Dear German language, I love you. And I hate you. That is all. Sincerely, Dana
Hey everyone! I’m Dana and you’re watching Wanted Adventure Living Abroad.
I started learning German 7 years ago, back when I first began planning to move to here.
And at first I loved it! I loved everything about the language.
How it sounded and the vocabulary and the rhythm.
I just loved everything.
But then I got past the honeymoon stage, and into the weeping into my textbook, tearing
up my homework in frustration stage.
And now I’m happy to say I’ve leveled out into the: there’s some things I love
and some things I hate about the language stage.
And here are the big ones that cause the most emotions in me either way.
Aarrggg! Die, der, das, you drive me crazy.
You are really trying to end me, I know that.
I was first introduced to gendered nouns when I learned Spanish.
But at least there it was not so bad. Actually it wasn't bad at all.
For the most part you knew which gender a noun was by the ending of the word.
Ah, not so much in German.
Sure there are a few hints, like nouns that end in -heit and -keit are feminine, and words
that end in -ig are masculine, but most of the words out there just have to be memorized
one by one by one.
And if you don’t get the gender right, then you usually end up messing up all the other
complicated conjugations of adjectives in front of the noun.
Which brings me to…
I’m not really sure there’s much for me to say here for this one.
If you speak German you already know about this, and if you don’t speak German then I think
it would be hard for me to succinctly explain why this is so complicated in the next ten
seconds, so I’ll just show you this chart and ask you to believe me.
It’s complicated.
Alright, now how about something that I love about German.
In German you get to create new words. You can make them yourself.
You’re not limited by only what is in the dictionary.
As I mentioned in my video on what’s bigger in Germany, the German language has some really
big words, and these words are often formed by stringing smaller words together.
Sometimes these smaller words are strung together so often that they land in the dictionary
as an actual, official word, but because there are so many possibilities out there, not all
the words that are created and used in every day speech and writing are actually in the dictionary.
There are lots of times that I come across a long words in German and then when I try to look
that word up in the dictionary, I can't find it in there.
But I can look up the individual smaller words in that bigger word, and from that get the
meaning of the bigger word.
And this might sound complicated, but to me, I think it’s, it's actually beautiful, and I just love it.
For one, I mean, it makes learning German easier because the meaning of a lot of more
complicated words can actually be understood simply by knowing the smaller words.
And it gives me the freedom to create some really cool words as I go.
I just find that fun and even a little poetic sometimes.
Ooooh, how I dislike these two letters in German.
The R in German often comes from the back of the throat.
And as of now I still have not been able to master it.
Lehrer.
Let me see your face.
Lehrer.
Die Lehrerin.
Is that better? - Besser. Das ist besser. - That's great.
So my "die Lehrerin" is better than my "der Lehrer."
And the U with the umlaut: it's my nemesis. Pure evil. I'm telling you.
I love the speed at which German is spoken.
Not too fast but not too slow.
And there is a distinct break between each word.
I studied Spanish for years in school.
But still, I could never really understand TV shows in Spanish because the language is
often spoken so quickly, and to my ears it always sounded like
the words just kind of ran together.
The way that some words are pronounced in German differs from region to region.
And this is one thing about the language that I really love...and it drives me crazy!
I love it because it's just super interesting!
I mean, I'm fascinated by languages, and this is a really cool side to the German language.
But it does kind of make it tricky as someone who is trying to learn and speak German as
a foreign language.
Mr. German Man is from the Cologne area, but we live here in Munich, and I'm friends with
people who are from other parts of Germany.
So put that all together, and I'm sometimes very confused about what is actually the "correct"
pronunciation of a word that I should be trying to match.
Sometimes I will work really, really hard to try to pronounce something as I've heard
a friend say it or to mimic how I've heard it on TV, only to be asked later by Mr. German Man
why I am pronouncing it that way.
I think it's just really cool: in German numbers are said kind of "backwards" from how they're
said in English.
Twenty-one compared to Einundzwanzig, which is literally "one and twenty."
I love this because I just think it's a cool way to say numbers.
And actually, I believe that in the past numbers were sometimes written or said this way in
English as well.
I know that I have read or come across older documents or heard things, maybe in history
class where the number was written or said "five and twenty" in English,
or something like that.
So I just think it's really interesting that that's how numbers are actually constructed in German.
And I wonder if there's a connection there.
And if there is a connection there between the way that German number are written and
English numbers are written, then was there a time when English numbers were actually
said and written one and twenty, two and twenty?
Or was this just sporadically used? Sometimes in the English language.
Again, I have so many questions. So if anyone has answers to these questions, I'm always grateful.
So my question for you is: which parts of German or English or any other language do
you love and which parts drive you crazy?
Please let me know in the comments below.
I really hope that you enjoyed this video.
Thanks so much for watching and liking and commenting and sharing my videos, and I hope
that you enjoy the bloopers that are coming up next.
Until next time, auf Wiedersehen!
It makes learning German easier because...there's a reason there. I had something to say.
Uggghh die, der, das! I don't like you. That's it. I just don't like you at all.
Ah, alright. That was fun.