How well do you speak German?

If you can readily say what the "Verkehrswegeplanungsbeschleunigungsgesetz" is, then you are a true German speaker.

Me, I am here to do my job which doesn't involve German but now my colleagues razz me almost everyday. Of course they think I will stay here 25 years when in acutality it will be 22 months. With only one year of german study under my belt, my conversational german is growing on me but it is coming sloooowwly because I don't spend any time on it.

It's all about how important it is to you. I used to have sympathy for people who have crap German because of the excuse they worked in an English enviroment and had a private life that was English-based. Now, having seen my boyfriend go from knowing practically nothing to being able to hold a conversation in German and write (albeit brokenly) German work emails in a year, I know it can be done.

It comes down to, "do I need to". I dont need to, so I dont bother. It cant be that hard, cause I saw some 12 year old kid walking around talking fluently the other day.

this caused some amusement as i slipped some of my new harry potter related vocabulary into conversations at work... sehr merkwürdig... schrecklich... besen... 'duweistschonwer'

I think it all depends on whether you want to. Immersing youself in the language is the only way. If you spend all your time in Irish pubs, then you're not going to pick up much german.

I am not looking for sympathy. My colleagues are speaking fast and wondering why I don't get it yet. I can speak broken German and I usually can say what I mean in a simple way. We are really all happy with that. Plus I am learning every day.
However, with the wide variety of people on TT I was just wondering how good everyone is. I mean some are obviously German and some want to take the Sprachdiplom test.

Yeah and most can't speak it for s**t!

Hmmm. I dunno how to answer this.
I love umlauts, never watch "The Osbournes", read only the gossip in Bild, can buy Wurst and Schnitzel but generally order neither, do not jaywalk (we have a school and a kindergarten in the street where I live and I could not handle the dirty looks it would cause), have never read Harry Potter in any language at all, do read the SZ Magazin and the concert listings but nothing else in the paper, my German friends and I do not discuss Kafka (but we could if we really wanted to I guess) and I'm far too lazy to take an exam for fun so...
Hmmmm.
And as for

that at least is a definite no.
Katrina

Once I learn the rules for der, die and das, then I will be fluent. What? There are no rules? Sweet! No need to feel bad for giving up now then.

Easy to see why English is the standard international language and not German really, English can be learnt, German has to be grown up with.

Even after 3 years of reading writing speaking and listening to almost exclusivly german, I still have to pause everytime the gender of a noun becomes necessary, and i end up saying simply a 'd' sound, or a 'a' sound. Bavarians dont help either, they have their own rules yet again.

I do know the -ung, -heit, -keit etc nouns are all feminine, anyone know any other rules for working out gender?

In short, waste of time, its not even properly learnable, a non-native speaker will never be fluent and everyone speaks english anyway.

yes big c. quite. but you've picked up a few germans old chap no doubt?

Not in Murphy's though

Far be it from me to every put a label on you, Katrina. You are truly unique.

g murphs,
well that's more your eastie beastie (dud czechs especially) stamping ground (from what i am aware of)

Back to the original topic.
I find german about 10 million times easier to speak than write. You can get away with mistakes in spoken and it's easier to learn that all the verbose structures they love in written german. And using the perfect for spoken, but imperfect for written etc. etc. And reading I would say is in the middle somewhere.
But then I've met people here who find the speaking harder than the written, so maybe it's just how you've learned the language!

@Flogger - Czechs, where? I only met two in there at karoke and they weren't all that. But tell me when & where for more and I'm there. Beats any english or germans any day.

I agree with Katrina. None of the categories really fit for an advanced German speaker.
I chose the one about taking the German language exam. I took it years ago (1997 to be exact) and passed it. I didn't really do it for fun though. I took it because I wanted to take courses at a German university and you have to pass it in order to do that.
There should be more categories like...
I studied German.
I came to Germany because I could speak German, etc...
Those would fit better in my case, but maybe they aren't so funny as the other categories.

What about a category for "can fully explain the workings of a mixed signal circuit including its dsp algorithms and corresponding software in written or spoken german to other engineers, but gets every instance of 'the' and 'a' wrong"

Is that beginner territory or advanced territory? I dunno either..

Yes i find German extremely, and increasingly, frustrating, the more I learn the worse I seem to get.

I'm with Katrina and amimeli on this one. I started learning at the age of thirteen, did an A-Level and a degree in it and haven't stopped learning yet.
I could live without unlauts - but they don't bite!
I don't enjoy reading translations of anything.
My bf only ever corrects my German when I'm tired enough to make silly mistakes and he's awake enough to notice!

When creating a poll the answers must fit on one line only. And if you mess up you can't go back and edit.
(Thanks Bob for the edit.)
It could get very involved otherwise! There could be a category for:
"i came to germany to sing german, italian, french, and the occasional russian aria"!

Still have problems with der die das den Dem etc etc after living here 12 years.
Writing is also a lot harder than speaking.

Unless I'm really careful I come out with my bar room Munich slang as that is where I learnt my German and it's not really appropriate at work sometimes.

With some of my English speaking mates who have been here a long time as well, we often find outselves using german words or whole sentences with each other in German!

http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa042098.htm

I read it every so often and a few more tips sink in each time. The gender thing does improve, but only if you try and notice it (i.e. every time I look at a new word in leo, i read the noun in my head with der / die / das together) and / or if somebody corrects you (in my case my gf). noun gender + noun case + correct adjective form is even trickier to get right. Once you have mastered that, clauses can be a challenge and then you can practice changing the word order (der Sonne hinterher etc.) but you do begin to get a feel for it after a while. What would life be like without a challenge?

my german is acceptable when i need it..but i have to admit to currently finding the bavarian dialect the biggest annoyingly total abortional fcuk up one can possibly imagine..and i do love learning languages..
this will pass?? or its time to retreat to berlin/hamburg.

There really is no rule for the articles,
but maybe it helps if you know that mostly nouns (singular) which end of -er are male = der and the ones ending with -e are female (die)
Of course not always es der is still "das" like das Fenster, das Messer...
Am I confusing here? sorry

I was given a few German books b4 I got here...given some of the posts I've read on this site, I suspect (hope) that some of you may be interested in the only book I found of value...okay, the only book I actually read through...totally not appropriate for work, though good for a few low brow laughs.

Scheisse!: The Real German You Were Never Taught in School
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearc...452272211&itm=1

From the Publisher
If you think you have a fairly good command of German, think again. For it's a sure bet that Frau Schultz never taught you those nasty little guttural curses and humiliating invectives so expressive of real low German speech. But relax - here at last is the one book that can introduce you to the very worst beer-hall German. Scheisse! is an indispensible guide to off-color German colloquialisms and profanities - lascivious bedroom slang and boozy insults, jeering scatalogical put-downs and scurrilous ridicule. This hilariously illustrated cornucopia of creative expletives, gauranteed to vex, taunt, aggravate, and provoke as only overwrought low German can, will help you master the fine art of German verbal abuse - with triumphant one-upmanship.

Mayday. Mayday. This is Oceanliner Britannia.

Zis is "Lufthansa flight 101". What iz your mayday?

We are sinking!
---a few moments pass---
Hello? Lufthansa? Can you radio for help?

Ach! Vell, vat are you still sinking about?

to profundo!
And I love Boarisch, I don't even mind Schwäbisch. If you want to hear real nails-on-a-blackboard stuff try living in Franken. Fifteen months of linguistic hell that was.
Reminds me of when I worked for a certain sports company in Herzogenaurach and said during my first week there that I thought that local boy Lothar Matthäus had done so well for himself despite being "sprachbehindert"...
It was then clear that my future was never going to be fränkisch

was shocked when I clicked on the link to the Verk[...]gesetz and discovered that that is actually the *short* name for it

I actually thought I was getting the hang of German, speaking to my colleagues in German, then was forced to call the office in Dresden, where no one spoke any English, so had no fall back. Managed to get through it, but boy was that hard. The Saxon accent has to be worse than the Baverian.

When I first came here, I tried, but I just could not get anything right, then after about 2 years of just reading and listening, it all just seemed to fall into place. I still have keine Lust to learn, but reading a newspaper or something and I see a word I don't know, have to highlight it and look it up later. Found that helped.

I agree with Big C, speaking is easier, as its generally less formal, written German can sometimes be completely different. Suppose Jimbo sees this, having to write Business German all the time ! I feel sorry for you mate !

Jimbo? Write in German? I doubt it somehow. Or have I completely misjudged his German skills?

Why does no one have any desire to learn another language? I know German is a pretty nasty language (both sounding and to learn), but am I the only one who actually WANTS to learn and try to end up fluent in German?

That surplus desire to learn will find itself corrected before fluency is achieved I suspect. Did in my case. I am happy to meet a language half way, but when 3/4 of the people I am speaking to day to day are speaking bavarian, and the books only teach high german, and I have little way of telling if a new word is one or the other, then its really an uphill battle.

Its worth remembering that English speakers and German speakers started off around the 5th century practically as dialects of each other. You can guess which group had the flexibility to simplify the unnecessary crap out of the language (and genders really do serve no semantic function) thus permitting their language to be learnt easily by foreigners and eventually become the worlds standard language. I think we have already made our effort

Yeah I have given up basically... You have to choose your battles...

Nope - don't speak a word mate...

@Pepper - Business German is a walk in the park once you've had to use legal German. Sentences go on for pages and pages and essentially say nothing more excitng than "The directors are authorised to represent the company jointly and severally and are likewise released from the restrictions of para 181 of the German Civil Code". If I had a penny for everytime I had seen that...I could probably buy half a shandy in a student bar.

I clicked the penultimate category but might not pass. I started learning German in school at age 13, and got most of the way to a PhD in German before switching to music. I taught German at three US universities (the grad students teach the beginners). I've lived in Austria and Germany for about 6 years altogether.

But it still ain't easy. I'm good enough that most of my German friends prefer to practice their German with me rather than their English, yet I still have to mentally restructure sentences in mid-sentence because I am not sure of a noun's gender or of which adjective to modify it with.

I have noticed that my spontaneity in the language increases the more I hear it. If I have to compose a sentence theoretically, rather than repeat or modify a phrase that I've heard spoken, the correctness of my speech is more prone to risk. The longer you submerse yourself in the native-speaker environment -- as long as you're concentrating on picking up phrases -- the better your speech and comprehension will be.

When I was a Germanics student I kept two notebooks: one for class notes and the other for phrases the professors used that I wanted to memorize. I still remember some of these ("der normale Sterbliche" - the common mortal) and where I got them. You-all might try jotting down words or phrases you want to memorize when you see or hear them on the street, in the paper, at work. Pay particular attention to cognates (related words like Mutter/mother) and international vocabulary (der Manager, der Boss, optimal, prima, maximal), which are easiest to remember, and to words or phrases you hear frequently and thus obviously need to know.

As for Boarisch (Bavarian), there are a few transformational rules that one needs to become accustomed to. My first immersion in a German-speaking environment was Vienna, where it was the same dialect story. ie = ea (Wean, not Wien); al = oi (Soizburg not Salzburg) and so on. They don't say "Das ist ja ohnehin klar" but rather "Des is jo eh kloah." The number of transformations and regional vocabulary items to learn is finite; if you concentrate you can pick up all the fundamentals in a year, I would think. I did.

As for where to learn dialect formally, which would accelerate the process considerably, I'm not sure there are courses. There may be some. However I have definitely seen booklets on the dialect, usually written for non-Bavarians. Have a look at Hugendubel or Lehmkuhl, or ask a bookseller in the language reference section to refer you to something. Or go to the local Stadtbibliothek. I used to have a book "Wie ich ein echter Münchner werde" (How to become a true Muenchner), which was satirical, partly linguistical but included a slew of regional idiosyncrasies. Then you could amuse your German colleagues with dialect terms. Think how you'd react if a German invited you over, saying, "Y'all come!" They often whoop when I come out with something dialectical like Oachkatzerlschwoaf (squirrel's tail = the password to Austria) or pfiat di (= behüte Dich Gott = bye bye), with accent and all. The worse your American/Brit accent, the funnier the dialect attempt will be.

Hm, one of my better friends here teaches German to foreigners. His own speech is very strongly Bavarian and I have to listen closely to follow. I'll ask Frank whether there is some crash course in Bayrisch for Auslaender.

Consolation? My brother knew German pretty well, then he went to Japan to live. He tells me German is a piece of cake.

--Musikus

PS: Profundo, your German must sound pretty respectable now or your Kollegen wouldn't be speaking fast to you.

bavarian for beginners

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/specia...rticle.html?i=1

I read an article once that although Germans like to bandy the word dialect around a bit, there are actually only something like 3 dialects in Germany, and Bayrisch is not one of them. Most of what the Germans call dialects are actually linguistically speaking only strong accents.

Cannot vouch for the accuracy, apart from the fact that 2 of my best mates in my job here are right Oberbayers and after 2 years, I can understand them!

This article woule seem to contradict what the article I read says though:
http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa051198.htm

All alcoholic beverages are apparently masculine except for beer, which is neuter.

I was very lucky in this regard...

I grew up bilingual, so I never had to study the language. Although, when I first moved to Germany, my vocabulary was pretty shot and I couldn't swear effectively (a problem when you only speak the language with your parents). However, I don't have too much of an accent when I speak as a result of learning so early.

Didn't take too long to iron out most problems. I still make occasional mistakes, but don't worry too much about it.

Learnt a new phrase today: Ist gebongt!
It made me smile, I think I'll remember that one for a while.

I was wondering where to put this -- the dictionary game, aka Balderdash or Das Lexikon-Spiel:

One person ("It") looks up a word in the dictionary that they think nobody will know. Reads it out loud and spells it.

Everyone else writes it down and makes up a definition. It copies the definition from the dictionary onto its card.

All cards are collected, and It reads them all aloud, and everyone votes on what they think is the correct definition.

You get a point for each person who votes for your definition.
You get a point if you vote for the real definition.
If you were It and nobody voted for the real definition, you get a point.

Extra points can be awarded for particularly creative / funny definitions.

I love this game, other people think I'm nuts. Anyone want to play sometime? In English or in German, though I'll admit to being better in English...