Stichwörter (Keywords):
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- Category: German learning methods
Falling in love with a German is wunderbar, and ideally the focus of your relationship is, well, the relationship and the activities you enjoy together, not language learning. I'll say it over and over again: Do not make your German spouse your German teacher.
I said it again in class last week, and one man, who is dating a German woman said, “Yeah, we figured that out. She doesn’t teach me any more.” “Good call!” I exclaimed. He grinned. Really, it was a relief, because he’s sweet on her, and I’ve seen the kind of friction which often arises when people make their German spouse their German teacher, and that’s one of the negative reasons why people end up in my classroom. Instead of that, let’s make it a positive reason. First, here are the 5 reasons why you (say it with me now!) shouldn’t make your German spouse your German teacher! And after that, we’ll turn it into something positive.
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Read more: 5 Reasons Not to Make Your German Spouse Your German Teacher
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- Category: German vocabulary
Auf Deutsch: Leider musste ich in meinem Leben sehr oft umziehen und bald ziehe ich schon wieder um. Das macht mich richtig sauer, aber die neue Situation wird, glaube ich, viel besser sein.
Und da wir hier sehr praktisch Deutsch lernen, ist es passend, wenn Sie diese Vokabeln lernen.
Hier können Sie sieben Vokabeln über einen Umzug lesen.
Auf Englisch: Unfortunately I've had to move often in my life and soon I'm going to move yet again. I'm really peeved about it, but the new situation, I believe, will be a lot better.
And since German learning here is very practical, it's fitting that you'd learn these vocabulary words.
Here you can read seven vocabulary words about moving (house).
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- Category: German vocabulary
Gestern Abend im Kurs B1+ sind wir auf sehr interessante Vokabeln gestoßen. Was für Sie besonders interessant ist, ist, dass diese Vokabeln in Lehrbüchern nur sehr selten vorkommen. Also diese Vokabeln sind ganz normale Wörter, die man im Alltag lernt.
der Zuckerersatz = artificial sugar
das Süßungsmittel = sweetener
der Meinungsmacher = an opinion-maker, e.g. a certain newspaper in Germany is a Meinungsmacher because it has a lot of influence on its readers
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- Category: German learning methods
Are you intimidated by a new German book? You might be like one of my clients, who, after the comfort developed by having spent time working through the A1 materials, looked at the A2 book for the very first time and said, “But I can’t do that! It’s too advanced for me.” Except she had never worked on the materials in the A2 level before. So I reminded her, “Remember that you don't have to know anything until you've learned it and worked on it for a while.”
Focus on acquiring German language skills, not on ‘making the grade.’
Learning is nonlinear and also invisible. So how do you know you’ve learned, for example, dass + Nebensatz? You know you’ve learned it when you feel relatively comfortable executing it in conversation auf Deutsch. This is why we use self-assessment to make this visual. We don’t use grades here. Ever.
Because we have a formalized and rigid (and frankly quite out-of-date) school system, we are steeped in formalized education from the time we enter kindergarten, and for a lot of children, even before that. This create an immense amount of pressure because our educational system is based on performance.
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Read more: You don’t have to know German before you have learned it.
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- Category: Writing German
In this post you'll learn a handful of German vocabulary words for typewriter parts, as well as a bit of the history of how I came to own...5...typewriters, including the beauty in the video above, a brother deluxe 220 from 1977 with a German keyboard, which I affectionately refer to as My Little Green, German Machine (it sounds better with a German accent, which you can hear in the video, above).
First German, then English.
Vokabeln:
die Schreibmaschine, die Schreibmaschinen = typewriter
etwas mit der Schreibmaschine schreiben = to type something (on a typewriter) (mit + Dativ)
klappern = one of the verbs you can use to express the sound of typing on a machine, e.g. "clackety-clack"
ratschen = a verb you can use to express the "ratchet" sound of using the carriage return lever
klingeln = (here) to ding, the most satisfying sound you hear when you reach the end of one line on a typewriter. In German: «PING!»
The Typosphere: The digital existence of bloggers and their blogs, typists and fans of typewriters, which fuels real human connections regarding to and because of their typewriters and the very human need to connect.
die Geschichte:
In 2017 habe ich eine Folge des Nerdette Podcasts gehört und zu Gast war Tom Hanks. Er hat die ganze Zeit über Schreibmaschinen gesprochen und es hatte mich fasziniert. Etwas später habe ich eine Schreibmaschine in einem Antiquariat eine Schreibmaschine gesehen und fast gekauft, aber ich mochte das Gefühl der Tasten nicht. Sie war nicht die richtige Schreibmaschine für mich.
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