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