a native speaker, you will often hear them say the word ‘mal’ (regularly shortened to ‘ma’) and other similar words (which may not make any sense to you). This is evidence that in order to sound authentically German, you need to try to chuck in some of these words, but it’s not just as simple as learning a word which has an equivalent English translation – you need to understand how these things are used!

So how do they work? To get some idea of what we’re dealing with, here’s a table of the most common modal particles:

Let’s look at the first one in the table, ‘aber’, which of course means ‘but’ or ‘however’ – well, not in all cases. Look at the sentence below:

“es war aber sehr ermüdend”

In this example, the word ‘indeed’ could actually be used to translate the word ‘aber’ (i.e. “it was very tiring indeed”). However, when the word ‘aber’ is used as a modal particle, its grammatical function is to stress the focus of the sentence. Modal particles used in this way generally appear in spoken and more colloquial contexts. As such, this stress is usually expressed in written English through the use of italics. The example sentence is therefore more likely to be translated as [it was very tiring].

But what about the other functions of modal particles? The word ‘doch’ is probably one of most useful words in German and you’ll hear it all the time. It can be used to counter a false statement or a negative question and should be interpreted as something along the lines of “on the contrary”. For example, the negative question “Besitzt du kein Auto?” [Don’t you own a car?] is best answered with either with ‘nein’ [no] or ‘doch’. If you answer the question with ‘ja’, when you do in fact have a car, a speaker of German may think you are saying “no, I don’t own a car”. If you don’t own a car, the answer is nein, but if you do, the answer should be doch. It all seems very confusing, but the word doch as an answer to this question would be translated as yeah [I do have a car] (with stress placed on the contradictory ‘yeah’ when spoken). As is the case with ‘aber’, ‘doch’ is used more in spoken than written German.

Sticking to the word ‘doch’, modal particles can actually be combined as in:

“Versuchen Sie es doch mal!”

The sentence means “Just try it!” In the English translation, the exclamation mark is enough to convey the idea expressed in the German. The ‘doch mal’ is there to emphasise the idea that the speaker thinks the addressee really should try it. This example shows that the subtle nuances conveyed by modal particles are sometimes impossible to translate fully into English. This poses a huge challenge in the field of language translation, as there is often no single correct translation. As long as you can understand the ideas and emotions being expressed in the German and express it satisfactorily in English, you can’t go far wrong.

If you want your German to sound more authentic, it is important to learn how to use all of these modal particles. Many grammar books clearly explain their proper use, but it can be difficult to understand them fully without listening to how native speakers use them. If you work on your accent and perfect your grammar, all you need do is incorporate some modal particles and you might pass as a German!

This is a guest post written by Ed Langley on behalf of Codex Global language translation.

And then I sort of stopped.

It seems to happen to the best learners (and me, too, and I’m certainly not one of the best). I’ll be doing great, and then something will knock me off course. Sometimes it’s easy to hop right back on and keep going. Other times, “things” keep getting in the way, day after day; and like any habit, the further away you get from it, the harder it is to start back up.

I was doing well with Read More or Die, and had worked through a German book in relatively short order. I had just been connected with a Russian pen-pal via eTandem. Then I had company at my house for a few days, so I shelved my studies for a bit so as to avoid looking like an antisocial language geek. After that, life just kept getting in my way, I lost the habit (obsession?) of working on my languages, and here I find myself, nearly a month later, having done more or less nothing. Awful!

So, it’s time to get back to it. My current short-term plans include:

• continuing the active wave of Russisch ohne Mühe
• getting back to writing to my German tutor and going over his corrections
• touching base with French, which I’ve largely neglected lately in favor of Russian

I also need to look a bit more at Rocket Italian, as they offered me a free subscription to their basic Italian course in return for a review, but more on that later.

(And yes, I’m well aware that I just said Italian, which is / was a language that was not on my list. If you all don’t know that I suffer greatly from wanderlust, I’m not sure what blog you’ve been reading. Gimme’ a break.)

While it started on the 1st, it’s not too late to sign up. There were some people on the HTLAL forums who seemed reluctant to take part because they knew they couldn’t read hundreds of pages in their foreign languages in one month, but that’s sort of missing the point. It’s not about “winning” (there aren’t any prizes other than bragging rights), it’s about reading. Some friendly competition is a good way to kick yourself into gear.

If you’re interested in taking part, check out the Read More or Die challenge blog. You’ll want to follow TadokuBot on Twitter to see updates, and you’ll probably want to follow lordsilent as well, who’s behind the challenge.

1. I really do hate the verb “tweeting.” Oh well.