Listening Comprehension

Reading Your Stories 3 – Dankbarkeit

Hello everyone, and welcome to the third episode of Reading Your Stories For those of you who are new here – in each episode of this series, I take one short text that one of you has sent me, and I correct it and comment on why I made the corrections that I made, so you can learn from the mistakes. And I also read out the corrected version and give you a line by line translation to English as well. So you can use this to practice listening, reading and if you want to you can also try to find the mistakes yourself, and practice some grammar that way :). Today’s story, called “Dankbarkeit” comes from Parul and not only does it contain a bunch of interesting mistakes and sentences, it also has a really beautiful and inspiring message, and I am really happy to share it with you all. So are you ready to jump in? Then let’s go!

Reading Your Stories 2 – Die Pilzjagd

Hello everyone, and welcome to the second episode of the new series Reading Your Stories In each episode, we’ll take a look at a short story that you have sent me and I’ll read it, and I’ll correct all the mistakes and add commentary what needs to be changed and why. And I’ll add a translation. AND today, you can also guess what the mistake is so you essentially get to practice  listening, reading, vocabulary, grammar AND style Wow, so cool :). The story of today comes from Ruth and she’s telling us about a somewhat unusual weekend trip of hers. It’s pretty well written overall and has a good mix of long and short sentences. But there are some basic mistakes in it that many of you will be able to spot. Like last time, I’ll give you the audio and then the corrected version first, along with a (rather close) translation. And after that, we’ll go through the original text section by section. And this time, I WON’T mark the mistakes right away, I’ll just tell you how many there are in a given segment, so you can see if you can spot them :). So are you … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/listen-to-german-1/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

Writing, Reading, Listening – Your Stories 1

Together, we'll look at a short story of one you and analyze the mistakes. I'll also read and translate it - reading, writing and listening practice in one :)

Listening Comprehension – Bulgaria

Hello everyone, and welcome. I know it’s hot…. well.. at least in Berlin it is. But you are ready for an epidose of Listening Comprehension  And yes… epidose is a word now. It’s a mix of epic and dose :). This time, I’ll tell you a bit about my stay in Bulgaria. I was there a few weeks ago because … but hey, just hear for yourself ;)

Listening Comprehension – Ljubljana

Hello everyone, and welcome back to a new episode of my Listening Comprehension Podcast I think it’s episode two or three now, I don’t know. Anyway, the topic this time is Ljubljana. Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, which is a country in Europe, which is a continent on Earth, which is a planet in the sol… okay seriously :) Slovenia is right under Austria. It has a lot of mountains, but also a tiny fraction of the mediterranean coast. It used to belong to former Yugoslavia, but it was the first one to become independent and it had nothing to do with the war that went on in the Balkans a while back. The language belongs to the Slavic family, but they’re not using the Cyrillic alphabet and all in all, it didn’t feel very eastern European to me. There are a lot of Austrian influences, the supermarkets are pretty much German (Spar, Lidl, Hofer … which is Aldi in Germany) and half the stuff there has German labels, but the impression I got was neither German, nor Eastern European but instead…. well, you’ll hear it in the podcast.

Listen up – Ich ziehe um

Hello everyone, I didn’t have enough time to finish an article this week, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging. So I decided that I’ll just do a little mini podcast as listening comprehension, telling you guys what’s going on and what I am up to :). I didn’t have a script, so there are plenty of erm and uhms and I talked pretty much how I usually talk. (I am a slow speaker). I cut it up in segments to make it a little easier to follow and read the transcript, but it still might be a bit too fast for you , if you’re a beginner. But maybe you can at least catch some words. Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed it and if you’d like to have more. Viel Spaß :)

Listen to German – A Berlin Crime Story Part 2

Hello everyone, wie geht’s euch :)? Today, we’ll take a little break from all the boring reading and theory and instead do some Listening Comprehension Yeay. I don’t know if you remember but last time, I read you a couple of chapters from a lovely novel for learners called “A Berlin Crime Story” and I really like it because it is not as dull and steril as many other books in that genre. Today, we’ll take another peek into the book. And yes… you can totally win some copies again, because Janine, the author, is awesome like that :). Oh and she also has a website and a Youtube channel with lots of cool material for German learners. I’ll give you the links below. But let’s do the practice first. Oh, if you want to listen to part 1 again, you can find that here. Listen to German – A Berlin Crime Story 1 And here’s what happened up to where we’ll jump in today:

Listen to German – A Berlin Crime Story

Hello everyone, wie geht’s euch heute? Last week was an all about grammar, so this week we’ll give those muscles a rest and instead focus on the muscle group called Earus Understandiceps with some listening comprehension. And today, I’m not going to read a short story. Instead, I’ll read a snippet of a whole book for learners. Krimi in Berlin v1 V1 because it’s a three part series by now :). The author is Janine, she is a German teacher (from Berlin, by the way) both in real life and online, she has a website with super useful free mini courses about German grammar (I’ll add all the links below), she has her own Youtube channel about the German language AND as if that wasn’t enough, she also writes novels for learners. And those are really lovely. They’re well written and fun, she uses lots of colloquial language and slang that people ACTUALLY use in daily life, the stories are really up to date and “zeitgeist”-y and most importantly, she puts a lot of love into it. Not like all those sterile, artificial learner books from the book assembly lines of the industry, full of preservatives and flavor enhancers and crap like that. Those will eat … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/listen-to-german-1/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

Listen to German – Horoscopes

Today, we'll go over the Zodiac signs in German and combine that with a fun little listening exercise.

Listen to German – “Der Lateinische Junge”

Hello everyone, it’s been entirely too long since we’ve worked on our listening comprehension so today we’ll work on… our listening comprehension. Yeay. I’ll read a story to you and you can read along, either in German or with the line by line translation.

A Christmas Story – “Das Weihnachtsgeschenk”

  The 24th! Hooray. Of course there is a special surprise in the calendar: a Christmas story.

Listen to German 4 – “Gehört ist nicht gesehen”

Hello everyone, and welcome to another round of Listening Comprehension Yeaaaay. Today’s story is again one of those lovely little folk tales from East Frisia, an area at the coast of the North Sea. This time it’s about a little town  and their new Amtsrichter. And to find out what exactly that is we’ll do a quick peek into history :)

Listen to German 3 – “der Hering”

Hello everyone, and welcome to your (hopefully) favorite German blog. And today it’s more of a podcast because it’s time for a bit of listening comprehension again. Yeeeeaaaay. Today’s story is about a fish served with a side of wisdom… and fried potatoes. So let’s waste no time and train our hearing with some herring :). The language is nothing too crazy… hold on, let me rephrase that… considering it’s German the language is nothing too crazy but there are a few specific words and phrasings that I think might be useful in advance… so here they are:

Listen to German 2 – “Das Pfannkuchenbacken”

  Hello everyone, and welcome to … well… I felt like it was time for another little bit of listening comprehension so welcome to that :). Last time I said, I was gonna read fables but while I was looking for nice fables I came across lots of other cool stuff. For example Friesian fairytales. Friesland is an area in Northers Germany along the coast of the North Sea and they have really really lovely fairy tales there. Well, there more folk tales I guess. But they’re really great. Not like Grimm’s fairy tales all serious and gloomy. The Frisian ones are light-hearted, witty, honest and really down to earth. Some are a bit stupid others are so random they border on a fever dream but reading them really gets me in a good mood. Honestly… I think I have a little crush on Frisian folk tales :). So I’m really glad to share some of them with you here.

Listen to German – 1

Hello everyone sooooo….  I bought a microphone recently because I’m planning to do flash cards with audio and once I had it at home I was thinking:  why not actually also train listening a bit here by reading something. And then I also had an idea for what to read… fables. Animal tales. Animals are cool to begin with, but also fables are really old, so there are no more annoying copyright issues anymore (an author has to be dead for 70!!!! years before you can use the work without paying), fables are short, they are fun and the language is surprisingly “daily”… way more so than in fairy tales. And so I decided to give it a try.