contextually_appropriate_utterance epitome of incomprehensibility One idea, which I might have just made up, is that you're starting to learn a language when you can do this spontaneously, without looking at a word book. It can be a very beginnery thing, like saying hello, or it can be a Still Quite Beginnery thing, as in "Du hast ein Wörterbuch." See you_have_a_dictionary. It Makes Sense In Context. 201004 ... e_o_i Also, "Wörterbuch" is literally "words book." 201004 ... nr i like the literal-ness of some german phrases. before i took german in high school, my younger brother told me (no idea how he knew this) that "the music is loud" in german was "die musik ist laut" and i didn't believe him. 201004 ... raze i still say "das ist darm!" (in english: "this is intestine!") to myself at random moments. there are times when it feels like the only appropriate response to the strangeness of being alive. 201023 ... e_o_i Oh, man. Now I'm in German 2 and it's hard. It makes me appreciate how much French I know. For most ideas that occur to me, I can render them in French, however imperfectly. Pour la plupart de mes idées, je peut les traduire en français, même si le résultat n'est pas parfait. See? (I cheated a little, having to google the diacritics.) But German? I can barely hold a simple conversation. But I'm measuring myself with a higher standard now. And so's the teacher. I've gone from a prof who's kindergarten-level nice to a stern and demanding one. (Kindergarten is a word borrowed from German, though kindergartens in Germany are like daycares/preschools in Canada.) 210225 ... e_o_i nr: Sorry for not answering before! Yes, besides the cognate words (laut/loud, ist/is, etc.) some structures follow English fairly closely (e.g. adjectives before nouns rather than after, as in French). Das Buch ist sehr gut. = The book is very good. But! Not all structures. E.g. English doesn't put adverbs between verbs and direct objects, but German does as a matter of course: Ich habe mit meinen Freunden gesprochen. = I have with my friends spoken? "I spoke with my friends" would sound more natural in English (and for tenses, simple past is often used where you'd use Perfekt in casual German). Too lazy to analyze, but as another example (zum Beispiel = for example), a sentence from one of the exercises: Vor das Fenster stelle ich mein neues Fahrrad = For the window stand I my new bike? (I placed my new bike in front of the window.) 210328 what's it to you? who go blather from