#my pronunciation is not always the best with languages I don't actually speak/write/read/etc. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

magistralucis · 7 years

Note

I don't know if you're the same person, but I think I came across your old DeviantArt account. The reason why I bring this up is because I found your translations of Till Lindemann's poems, and in them you mentioned that you were just a beginner when it came to the German language. As someone who is trying to learn German myself, I was wonder if you had any tips on how to learn the language. I'm finding it quite difficult to get the hang of. Again, please ignore this if I have the wrong person.

Hi, it’s the same anon who asked you advice about learning German. It’s a bit off topic from my last ask, but the reason why I want to learn is mostly due to becoming a huge fan of Rammstein. Mutter is my favorite album, it’s so good!

Hello anon. I am definitely the person you’re looking for. I was working on this message when I initially received it and it was beginning to get rather out of hand - then I received the second one, and so I’ll meld the two responses into one and cross my fingers and hope for the best!

I started learning German about six years ago, when I first got into R+ and Till’s poetry. The motivation you have is pretty much the same one I had (same favourite album too! High five) and this is how I went about it. Apart from the standard ‘take it slow and steady, practice often’ advice that applies to every language, I’ve also added some German-specific advice beneath the cut:

1. If you can attend a beginner’s class, try to attend at least a year’s worth, especially if German is your first attempted foreign language. If you’re not used to learning languages, this is probably the most helpful advice I can give, because languages are by definition social constructs and you need people to speak it to and keep it alive with; this is also the place where they’ll teach you the basics of grammar, enough for you to begin navigating textbooks and be able to pick out the advice that works for you.

This applies regardless of whether you want to learn ‘fully’ (in all capacities) or more ‘academically’ (reading + writing + information gathering prioritized) or if you literally want to be able to ‘speak’ it (listening + speaking prioritized). I may or may not be against the advice of langblr when I say this, but there is absolutely a limit to self-study, especially if you have no one else to talk in German with. I’d be hesitant to advise that going to classes for the entirety of your German learning will be helpful, because those things differ and there are very real concerns like money to consider, but they do make for an invaluable foundation.

2. If you are committed to self-studying for whatever reason, research your resources thoroughly. I’d recommend finding a textbook that works for you and sticking with it, because some grammar terms can and will differ across media. This isn’t a fix for knowing the correct grammatical terminology in all cases, because there are multiple ways to refer to a concept, but knowing what process is involved in what you’re referring to and being able to refer to it by a consistent name will help when you’re looking up resources elsewhere.

This is an example of what I mean: the ’Subjunctive II’ in German used to be called ‘past subjunctive’ as an interchangeable term, when in fact the Subjunctive II is a class of subjunctives that utilize simple past/imperfect, pluperfect, and conditional tense forms to form themselves - they are not merely subjunctives that are only meant to be used in past tense sentences, as the term ‘past subjunctive’ can imply. I mean, simple past/imperfect subjunctives are meant for unreal events taking place in the present or future.

Took me a while to wrap my head around that.

The books in my arsenal are Essential German Grammar by Martin Durrell, Katrin Kohl and Gudrun Loftus (very grammar-oriented and strict, but helpful), a verb conjugation book of the 500 most common German verbs (useful for reference), a German dictionary, a translation theory book (you won’t need this, necessarily, if your focus isn’t on translation), and some textbooks with translation segments in them. When I was going to classes, I used the Wilkommen! series of books by Paul Coggle and Heiner Schenke, and I have a GCSE German textbook from CGP Books for when I tutor German to younger students (because that’s also a thing I do, haha). I gathered all of this in the UK, so this list may or may not be helpful to you; but in the end, the language isn’t going anywhere, so some research will help you make the right choice.

3. Brush up on your grammar terminology. If the above Subjunctive II example induced in you a case of math_lady.jpg, the problem you’ll first run into isn’t a German problem - it’ll be a problem of what you understand of the grammar of your native language, or at the very least, the language your resources are written in. Even if you are a bilingual or residing in multilingual territory already (e.g. you are from somewhere like Canada where monolingualism isn’t standard, already know some foreign languages, etc.) it’s worth brushing up on the grammar. Terms such as ‘copula’, ‘adjective’, ‘preposition’, ‘gender-based inflection’, ‘accusative case’, ‘indirect object’, and ‘adverbials’ absolutely need to make sense to you in order for you to understand your resources.

I mean, I have to be honest. You don’t really need grammarspeak in order to be fluent in a language, because you also pick those things up via immersion; but if you are using textbooks and learning at a later stage of life, you are going to come across heavy use of grammar terminology at some point. And German grammar is painful, I won’t lie. When I tutored German from scratch, it took a full year just to get the fundamental grammar down. German is very logical, save for when there are exceptions - and there are always exceptions, thousands of them - and when the underlying structure of the language hasn’t begun to make sense yet. To my experience, you sort of break eventually and accept it. It’s, uh… always best to be prepared. If you’re adept in grammarspeak already you may ignore this section, save for the bit about German grammar being hard, because that is absolutely true.

4. Practice, practice, practice. I can’t stress this enough. I actually have no one method to recommend, because I had only a very specific goal in mind when I was first learning German: I was going to finish translating Messer. My practice involved translating German texts into English (not the reverse!), regardless of what they were, and listening to German music and radio. This will not work for everyone. What matters regardless of what you do is consistency - 10 mins every single day revising is far better than two hours of revision weekly. Don’t let the stigma of being a beginner get you down. You want to have a go at a German poem, but it’s too ambitious-seeming for you? You won’t know it unless you try. Don’t let the naysayers get you down. You will make a boatload of mistakes and embarrass yourself constantly, and this is a sign that your learning is going well - patience and tenacity is the key here.

5. Penpals and Tandem/speaking partners can be helpful. This may not be immediately applicable advice, because it can be intimidating for a beginner to write to or talk to native speakers, but once you reach a certain point in your studies it’s important for you to be acquainted to the way native speakers do things. It’s how you pick up slang and other quirks of the language, for one. Same for total immersion.

6. Don’t trust Till’s ‘r’ when it comes to the German ‘r’ sound. The strong rolled ‘r’ is a feature of sung German and has nothing to do with the rhotic, throaty ‘r’ of German and French. Please ignore this section if you’re already familiar with the rhotic ‘r’.

7. In fact, look up proper pronunciations for everything. Sung German is its own territory, and not the best thing to refer to when you’re learning Standard German. The two ‘ch’s especially - they’re their own sounds, not just e.g. ‘ich’ -> ‘ish’ and e.g. ‘ach’ -> ‘ack’. The former is closer to ‘i-hh’ sounded at the front of the mouth, while the other ‘ch’ is pronounced like the ‘ch’ of the Scottish ‘Loch’ (make ‘hh-’ sound with the back of your tongue touching or near to the soft palate). Again, please ignore if you have the pronunciation down pat already.

8. When you learn words, make sure that you learn the article that comes with them. ‘Das Mädchen’, ‘Der Tisch’, etc. It is absolutely more work, but if you are not acquainted to grammatical gender, knowing the appropriate ‘der/die/das’ that comes with a noun is extremely useful. There are three main grammatical genders in German - this may not be the case for you even if you already speak a gendered foreign language (like French - no neuter gender), so this is absolutely vital advice I plead with you not to ignore.

9. Don’t shy away from compound nouns. I unironically love this feature about German and have never had problems with it personally, but I know sometimes it can be intimidating to be faced with a huge string of words that pop out at you from nowhere.

I tend to break them down to their components to figure out what the singular word means, approaching them like a puzzle rather than a singular concept to just know firsthand: ‘Fallschirmspringen’ means ‘to parachute’, but its components literally boil down to ‘fall-umbrella-jumping’, for one; compound nouns are rather whimsical concepts, and also very literary, and I think there’s a real beauty in them! Take it slow and listen to what the compound noun is trying to tell you.

10. Verb conjugation tables are your friends. Especially for the strong verbs. I got nothing else to add to this.

11. Like in every other language, beware of false friends. These are words that look alike to those in your native language, but do not mean what you think they mean. ‘Also’ in German does not mean ‘also’ in English. (It’s closer in meaning to ‘so’ in English.) The German ‘bald’ means ‘soon’, while the English ‘bald’ is ‘kahl’ in German. ‘Kritik’ in German is referring to the act of criticism, not the ‘critic’. It is because of this that you must resist the temptation to do literal translations from English/[insert your native language here] to German, unless you know what you’re doing.

12. Read up on grammatical cases. German has four, which is one more than English, and the four cases are nigh universally called the nominative, accusative, dative, and the genitive. There are none of the ‘subjective/objective/possessive’ stuff that English uses, or worse, the ‘I-me-mine’ relation that doesn’t name anything helpful.

These four are also true grammatical cases, which means that full inflection of nouns, pronouns, and noun phrase elements (e.g. adjectives/numerals…) need to be learnt in German. At its extreme, this can mean learning up to 48 adjectival endings for each adjective - accounting for gender, number, case, and strong/weak/mixed endings. All because case inflection is a thing.I make that sound a lot more intimidating than it actually is, because said endings usually follow a pattern and sometimes don’t even change that often. Inflections are just things that you get used to. If cases are already your bread and butter because you’re familiar with a language with true cases, you can go ahead and ignore all of this; let us be thankful that German only has four. We could be… like… talking about Russian or something.

13. You are learning a new way of thought, not a new way to put words together. This is applicable to every language you might wish to learn. This is why you ought to look up words in both directions to verify the exact sense that you need, and why you can’t rely on [native language] -> [target language] translations forever in order to become familiar with the target language. The old way of thought will absolutely cling on and try to impede your progress; language learning is about unlearning this process as much as it is about learning new things.

I’m six years gone, and if you stuck me in Germany I’d still be stammering and blushing and nonfunctional. We don’t consider eight-year-olds who’ve grown up speaking a language all their life ‘fluent speakers’ of that language; it can be easily another eight years for you, too. You’re in for the very long haul, and that means you can take as much time as you need. Don’t be down if you don’t get it right soon enough, or if it’s taking a very long time.

14. [SHAMELESS SELF-PROMO] I also tutor German. Contact me if you wish clarification on certain things or if you feel that you may require actual tuition. [/SHAMELESS SELF-PROMO]

I don’t post so much about R+ anymore, but German remains a very strong and integral part of my life. I am glad that my attempts at contributing to the fandom have led you to the same interest I developed all those years ago. I hope that the advice above is helpful, but if it is not, I would love to hear feedback from you on what parts of German you are struggling with so I am able to give more specific advice. My inbox is open whenever you want to ask me questions; I wish you luck on your journey and would love to hear from you, wherever you may be in your pursuits!

#Anonymous #long post #reference #recommendations #german #advice #languages #rammstein #so long... i'm sorry... ugh

14 notes · View notes