Sprichst du Deutsch?

[Black Knight]

Danke

[Sukkit]

I'm going to top this because I want you guys to keep posting in German. Currently I'm trying to learn the basics of it, but so far I'm still working with the conjugations (frage fragst fragt fragte fragtest fragte grefragt werde wird wirst habe hast hat etc etc ), and also with the definite article, personal pronouns, and all the other stuff that we could say constitutes the 'core' of a language.

I'm also learning a list of irregular verbs, which brings back memories of the times when I was learning English.

Ich denke nicht, dass mein Deutsch wirst gut werden.

(Hahaha, I know nothing of syntax yet)

[Fire Giant]

Ich denke nicht, dass mein Deutsch wirst gut werden.

(Hahaha, I know nothing of syntax yet)

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Well, you took a difficult start there... I won't even know myself which tense that would be supposed to be... "Futur II" or something equivalent, I guess

Anyway, correct would be: "Ich denke nicht, dass mein Deutsch gut verstanden werden wird.", so the mistake is only minor.

Es ist gut zu hören, dass noch jemand hier Deutsch lernt!

[Argalius]

Ich soll eine Sprache machen in zwei wochen... für die ganze Klasse...

[Sukkit]

Well, you took a difficult start there... I won't even know myself which tense that would be supposed to be... "Futur II" or something equivalent, I guess

Hehe, I *think* I wanted to use werden as a normal verb and put it in Futur. Then I got distracted by how much I like the form wirst and used it instead of wird

Es ist gut zu hören, dass noch jemand hier Deutsch lernt!

Ja! Deutsch ist sehr schön, schöner als Althochdeutsch

I really need a dictionary. I know I had one but my sister took it when she went to Germany :\

[Fire Giant]

Ich soll eine Sprache machen in zwei wochen... für die ganze Klasse...

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Ah, you mean a "talk"or a "speech"? That would be called "Vortrag" in German - "Sprache" is meaning "language" and only that. Also, as a matter of interest, what is the talk going to be about?

I really need a dictionary. I know I had one but my sister took it when she went to Germany :\

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http://www.ponsline.de/cgi-bin/wb/wb.pl? is my preferred dictonary, but the site is German. You need to change the dropdown field at the top to "Engl. -> D" and you'll be able to do do lookups English -> German

[Argalius]

Ah, you mean a "talk"or a "speech"? That would be called "Vortrag" in German - "Sprache" is meaning "language" and only that. Also, as a matter of interest, what is the talk going to be about?

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Yeah, I meant Vortrag. I don't know yet about what it's going to be, any suggestions? (it's a 5 minute talk)

[Sukkit]

Du kannst sprechen über das Internet.

Yay for extraordinarily simple sentences!

Last night I spent some time watching the German music TV channel Viva (which is terrible), and there was this show where people sent text messages and they put them on the screen. Of course I hardly understood anything, but my ability to recognize verbs (and tenses), particles, case and gender (especially when der/die/das was present) is increasing

Also, being a linguistic nerd I cannot help but comment on how my very basic knowledge on Gothic is helping me with some elements of modern German

For example, I memorized the forms of the definite article by attaching them to the forms of the related definite article in Gothic:

GOTHIC / GERMAN

Masc.

sa / der (not directly related)

þana / den

þis / des

þamma / dem

þai / die

þans / die (not directly related)

þize / der (z > r, a regular switch)

þaim > den

Also, most if not all modal verbs seem to come from the 'present-preterite' verbal category of Germanic. They were characterized by the use of the original preterite as present tense, and the creation of a new analogical preterite. It's much easier to learn a verb like 'können' when you know that (although, surprisingly, the German grammar I'm reading does not mention this at all).

[Fire Giant]

Yeah, I meant Vortrag. I don't know yet about what it's going to be, any suggestions? (it's a 5 minute talk)

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Hmm. The relationship between two countries (in your case, Netherlands and Germany) are always a good topic, but I guess there's not *that* much to say about relations between Netherlands and Germany.

But, how about the "Hanse" - which was a medieval alliance of several wealthy cities in the area of Northern Europe which grew pretty powerful over time. It included cities in your country, too, I think, and German cities (Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen...) played a significant role in it.

Otherwise, if you are more into recent political developments, you could get onto a topic like the introduction of tuition fees in Germany, the recently introduced highway/road-toll or the reforms of the German welfare system.

If you have any questions concerning one of these topics, don't hesitate to ask them here.

@Sukkit: Hehe. I would not say that Viva is the perfect place for trying to learn German, though, because the language of that channel is pretty strange and often far away from everydays German like you could hear it on the road. Probably it would be easier to have a look at the news on a public-law TV channel (ARD, ZDF), because they are usually in a very good language and the people aren't talking too fast.

[Sukkit]

@Sukkit: Hehe. I would not say that Viva is the perfect place for trying to learn German, though, because the language of that channel is pretty strange and often far away from everydays German like you could hear it on the road. Probably it would be easier to have a look at the news on a public-law TV channel (ARD, ZDF), because they are usually in a very good language and the people aren't talking too fast.

Believe me, if I got any German channel other than Viva I would gladly watch it

Some years ago I could watch RTL (I think), but if my memory serves me well it was 24 hours a day of Bavarian folklore.

Oh, I forgot about the dictionary link. Danke! Es ist sehr gut

[Argalius]

@Fire Giant: I decided to do my speach about, the one thing that Dutch people always come up with first when they think of Germany, beer! ( I talked to my teacher and she said that it shouldn't be a too diffecult subject because of the level of German I can speak and that it should only take 5 min. I then decided to use beer as my subject. .

I'm planning to mostly talk about the history of beer. I have most of the info already, now lets make a nice story out of it and start translating.

[Fire Giant]

Sounds good. Feel free to post the speech for spellchecking and additional remarks, I'll be glad to be able to help you

[Sukkit]

Der Vater eines guten Freundes meiner ist tot.

Would this be correct? Should I use the preposition von (or any other) instead of the genitive? Freundes or Freunds? Should I use the genitive of the possessive mein instead of the genitive of ich, meiner? (The meaning I want to have is "The father of a good friend of mine", rather than "The father of my friend").

[Fire Giant]

Der Vater eines guten Freundes meiner ist tot.

Would this be correct? Should I use the preposition von (or any other) instead of the genitive? Freundes or Freunds? Should I use the genitive of the possessive mein instead of the genitive of ich, meiner? (The meaning I want to have is "The father of a good friend of mine", rather than "The father of my friend").

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I think it would sound better to use the "von" preposition here, but you have to use the pronoun "mir" then, so it would be:

"Der Vater eines guten Freundes von mir ist tot."

Genitive and "Freundes" are correct here.

Alternatively, you could also go with a plural form of Freund and say:

"Der Vater eines meiner guten Freunde ist tot."

(literally: "The father of one of my good friends...")

But that wouldn't be as close to the original as the first translation due to the usage of the plural form.

[Sukkit]

I see. Thanks! It's good to see I got it more or less right