Ok now that my camera is in focus,
I'm gonna take my glasses of and hope it stays that way. So if there
were things that I wish I knew before learning German, it would definitely
have a lot to do with the difficulties I face and the mistakes
I always make, but I think it equally is part of like
having to shed my beliefs constantly that it's just like English, or shedding
other people's beliefs that it's an ugly language or it's too difficult
or any of these things. It's very hard to transform your mindset once you
already have so many implanted ideas about a language because if you
walk in thinking something is hard, it must be hard! It's going to be hard. So today I've
prepared a video, maybe like 6-7 things I wish I knew
before learning German. So whether that's grammatical features,
things I would feel during the German learning process, any of it. So definitely right off the bat one thing that
I wish I knew before learning German was that
sentence inversion exists, or just what is it in general?
Because in German, when you say certain words, or you say certain types of phrases,
the sentence kind of goes backward from what it would be in English.
So for example: "I don't know if I have time." > "Ich weiss nicht, ob ich Zeit habe."
So word for word if you translated that back to English it would be "I don't
know if I time have." See, it feels so like
unnatural to say it in English, that I stutter.
So there's a lot of these trigger words like wenn, ob,
Time phrases, so if you say like "Im Winter
hab' ich mehr Zeit", like "I have more time in winter." But the thing
about sentence inversion is that you don't
get introduced to it until you are in way too deep.
So it's like "Ok guys, you remember everything that you've learned?"
"Move that out of the way because here's the word 'wenn'." And you're like "Oh."
So it's like you can't back out on it. Yeah. It's
It's easy to get a feel for it once you have enough speaking practice,
but initially it just feels like kind of a
piece-puzzle where you're just figuring out "Oh, so the
verb is supposed to go way back here, what about the pronoun, where's my kids?!"
Definitely feels clumsy when you first start speaking like that, but
now it feels very normal to me. The second thing is that grammar
is a must-have. Some people say
in their language-learning tips, there are some phony language coaches out there that say like,
"You don't have to study grammar to master a language." but with German,
You are going to have a very hard time getting used to how people
speak and reaching a high level if you do not put some kind of focus on grammar.
and I will swear on that because
it just doesn't seem logical unless you see it on paper and you see
a pattern. I personally think German has very logical grammar,
You just have to know what mechanisms trigger what
ending and so forth, so declension has become very
easy once I started studying with this book.
And I plug it in every single video that I make about German,
it's called German Grammar Drills and it's by Ed Swick.
this is like the 4th edition I think
Doing grammar drills might feel boring, you might
not like correcting them, you might not like being told that you're not
the best at something, but studying German grammar
definitely humble you, but it gives you a good sense of security.
So. And just building on that, in general,
repetition is way more important in German than in other languages
because there are so many small things
that change the entire sentence. You need to make it feel natural,
and I feel like the only way to do that is through
repetition, so definitely grammar and repetition go hand in hand. It's not that
intimidating if you have like a guide, like a
book. So instead of sharing memes about it all of the time, you could be
spending that time studying the Dative. Okay and this
next one is kind of weird to talk about because I kinda
blew my own mind when I realized it. The same things
that are difficult for people learning English are the same things that
when I learn German (namely prepositions
and separable verbs). There are so many
prepositions in English, and they often do not make sense, so
you're like "on the plane" even though you're not
physically riding on top of the airplane. and I think that
same kind of confusion is with me when I
think about German prepositions because there's a lot
of confusion with the Wachselprepositionen so like caused different changes in the cases based on
if there is motion involved.
So if for example we're talking about "an den"
vs. "an dem", it's kind of the same
difference between "in" and "into", it involved motion.
It's weird, y'know? And I think it's hard to realize when you're studying a
language that is like a father language to yours. Another
example is separable verbs. So in English we have phrasal verbs
so it depends where the preposition is gonna
go. Do you say "I'm going to take out the trash" or "I'm going to take the trash out"?
Personally I think it sounds more natural to say
"take out the trash". Do I have an idea why? No. In German,
I have this problem with separable prefix verbs, so like
"Der Zug kommt um 11 Uhr an."
But then I don't know when to say "Wenn ich ankomme" for
example, so I don't know when
the preposition should be separate from the verb,
and when it should be together. So I am like "Wow, I am having
the same problem that my English students have."
and it has been super humbling, I have to admit it has been very humbling.
So yeah. So next, I would have loved to know before
learning German that it is more time-intensive than
any of the other languages that I speak. Mainly for a
couple of different reasons, one being that there
are not a lot of German speakers in the United States, whereas
with Spanish I live in Florida, and I had the opportunity to speak Spanish in
old jobs that I had, or I had a
ton of Latino friends at school and stuff like that so it's very common.
But with German I have to actively
take lessons, find language partners, and just generally
it is so hard to find people to speak German with sometimes unless you
go to the country. On HelloTalk sometimes, for example, I would post
something in Chinese and get 20
corrections in 3 minutes versus if
I post something in German, I would maybe get 1 correction in 24
hours. It's insane. So for that
reason I have to listen a lot more, I have to constantly find
ways to speak it with people, whether that's
taking lessons or finding language partners like I said.
It's just kind of exhausting to not have it fall in
your lap sometimes. Because with Spanish, I know that
I will always have opportunities to speak Spanish because it's a very popular
language in the United States
and because we're hella close to a lot of Spanish-speaking countries
so I can travel to those more easily than
traveling to Germany, for example. And yeah, I kind of got the impression
that it would be difficult to have contact with the language when I started, cause people
were like "Oh, why are you learning German?" Nobody speaks German
except for Germans." and I was like *pfffbbt* "uhhh I don't know, I don't know."
Next thing and probably the most disturbing--
Wait a minute, where are my earrings? Shit, I always have my earrings, hold on one minute.
Ok, face trackiiiing, ok got it. But like I
was saying, maybe the most disturbing thing of all of these
things that I would've liked to know before learning German is that
ANGLICISMS. ARE SO.
prevalent, and they are so present everywhere in German.
I swear to god, they will be like,
"Oh, ich werd'n bisschen vor dem Meeting chillen." I'm like "Why are we talking
about meetings and chilling? Those are English words those are not German words"
And I understand Anglicisms, and it's fine when
there literally is no translation or if it's like a trend
term that originated in the United
States or an English-speaking country in general. But sometimes I will
overcomplicate things and I will find like some super
convoluted German way of saying things, and then the
German person I'm talking to will just be like:
"Oh, no we just use this English word." And I'm like "Well f*ck my life."
I was first introduced to this when my friend Svenja (hello Svenja),
she told me that if you're in Germany,
and you're walking down the street, it will not say Verkauf
on the little poster. It will say sale.
and English word that they already have a word for.
Definitely not one of those cases. So I think Denglisch is very
much a prevalent thing, and it is scary because
as an English speaker I don't want to contribute
to normalizing so many Anglicisms. It feels weird, and I know
that's how languages evolve, so I should just let it pass, but also
it weird because German was like the forefather
of English, and now we've come full-circle and like, we
own you guys now? What's the deal? Anyways, a funny anecdote
that I always talk about is the song "Ice" by Shirin David,
she is German popstar-rapper-singer-queen.
I would listen to this song on repeat all last summer,
and it was so funny because 80%
of the chorus is just English. Let me play it for you, here it is, here it is.
What the f*ck? Okay but let me just put that in perspective for y'all real
quick. Ganz egal ob Euro, Yen, oder
DOLLAR SIGN. Sie sagen TIME IS MONEY und ich hab'
unendlich Zeit. Mein bester Freund ist Geld, MONEY BAGS sind die VIBES,
ja ich hab was ihnen gefallt, BITCH ich mach' MONEY.
So we're talking bout money, time is money, dollar signs, vibes, bitch, and I'm just like..
what? So when I heard this song for the first time last summer
I would always just mumble through the German parts and just be like
*mumbles* dollar sign... *mumbles* TIME IS MONEY *mumbles
It is such a shame. Just for me it is such a shame.
I feel guilty. It is not my fault that the
world has globalized, and that English has such a big
role in social media and
music, movies, and all of that stuff. But I still hate
anglicisms so much. So without shame
I will always find an opportunity to "Deutschify" it,
and find a different way to say it. That's just me
My philosophy as an English speaker. Not to be
fake deep, but.. is that fake deep? I feel like that's genuine.
Okay, so our penultimate point is that German
speakers and German people often have perfect English, which is
very intimidating if you do not have a perfect level yourself.
And granted, German people know how difficult their language is so
they are generally very forgiving, but it doesn't
mean that I still don't feel like a peewee when
they're talking about the meaning of life and Nietzsche
and I'm over here struggling to talk about my breakfast or something. This is
like, traumatizing to talk about.. but you know, German is
not a very common language for English native speakers to learn.. well, I don't know
if that's a good statement. But generally, German people are
very appreciative
so it's not a big deal. But like, can you
not be so good at English for five seconds? It's because
English comes from German, so we're basically like the
simpleton little brother. So we do not have that mutual privilege because it's
We're learning a hard version of our language and they're learning an easy, watered-down version of their language.
And that's tea. So finally we have arrived at the end of the video and the last thing is
that I wish I knew German..
was beautiful.
I am 100% deadass. Like people
always told me like "Hingadinga durgen.. Schmetterling" when
I was starting to learn German, and I was like "Hey.."
And as difficult as German phonology is, because like the
word "Pflicht" exists.. what-when did that happen..
It also is very beautiful, like German has a very nice
bouncy nature, and it's just beautiful, and not
just as a language, but it's also made my
life more beautiful because of the experiences I've gotten to have because
I speak German, from people that I've met, and that's what language learning
does in general. Like not just with German but I think people discredit
German a lot of the time and it gets a lot of shit
But I would just like to take the opportunity to say that it can be very beautiful if
you give it a chance, and if you learn any other word than Schmetterling.
*German pronunciation* Schmetterling, sorry. It's very hard for me to switch between
pronunciations. Speaking of transformation, I would like to thank
today's sponsor who is Lingoda, and I'm gonna
leave this up to future Elysse to tell you all about it.
Take it away, Elysse in the future. Thank you past Elysse. Now that many of
us are still in quarantine, we have a lot of people taking online
language classes, which also comes from the people who think that
online language classes are not as efficient as traditional language schools.
Which I think is baloney because personally I will take any opportunity to do something in my
pajamas that I normally cannot.
Now for the last month or so I've been keeping up with my German on Lingoda, which provides
all the benefits of the aforementioned traditional
language school, plus so much more. You no longer have to travel
to speak a language. That is a thing of the 20th century,
and with Lingoda the group classes average
3-4 people, the maximum is 5, so you no longer
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probably not your bathtub. If you have clothes, on, I'm
sure they might be okay with it. And aside from that, it's all online
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So night owls and lunch break learners are definitely welcome.
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but that is old news, and frankly I hate coffee. The reason why I love
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Now I've taken online classes with different platforms in the past
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it really helps to have a topic or a focus
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Awesome. First sponsored video, huh?
Feels weird. Thank you for watching this video, I had a lot of fun
although my neighbor decided to test all of
his power tools and every plane ever decided to fly overhead.
I hope that everyone is continuing to stay safe, you do not need to go
to a restaurant, you do not need to go to the club.
Unless you wanna dance with Miss Rona. I will see you guys soon, and have a nice day.
