I received official word today that I can forget all of my German. While I’m still an expert, I thought I would pass on my wisdom concerning the language. Actually, it does not take a whole lot to be able to confidently read the latest spam.
First, those capital letters all over the place. Capitalized words are nouns.
Second, German has only four strange characters, and only one of those is really strange: ä ö ü ß. The last is the only one that will throw you off, but it is the equivalent of a double-s (ss). Sometimes words use an ess-tsett (ß) and sometimes they use a “ss”.
Third, German has a lot of cognate words, that is, words that look and mean something very similar to their English counterparts. What this means is that when you see a German Text, don’t immediately act like it’s Greiche, because you probably know about 20% of the Worte.
Fourth, translation websites are still pretty lousy, at least for the few examples I tried. But if you do use one for German, it will help you to know that in German the verbs are often at the end of the sentence. In fact, here’s a helpful way to read German: get the definitions of all the words and then re-arrange them into an order that makes sense.
Fifth, a good free downloadable German-English dictionary is QuickDic. A good website to learn conversational German is the BBC website.
While I don’t have plans to learn German any time soon, this information is interesting to me. Thanks for posting it. I take it that this means you passed your German exams and class?