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.<\/p>\n
First, those capital letters all over the place. Capitalized words are nouns. <\/p>\n
Second, German has only four strange characters, and only one of those is really strange: \u00c3\u00a4 \u00c3\u00b6 \u00c3\u00bc \u00c3\u0178. 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 (\u00c3\u0178) and sometimes they use a “ss”. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Fifth, a good free downloadable German-English dictionary is QuickDic<\/a>. A good website to learn conversational German is the BBC website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advice","category-phd-coursework"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}