Crazy German

Wer/Wen/Wem

2011-10-23T17:45:41Z

I have Wem ist kalt? in my flash cards. I'm not sure that's correct, in fact, I think that's wrong. Pity I didn't also add citations to see where I collected that from?

A quick explanation of the issues: the nominative question is wer? - "who?" For the accusative case, it becomes wen, while for the dative case, one says wem ("whom"). This follows the normal pattern, der becomes den or dem.

An example that makes sense to me: "Wen ruft sie an?" - "who is she calling?" Consider "she calls a plumber" - "she" is the subject, "the plumber" is the object (direct object), so der Klempner becomes den Kempner, sie ruft einen Klempner an. Thus, wen ruft sie an.

As usual, it seems Swiss German is different. Of course. How else could it possibly be. :-P I happened to notice Wikipedia saying:

In general, the dative marks the indirect object of a verb, although in some instances the dative is used for the direct object of a verb pertaining directly to an act of giving something. In Russian, Hebrew, and Swiss German, for example, the verb "to call (by telephone)" is always followed by a noun in the dative.

In any case, surely for "who is cold?", "who" should be nominative? Ich bin kalt! Otherwise, and this is the explanation I've been going with, one actually asks "to whom is it cold?" - but then I would expect an answer in a form similar to "it is cold to her?" (What would that look like?)

When I find the answer I will drop a comment on this post, unless someone has already done so.

Flash Cards: Anki

2011-03-22T01:14:15Z

I have taken up using flash cards to drill vocabulary. I'm using a tool called Anki, available for many operating systems including Linux and Android. I am only using it on my laptop though, as I have not tried out uploading my deck. (By the sounds of it, syncing is somewhat fragile if you forget to close your deck.)

If there is interest, I will be happy to share more details on how I use it, how I've set up templates to make it easier to create cards for verbs and nouns. I share some detail below in any case. Generally I also type out my answers rather than just "think" them in my head, a useful discipline for me.

While sharing decks could save some effort, creating your own deck takes a fraction of the time you spend reviewing it. (Especially if you set up your templates well, where the tips promised above could come in handy.) Arguably going to some effort when entering new words is beneficial. While adding new cards, I typically use wiktionary to look up words I've collected in class or from the book we're studying from. In the process I get a better grip on the word than I otherwise would have had.

If you think it useful however, I'll also be happy to provide a copy of my current deck. I now have 1201 cards based on 537 "facts" (a concept in Anki). From my templates, a noun "fact" may generate two cards (to test singular and plural), and naturally they include articles. A verb "fact" can generate as many as 10 cards — to practice conjugations I typically have a card for each of ich, du, er, sie, es, wir, ihr, Sie and another for perfect tense.

Having er, sie and es seems a bit overkill, but which would I skip? As I'm generating cards from templates, it causes no additional effort to create all three, it just gets more repetitive when reviewing cards. Consider the verb "to eat":

For the English infinitive, I enter "eat". German: "essen". Next, I only need to enter five conjugations in fields for ich, du, er/sie/es, wir/sie and ihr — esse, isst, isst, essen, esst. Then I enter a past perfect tense question and answer, such as the question: "(Formal) You ate bread" and the answer "Sie haben Brot gegessen".

Typically I'm too lazy to do this properly, so for "to examine" I entered "You have examined" with answer "Sie haben untersucht". This does not test knowledge of sentence structure, "You have examined the patient" is "Sie haben der Patient untersucht": second verb at the end of the sentence. I typically don't have trouble with German's word order, thanks to Afrikaans.

From the above "fact", Anki then generates all the questions:

"to eat" → "essen"
"I eat / ich ____" → "ich esse"
"you eat / du ____" → "du isst"
"he eats / er ____" → "er isst"
"she eats / sie ____" → "sie isst"
"it eats / es ____" → "es isst"
"we eat / wir ____" → "wir essen"
"you eat / sie ____" → "ihr esst"
"they eat / sie ____" → "sie essen"
"(Formal) You ate bread / (Perfekt)" → "Sie haben Brot gegessen"

I add the articles in my questions in order to help distinguish between singular and plural "you". I also am not bothering with formal you for normal verb conjugation ("Sie essen"), since it is identical to third-person plural — I'm trusting my mind to associate those two. Maybe inconsistent with my approach to er/sie/es, but I don't want to have four cards with "essen" as the answer (infinitive, we, they, formal You). I recognise I am actually entering more data than I need: sie/wir is always the same as the infinitive.

For the past perfect tense, I specify it explicitly, as I know there are also other correct translations of "You ate bread". ("Sie aßen Brot" — a conjugation we haven't learned in class yet, but you can see it in the conjugation table on wiktionary, see: essen.)

Enough of that for now. Feel free to ask questions if I glossed over something too quickly. I'm attempting to spend less time doing things that don't have value, including explaining things to an audience if the audience has no need for such explanations. ;)

Greetings, Nationalities and Interrogation! (uh, question words)

2010-11-21T23:33:35Z

(Please do correct my German if you see me making a mistake.)

Guten Tag! Ich heiße Hugo. Ich komme aus Südafrika, ich bin Südafrikaner. Ich wohne in Zürich. Ich spreche Afrikaans und Englisch, und lerne langsam Deutsch.

Welche Sprache sprechen Sie? Welche Nationalität haben Sie und woher kommen Sie?

At last, I'm starting to review everything we've learned, starting at Chapter 1 of Book 1. In the process I'm also collecting (on secret parts of this site) the words I've learned. And I note how clueless I still am about nouns' articles, time to drill drill drill. I'll have to write just a little bit more code before I'll be able to use it to help me with that.

In the first chapter dealt with greetings, cities, countries, continents and nationalities. We learned to introduce ourselves, say where we're from, what languages we speak, how to spell things (to spell: buchstabieren, what a weird verb!) Personalpronomen: ich, er, sie, Sie, Die Verben: sein, kommen, sprechen.

Articles... Die Sprache, thus welche Sprache. However: der Kontinent, das Land, die Stadt, thus welcher Kontinent, welches Land, welche Stadt. Not logical at all, so this is thus one case where "drill baby drill" is uncontroversially great advice. ;)

wer: who. Wer is das? — who is that?
wie: how. Wie heißen Sie? — how are you called? Wie geht es Ihnen? —literally, I think, "how goes it with you"?
was: what.
welcher/welche/welches: which.
woher: where from.

German has a great many question words that confuse me. It is probably best to rather try to "think in German" than to map these words onto English, as I have effectively done above.

Wiktionary claims woher can also be "how", in the sense of Woher soll ich das wissen? — however the en2de Google translate bot indicates that Wie soll ich das wissen? is also correct.

Once I've got the "noun driller" down, I'll make it easy to add generic questions, by which one could add questions to exercise question words too. ;)

Verb Conjugation

2010-09-20T21:33:36Z

Verb conjugation is found in most European languages. English has simplified verb conjugation significantly, but it is still present. In particular, the infamous irregular verb to be: I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are (plural), they are. This verb is also particularly irregular in German.

"To be", infinitive, in German, is "sein", and its conjugations are as follows:

Ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind.

You can found pronunciations in wiktionary in the entry for sein, and too much information about conjugations on sein (Konjugation).

For regular verbs, English can be relatively simple. Third-person singular is typically the only odd one out, ending with an "s": I run, you run, we swim, they read... but he runs, she swims, it reads. German is more complicated, but conjugated verbs' endings generally follow a pattern. Consider the verbs to run, to swim and to read...

Infinitive	laufen	schwimmen	lesen
1st person singular	ich laufe	ich schwimme	ich lese
2nd person singular	du läufst	du schwimmst	du liest
3rd person singular	er/sie/es läuft	er/sie/es schwimmt	er/sie/es liest
1st person plural	wir laufen	wir schwimmen	wir lesen
2nd person plural	ihr lauft	ihr schwimmt	ihr lest
3rd person plural	sie laufen	sie schwimmen	sie lesen

Verbs with ich tend to end with -e, du with -st, er/sie/es with -t. Verbs with ihr also end with -t, but lack the modifications of the vowels seen for singular cases for some verbs (e.g. laufen -> du läufst, lesen -> du liest).

German also has a formal second person (a formal "you") which is verbally identical to the 3rd person plural, but capitalised when written: Sie laufen, Sie schwimmen, Sie lesen. This case applies to both singular and plural.

In fact, our German instructor writes out his verb conjugation tables with ten lines, with some grouping: ich, [Sie, du], er, es, sie; wir, [Sie, ihr], sie. This way he includes the formal second-person singular and plural cases in the table. I've written about his er/es/sie ordering in the previous post, as er/es/sie corresponds to der/das/die. I'm sticking to der/die/das, and I'm combining them for verb tables since I won't often include nouns in the same table.

Good old Afrikaans has no verb conjugation. Ek is, jy is, hy/sy/dit is, ons is, julle is, hulle is. Gotta love it. Among European languages, it seems only Swedish is equally smart. ;) (Source: Grammatical conjugation on Wikipedia.)

German Nouns

2010-08-19T09:05:42Z

Nouns are crazy in German. It's not enough to just know the word you're looking for, you also have to know its gender and how to pluralise it. (And from what I can tell, eventually, also its genitive form will need to be learned?)

German has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. (French, another crazy language, has only two genders.) The nominative articles for the three genders is der, die and das respectively.

A table is masculine, a lamp is feminine, and a bed is neuter: der Tisch, die Lampe and das Bett. Do the genders make sense? Sometimes. Der Sohn, die Tochter, das Kind. However, a testament to the arbitrariness of genders is that they aren't always the same in other languages: in French a table is feminine.

German nouns are always capitalised. If you see a German writing English with extraneous capitalisation of nouns, that would be why. Or more interestingly, if you see them writing english with too few capitals, it's because they're making an effort to not capitalise too many nouns. (In English, and Afrikaans and Dutch I believe, "proper nouns" are capitalised while the rest aren't.)

Another thing you'll need to learn for each noun is what its plural form looks like. Die Tische, die Lampen, die Betten. Some words have stranger plural forms. Der Stuhl, die Stühle. In the case of plural the article is die, irrespective of gender.

That's brushing the surface. It gets crazy when you start dealing with the other three cases. There are four cases, nominative (the plain form above), genitive (which I thankfully still know nothing about), dative and accusative. I'll get to dative and accusative later.

Articles should be learned as part of the word. By example, don't think of "chair" as Stuhl: a chair is der Stuhl.

Der/die/das oder der/das/die?

For all the German I've been exposed to until this year, I saw things organised masculine/feminine/neuter, der/die/das. However, the instructor we have now organizes things according to der/das/die. I asked him about his breaking of what I thought was convention. He insists "every book does it differently", this is just the way he chose. It so happens that every book I've come across thus far did der/die/das, as does Wiktionary, so I'll be redoing/reorganising the notes he gives us and the tables he writes on the board. The brain appreciates consistency...

Primacy of Spoken Language or Written Text

2010-08-01T09:53:30Z

(A random light-hearted rant only tangentially about German.)

I have a specific preference with regards to learning new words. Even names for that matter. I feel I don't know what the word is until I know how to spell it. I can hear the sounds of someone's name, but I'd feel I don't know what their name is until I know how it is written. I thought this would be common, but more and more I discover that some people are completely happy simply knowing how something sounds, and how to make those sounds.

And this isn't just non-native speakers I'm talking about. I've heard an Australian support the idea of scrapping crazy English spelling and simply going phonetic.

Phonetic?!

If there's one spelling habit that particularly drives me up walls, it's the "ur" contraction. I have friends that use it (German first-language, non-native speakers), so I try my best to not judge them for it. (But sometimes it is hard! ;-) I'm not sure I'd cope with seeing it every day, for example.) This brought up the interesting question "why is it so irritating?" (U no wat happens if u no longer rite correctly?)

The written word contains cues that help disambiguate things. When reading "your" and "you're", I don't translate it into sounds and hear it and thus experience it as one and the same. When I read it, the meaning of the word comes up immediately. Same with "no" and "know" - the sound is exactly the same, but by writing them correctly, you make the reading easier and faster. Fluent readers don't convert words on a page to sounds and then listen to it to know what it says. (Children learning to read might though.) So if you make a mistake on this, my reading experience feels a little like this:

Is this you are bike? (Is this you're bike?)
Belonging to you going riding today? (Your going riding today?)

And "ur" feels like a cop-out, "I'm not even going to try, so I won't get it wrong". And cop-outs suck, more than trying and getting it wrong. And first letters of words are important to me too, so "u" and "ur" fail to refer to someone in the manner they should, since they don't start with a "y". ;)

I suppose phonetic spelling need not be as bad and lossy with regards to meaning, but I'm still very glad it won't happen in my lifetime. (And if a child of mine ever dares to send me an sms with this kind of short-hand... I guess we'll just have to make sure that sms, and its short-hand with it, is dead by then.) Some languages are written phonetically already. African languages for example? At least Xhosa, which I took as a subject at school for nine months.

In conclusion, I'm going to have to get my German spelling right in order to avoid hypocrisy. I don't expect it to be a problem, in part thanks to my obsessive insistence on knowing how something is spelt before I'm able to pronounce it. (Considering "no" and "know" sound exactly the same, it is of utmost importance to know there's a silent "k", otherwise you end up saying the wrong word! :-P)

Dem, nicht den Buch

2010-06-10T15:26:52Z

I had it wrong. With mit, it is always dativ. Indirect object. Thus...

Heute starten wir mit dem zweiten Buch.

Not sure how to correctly write that in past-tense yet. Maybe: "Heute haben wir mit dem zweiten Buch gestarten"?

My German is still far inferior to Google translate. :-) Here's a potentially useful tip for users of Google Talk or Jabber: you can add de2en@bot.talk.google.com and en2de@bot.talk.google.com to your chat contacts, they respond with the Google Translate translated version of whatever you send their way. Other languages also supported!

Heute starten wir mit den zweiten Buch

2010-06-09T22:33:21Z

(Update: as mentioned in my next post, Dem, nicht den Buch, the title is wrong, as are comments I made below. In that sentence, "the book" is the indefinite article.)

As I mentioned last week, we're about to start with the second book. I will follow with this blog, as it will be my way to revise each week. (Kick me if I don't update weekly!) Since I also want to revise the first book, I will have two tracks in parallel.

I'm primarily writing this post to announce new subscription options (in addition to the news feed and email options I mentioned in the previous post — Update: I removed mention of twitter, I didn't set that up, and won't, unless someone expresses interest?):

Facebook! I have created a page for this blog on Facebook. If you prefer to read it via Facebook, go click on "Like" on that page. Bear in mind you'll have to click through to the site to see any discussions that might take place here, but I'll be more than happy to have discussions on Facebook as well.
Google Buzz. If you use Buzz, and know me personally, you might want to follow me (click on "Follow" on my profile page) — you should then these posts, as well as all my other personal updates/spam. If I have set things up correctly that is. I'm also not yet sure that I will keep it that way: are there any Buzz people that don't want to see "Crazy German" posts? I could limit them to specific people only. Let me know!

Now for some German, a breakdown of this post's title — I'm actually not completely certain that it is correct:

Heute: today — I mean Thursday.
starten wir: wir starten, we start. Afrikaans doesn't have any verb conjugation whatsoever, but since you clearly know English, you know about "I am, we are". That applies to all verbs in German, unlike English: "I start, you start, we start..."
mit: with
den zweiten Buch: das Buch - the book, zwei - two, zweiten - second, and I think in this sentence "the book" is the direct object, aka Akkusativ, thus "das Buch" becomes den Buch.

Like I said, German is one crazy language. ;-) All these crazy things will be reviewed, for my own sanity. Do feel free to use this blog to supplement your German learning, just bear in mind it certainly isn't intended as a replacement for a good language course. These will primarily be my personal notes.

At this point I still cheat: I use Google Translate to help me out with the title. I don't feel bad about it though, since Google Translate, being based on machine learning, isn't good for more than getting a rough understanding (aka it sucks ;-), so I have to check its work. In fact, it suggested "dem Buch" (Dativ, indirect object). So who's right? Google Translate, or me?

Hallo Welt!

2010-06-03T23:23:52Z

This here is my German blog. Not a blog in German, as you can clearly see, but it will contain some German. Hopefully more and more as time goes by. I'm experimenting to see how I can use it to help me learn German. No promises as to what I'll share here, time will tell if it proves useful to other learners of German.

At this point, if you would like to be informed when a new post is made, you can subscribe via a news reader or via email. I can add other options if there's interest. (Twitter? A Facebook page? ...Buzz? Let me know what you are interested in.)

We are now officially done with the first Berlitz book ("level one") and about to start on the second, but I intend to review what we've learned here — especially the crazy grammar and apparently arbitrary der/die/das. If I find enough time, I may even throw together my own little vocab-trainer (and der/die/das trainer), in part as an opportunity for me to learn some (more) javascript (yea I'm a geek, how did you guess?)