Hello everyone,
and welcome. It’s that time of the year again. Christmas. A time where people get together
their German study material to catch up on some grammar, memorize vocabulary and redo some of these riveting fill in the gap excerci… okay, of course not :). The only remotely language related thing most people do on Christmas is trying to figure out what a Santa Clause is… get it? Get it? My pun?
And even though not everyone cares about Christmas, we’ll take it easy this week :).
So… fröhliche Restweihnachten euch allen und genießt die freien Tage.
Tschüüühüüüs.
What? The surprise? What surprise? I did not promise no surp.. oh wait, I did (quick brain, think of something)
So … uh… I actually … uh.. have two surprises for you.
The first one is a little handout I made years ago, which I have no idea how to title. It’s about these pairs of words in German that you can use to express the same stuff but that have totally different functions. A really good example is “obwohl – trotzdem” but there are more and the most important ones are on this flashy sheet :). It doesn’t give much explanation and the ones it has are in German but there are examples on there too and maybe it helps a bit getting stuff organized.
Handout about… uhm some grammar stuff
The second surprise I dug up from my archi… have prepared for you is about wo-words and da-words and what prepositions combine with a certain verb. You know… stuff like this:
- Worauf freust du dich? Darauf, dass ich morgen noch mehr Plätzchen essen kann.
.You don’t have to write on the paper itself. You can just cover the solution and go over it again and again. I’d recommend reading it out loud to yourself. Or of course if you have a study partner it’s great to do it together. Just beware, there is one really really naughty example in there…
Okay not really. Anyway, here it is:
Exercise for wo-words, da-words and verb-preposition combinations.
Of course, if you have any questions about the handout or the exercise go ahead and ask. The explanations on there are really quite minimalistic :).
And now, because “Aller guten Dinge sind 3”,here’s the third surprise… a Word of the Day.
naschen
That’s it. It’s really just the word in this case. It has no direct translation as far as I know but it’s INCREDIBLY common and useful especially around Christmas and other times when you get sweets. I’m sure you can find out what it is.
Here are a few related words that can help you with the research:
- Naschzeug, Naschwerk, vernaschen and Naschkatze
Merry Christmas to all of you und bis nächste Woche.
Oh and here’s my almost favorite Christmas song of this year:
Oh and
here’s my favorite Christmas song mix of the year...
one hour of good mood (Mixcloud is awesome by the way!!!! !!!)
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
I have been looking at this website for a couple of months, and it has really helped with my understanding of the language.
I do have one question about the ” wo and da” handout and practice. I read the da word Word of the Day article, but still don’t quite understand what to do in a couple of the exercises.
Specifically, Wovon traeumst du? Is it…Davon, fliegen zu koennen or simply von since other verbs are involved?
Thanks.
Yeah, it’s
– “davon”, fliegen zu können.
because you need a dummy object in the first part of the sentence. (for more, check out the post on “da-words”)
You could also say
– Ich träume, fliegen zu können.
but that would sound more like you’re actually really sleep-dreaming it in that moment.
Hope that helps :)
sir, you have written “four you” instead of “for you”
“The second surprise I dug up from my archi… have prepared four you is about wo-words and da-words and what prepositions combine with a certain verb. You know… stuff like this:”
no biggie though :)
Ops… sometimes I spell as I speak . For a loooong time one article here was called “Meat the team” :D… danke für’s Bescheid sagen.
Oh yes. A little subtle. I normally think Twitter when I see follow. Not sure if that is fair or not. But anyway I found it. Danke schön
Ok… So is there a way to ‘subscribe’ then? Or does the site now know who I am (or at least as long as I stay on this here Ipad it does?).
I am a bit in love with you and this website. I just read ver- part 2 so really I am verliebt, verführt and verlaufen. I LUUURRRVE this website! LUURVE it I say! Darke for all the hard Arbeit.
Hahah… glad to hear you like it so much. So there should be a very tiny black box at that bottom right of the screen that says “follow”. When you click it it pops up a window where you can subscribe by mail :)
Hey! Recently I am quite curious about why Dichtung has such two different meanings? Why Dichte and Dichter have such similar forms?
That’s a coincidence. The “dicht” as in “dense” has a different origin than the family of “Dichter” as in poet.
https://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nosh?&o=100074&s=t
That’s the English version
Never heard :)… “naschen” has a clear bias for sweets though. For salty stuff like peanuts you’d say “knabbern”
I think “nosh” must be another Yiddish-ism.
And it is :)
Das Lied von Knorkator hat beide Verben :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADSCLvZ_CsA
Discount Rammstein (just this song :)
Hey… The moment i saw “surprise” in my mailbox, i jumped with excitement “the book is out……”:-)
Hope you are having rocking Weihnachtenszeit.
Regards,
Hunny
Oh I wish… that book drags ooooooon :)
I think you might have a boo-boo in your first handout. In the sentence with ‘nachdem’ I believe it should be written with a Plusquamperfekt as in: Nachdem ich gekocht hatte, habe ich gegessen.
Yeah, that’s what it says in the books but the (spoken) reality is different:
https://www.google.de/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22nachdem+ich+*+habe%2C+habe+ich%22
65 million results is something we could call “pretty well established”, I would say :).
I think people tend to use spoken past in both parts if the activities are clearly connected. Like
– After reading this, I changed my mind.
– Nachdem ich das gelesen habe, habe ich meine Meinung geändert.
nichtsdestotrotz (sic) ;)
Oh verdammt!! Das sieht jetzt so aus als seien das 3 Wörter, die alle gleich funktioniere. Scheiße!
Don’t mind me. I am just trying to log on and which comment I have ended up in is a bit random. I love this website.
Wait, were you trying to subscribe to get new posts? Because following comments does not put you in the post list, just in the list for a certain comment.
Just found this… had to share it
Google images tells me this if “vernaschen”
“is” not “if”
Hahaha… yeah, I just checked image search for myself and the “normal” vernaschen” and the adult version are pretty balanced :D