TAC 2014 - Jurgen Wullenwever - German

[Jurgen Wullenwever]

[flag=]de[/flag] Whenever I am in Germany, I feel like Ildefonso (the man without words). I cannot understand what people say. That is a reasonable fact, since I do not know German, but I feel so awkward when I buy something, and have no idea what the cashier means. Does she want a cent, or offer a bag, or that I put the sign "closed" on the band after my items, or something else? (All these have happened.)

What then is the problem? I have a vague understanding of written German, so I can read a novel in German and get the gist of it, but I know very few words, and very little grammar, so just reading semi-understood text really achieves nothing in expanding my knowledge of the language. I have nothing to build upon.

I need to learn the basics from the start. I have several beginners coursebooks and some grammar books, and lots of dictionaries and novels, so availability to the material is not the problem. Using the material is.

Now, I will return to Germany in July, and I would like to have learnt something more before then, so I start this thread to note down what I have done, to force myself forward. Hopefully I will have worked my way through one of the books, and perhaps picked up something. Anything would be an achievement for me. Currently I only grasp "Es tut mir leid", which is heard in every episode of every Krimi-show on German TV, so it is frequent at least, but it does not get me very far, communicationwise.

I have most of the pronunciation, but with a foreign accent, although not a Swedish accent strangely, and I have been told not to use Austrian painters as models for speech. German sounds much softer, it is said. Hm.

[kevin]

I wouldn't worry much about the accent for now. German sounds different in Vienna than in Stuttgart, and in both of them than in Hamburg. And we have a fairly large number of foreigners and are simply used to a relatively broad variety of accents. It probably won't inhibit communication.

Generally your situation looks similar to my own with Dutch, where I started with only some passive understanding of the written language (because you can guess much of the vocabulary when you know German). My way to improve the active knowledge was to write in the Dutch subforum (and PMs in Dutch), looking up lots of words and when I was unsure, checking some grammar. I think especially for the vocabulary writing was most important, because if you just read some word and immediately understand it (which happened a lot), you don't really memorise it.

[Jurgen Wullenwever]

So, I lost round one, apparently.

I did not achieve anything before I went to Germany, and I was there for three weeks, but fortunately did not buy very much. I had only three or four shop encounters, and most of those were swift.

I was told that I said more in German than at the previous visit, although that does not mean that I could say, or understand, very much.

Now some time has passed since I returned to Sweden but I have still not been actively studying, which is worrying for the next time I go.