Blog 9 from Alejandra

Today I want to talk about the B2 Test. I will do it in a bit less than a month. I am a bit worried, mostly about the speaking test. I registered for the TELC test and it consists of two big parts, the speaking test and the writing test. In the speaking test, three scenarios will be played out. The first one I have to talk about a specific thing for 1.5 minutes (a book, a movie, myself, etc) and at the end of my speech, the person who is listening to me (which is also someone taking the test with me) has to ask me two things regarding my presentation. I have to answer them. Part of the exam is that I also listen to this participant’s speech and ask him at the end two questions. Another part of the test is to plan something with this person (an event for example) and to discuss a specific point of view. That is for the speech part of the test. The other big part, consists actually of more things but in general it is called the writing test. First, comes the hearing test, where one will listen to three different scenarios and have to answer general and more specific questions. For example, what were the people talking about or specific things like at what time does a flight leave or at what platform does a train leave. Then the grammar part of the test, where one will put their knowledge of German grammar to the test. Of course I am terrified of this one haha. Then comes the reading part of the test, again there are 3 different areas to be evaluated (general understanding about something and other specificities) and at the end, the writing part of the test. We have to write a letter about a complaint or something to ask for more information about a specific thing. I hope I pass the test, I have been studying so much, but well I am still finishing my B2.2 course, still for a week. I’ve been going to Huggendubel to study. It’s a lovely department store like Barnes and Nobles. I also attached a photo with an example of the Telc Certificate. Wish me luck!!  

Bis bald! 

Ale 

Hello all! I have been taking the German course for the past 4 months. Before that, I tried to learn the language by myself at home for close to 2 months in vain.

I think one of the main reasons is that it is extremely hard to maintain the discipline every single day when you’re in it all by yourself. I found myself studying for hours on few days and hardly opening the book on a few days. And I’m pretty sure that that’s one of the worst ways to learn a language. You learn a little everyday and you gradually master it.

Anyway, once I started going to the course, I was doing exactly that. There is also solace in the fact that you’re not learning alone. Better yet, you have companions to make mistakes with and a teacher to correct those mistakes.

There is also the most obvious motivator which works for many things – money. You remind yourself that you got to make it count. The other important motivators being the material, occasional tests, monthly Stammtisch and the daily Hausaufgabe!

Ankitha

Während dem Deutsch lernen:

Weil deine Deutschfähigkeit nicht so gut ist,

Kennst du die Bedeutung der Wörter nicht,

die Aussprache der anderen Person ist falsch,

die Aussprache der anderen Person ist undeutlich,

die Aussprache ist so schnell und wegen der falschen Betonung,

es gibt viele Fälle, die den Satz nicht verstehen.

In dieser Situation habe ich im Unterricht gute Sätze gelernt und möchte mit all meinen Freunden, die Deutsch lernen, gute Sätze teilen:

“Sie sprechen leider sehr schnell. Daher kann ich Sie nur schlecht verstehen.

Ich glaube, das habe ich nicht richtig verstanden.

Könnten Sie das bitte wiederholen?

Könnten sie bitte etwas langsamer sprechen?

Ich kenne das Wort nicht. Könnten Sie mir das bitte erklären?

Habe ich Sie richtig verstanden?

Meinten Sie damit, dass…?

Bedeutet das, dass…?“

(Quelle: Menschen B1.2 von Hueber)

Yeju

It’s interesting how certain things in German are quite similar to English which I love. I get so excited when I hear a word that’s similar to English because I know that way I won’t end up forgetting it. I guess the key to German is to learn and not to forget which I do all the time. I guess remembering comes with practice and time. So keeping my fingers crossed.

So today we happened to learn about superlatives.  It’s just like English where you say pretty, prettier and the prettiest.  You’re comparing one against the other and the last is the final ground of comparison. For instance if you want to say the friendly man in Positiv (+), Komparativ (++) and Superlative (+++), it is freundlich, freundlicher and am freundlichsten. And if it comes along with an article. It becomes der freundlichste Mann.

It can go a little overboard at times but remember patience is the key .

Elza

Irregular verbs and regular verbs. That’s a mouthful but that is what we trying to learn in class today. Irregular verbs or strong verbs as some people call them are different from the regular verbs or ‘weak verbs. However the issue is that for people who are learning German as a new language, find it usually hard to learn these irregular verbs for their stem vowel in the past tense (Präteritum) and perfect tense changes.

For instance take the verb Machen. In its infitinitve form it is mach-en, past tense –mach-te and as a participle perfekt it is ge-mach-t. Notice how the stem mach remains the same and is consistent. This folks is your regular verb in german. Now if you take a look at the verb gehen. In its infinitive form it is gehen, past tense- ging and as a participle perfekt it is gegangen. Notice how here the stem is completely different.  German I’ve come to realize can often be overwhelming at times but you need to remember to breathe in and out, practice a lot and eventually it will come to you. It’s almost like how you don’t think when you speak in your native language, you don’t think about the tenses of verbs and nouns individually and then put it together. It all just comes together without thinking. With practice I believe, that is the key to cracking this Fremdsprachen.

Elza

My mom’s favorite word is ‘Nonetheless’. Well, today is my lucky day because I’m going to be telling her that back and that too in German. Today in our German class we discussed about Verbindungsadverbien (conjunctive adverbs) and over how they create logical relationships between clauses in a sentence. So, we have ‘obwohl’ and ‘trotzdem’ and they each serve a different purpose. ‘Obwohl’ stands for although in german and it connects a Haupsatz with a Nebensatz and it talks about unerwartete Gegensatze (contrast situations).

Zum Beispiel- Ich gehe nicht zum Arzt, obwohl ich erkältet bin.

Now if you look up the word ‘Trotzdem’, you’ll get all a lot of synonyms like however, still, yet, though and more. I personally think ‘despite that’ is the closest to what the word really means.

Zum Beispiel- Er verdient wenig. Trotzdem fahrt er ein teures Auto.

A couple of things to look out for while using Trotzdem is to remember that this word connects  Hauptsatz with another Hauptsatz and that it has position in a sentence so it is always followed by a verb. I personally think these are words I’ll be using for sure a lot in my daily broken attempts at speaking this complicated and yet dear to me language =)

Elza

Adjective declensions have always been a huge headache for me and I believe, for many other students learning German as well.

I think the main reason for that is the difference across languages. In Chinese, there is no gender for nouns, which means no “der, die, das” and therefore all declensions of adjectives are identical. In English, it works more or less the same way. When I learn German as a foreign language, I can’t help but using English as reference. When there is a conflict between these languages, it would make learning extra hard. According to our teacher, the problem that most struggle with are “Dativ” and “Adjektivdeklination”, probably due to the various forms for different situations.

So far it seems there is no way else but to learn it and memorize it though exercises. Just think of it as when kids acquire languages. Maybe it’s time to quit asking why and try tackling the problem in a more primitive method: repeating and repeating until it becomes automatic.

Yang

Das deutsche Alphabet haben wir schon im A1.1 Kurs gelernt, aber wie buchstabieren wir einen Namen am Telefon? Fast alle von meinem Kurs wussten die Antwort nicht, als die Lehrerin uns fragte.

In diesem Kurs haben wir eine Tabelle gelernt, in der es den richtigen Namen für jeden Buchstaben gibt. Zum Beispiel, A wie Anton, B wie Berta, und so weiter. Zusammen mit einem Spiel, das “Galgenmännchen“ heißt, haben wir viel geübt. Das Buchstabenspiel ist wie “Hangman“ auf Englisch. Die Lehrerin denkt an ein Wort, das weiter die Studenten raten. An der Tafel zeichnet die Lehrerin zuerst einen Galgen und manche Unterstriche, deren Anzahl von der Länge des Wortes hängt. Dann raten wir das Wort Buchstabe für Buchstabe. Wenn jemand einen falschen Buchstabe sagt, wird ein mehr Teil des Körpers gezeichnet. Das Ziel ist, dass wir alle richtigen Buchstaben haben, bevor alle Körperteile von dem Männchen gezeigt werden.

Davor habe ich nur auf Englisch einer Hotline angerufen und sehr oft gibt es Situationen, wenn ich meinen Name oder Adresse geben muss. Jetzt kann ich meinen Name auf Deutsch buchstabieren! Yang, Ypsilon, A wie Anton, N wie Nordpol, G wie Gustav!

—

Since the A1.1 course, we have been taught how to say the basic letters of German. However, how do we spell names on a telephone, without using just letters but in a more elegant way?

This is what I learned recently in my C1 course. There is a complete list of the names for letters, one name attached to one letter. For example, A in Anton, B in Berta, and so on. We learned it together with a game. It’s called “Galgenmännchen“ in German and the rule is exactly like the English version of “Hangman”. In this game, the teacher would first draw gallows and a few underlines, whose length depends on the length of the word for guessing. Then the students would guess the word letter by letter. When a wrong letter is given, the teacher would draw a body part of the little man. The goal is to get all the correct letters before the man is hung.

Before this I have phoned some service hotlines but only in English. Quite often in these cases, I have to give the name and address, where it requires spelling. Now I can finally spell my own name in German! Yang, Ypsilon, A wie Anton, N wie Nordpol, G wie Gustav!

Yang

It is getting a little clearer with the distinction between dativ and akkusativ. The dativ part of a sentence is basically the action which is not performed right now. Akkusative is more like the action you are directly referring to.

The questions like “with whom?” and “with which person?” are referred to as “mit wem?” and “mit welcher Person?”. Remembering to whom the sentence is referring to helps identify the nominative and hence figure out which his/her form can be used to replace it. For example,

Die Nachbarin von Herr Rahn, wohnt uber Herr Rahn.

Where the underlined nominative could be replaced by Seine Nachbarin.

A confusing word we learned is “absagen” which is a “trennbares verb” and used in a sentence like “Ich sage ab” (I cancel) which is similar to “Ich sage” but then it means “I say”!!The “ab” changes the meaning of the word completely so when you listen to a sentence you have to hear the whole sentence before jumping onto a conclusion. When you are reading its fine go back and look the previous words and find a fit but when you are listening I think this could be challenging.

Sudeep

We dived into Dativ today and it is not as scary as I thought it would be. Also, we learned about the locator words like vor, neben, hinter and über. No, it’s not the same as calling a uber. Über means over which is somewhat similar to English (with a thick British accent).
For the getting the article right you have to know the gender of the object. Seems like it all comes down to remembering if the object is a masculine, feminine or neutral. Since there is no trick to remembering this. You have to memorize for all the words in the German dictionary. Even synonyms can have different gender so the gender is really based on the word rather than the object itself.
I think this is the biggest problem everyone finds in German but it’s not the only language which has this. Some of the other languages I know like Hindi and Bengali also have a gender associated to the object. But I don’t remember memorizing the gender there when I was learning those languages and it just came to the students with time and practice. So, I am not stressing out about gender right now.

Sudeep