“T-Tig”
♥♥
Hello everyone,
Advent Calendar day number two. And what better way to kick things off than with a bit of actual practice. Time for your tongue to put on its yoga pants because we’ll do a speaking exercise for a topic that is as boring as it is important:
T-TiG
Sounds like a transatlantic trade deal, but it’s short for
Telling the Time in German
And that’s what we’ll practice a little today.
Now, if you’ve read my mini series about talking about time in German, you’ll know that there are two ways to say what time it is.
One is the formal way that they use in the news, which is why I call it News Speak.
And the other one is the “normal” one that people use in daily life, which is why I call it Street Speak.
If you’ve never heard about that or you want to do a little recap, you can find all you need in the article here:
Today, we’ll focus on News Speak and that one is pretty damn easy. You just say the hours, then Uhr and then the minutes.
So this…
- 11:20
would be
- Elf Uhr zwanzig
The only tricky part is that News Speak uses the 24 hour system. German doesn’t have am/pm, so 6 pm will translate to 18:00… or achtzehn Uhr in actual words.
That’s pretty much all you need. So yeah… it’s basically a practice for the numbers :).
How does the exercise work?
I’ll give you a time in numbers and you have to say it in News Speak.
And you have to make a full sentence, so you say
“Es ist blah blah blah.”
Just press the button to start the recording and press again to stop. The button should change color, so if it doesn’t, that’s a sign that the browser doesn’t allow my site to access your microphone. Leave me a comment, if something is not working and I’ll try to help.
The AI will then check how well your recording matches with the correct answer. If the match is good enough, you’ll get a word for word breakdown of how you did and an overall percentage. If it wasn’t good enough a match, you’re prompted to try again.
You can adjust this difficulty yourself at any point in the exercise. I have set it to 60% match but if you want a real challenge you can put it up to 100% or if your mic is not so good and you get frustrated just put it to 40% or lower.
When you click “hint” you’ll see a play button where you can hear me say it.
Cool… so I think we’re all set and all I have left to say is viel Spaß :)
And, how’d you do? That wasn’t too difficult, right?
Street speak is a bit more of a challenge so we’ll do an exercise for that too in this calendar, so stay tuned for that.
If you have questions about News Speak or the exercise, just leave me a comment.
Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.
wpDiscuz
