littleredcookbook

Speaking is the worst for me, but I also have severe social anxiety and my mouth moves much slower than my brain, haha. Writing is easier for me because I can form and edit my thoughts before committing them to speech or paper, and when speaking an answer is expected right away. And that unnerves the hell out of me.

Meine Lieblingsferien war im Sommer 2010? oder 2009. Mein Freund errinnt sich auch nicht Wir sind nach Colorado geflogen, mit seiner Eltern, meinem Freund, und ich. Ich hasse mit dem Flugzeug zu fliegen. Aber die Bergen war ganz schön, und ich benutzte fast alle meine Speicherstift in der Kamera mit Fotos von Bergen und Landschaften. Die Luft war so sauber und süß, dass meine Nase war immer zu trocken und tut immer weh. Aber das machte mir nichts. Wir schliefen im Untergeschoss, und durch der Tür jeden Morgen könnten wir an die schöne Sonnenaufgang schauen. Ich will von ganzem Herzen zurückkehren. :love:

"I" und "proper nouns", d.h. Substantive, die für die Name von einer Person, einem Land, einer Firma oder einem Artikel einer Firma stehen.

Part of the problem with that is also the types of humor cultures have that differ from even cultures that speak the same language. British humor is VERY, very different from American humor. In my German 306 class we have a book full of short stories, and one of them was supposed to be humorous but only a couple of people really saw it as funny. The rest of us thought it was almost mortifying by association in reading it. :/ So, you should take that into account too if you're looking at humor across cultures.

This is precisely why it's perceived as bad. Swearing at someone usually means you're angry with them, want to hurt them, or want them to feel bad. Same goes for slurs and derogatory speech. Dehumanizing is indeed a serious offence, especially when the victim is already part of a marginalized group. People within a marginalized group often reclaim slurs for themselves, such as "nigger/nigga" reclaimed by the Black community in America, "queer" reclaimed by the LGBT+/GSRM communities. But that doesn't stop it from hurting when people outside the groups still use the words with antagonistic intentions.

My favorite is the German "Gift". It could be a "present" .... if you were giving someone poison

I thought the "crappy handwriting" reason was the best; sat there and giggled a while. It makes perfect sense to me, having studied calligraphy for a while (and, not being much good at it, stopped). It sucks though that these scribes were more obsessed with form than actually preserving the words. The entire concept is just absurd, and it was so long ago it's not like it's fixable. Oh jeez. I feel like reading this again and laughing myself into tears.

What is "Döner-Morde" ?? Is that eating so many döners you just wanna die? hahaha ...oh man, I miss döners so much. I made myself sad.

I really like "tot". Even if you say it calmly and gently, there's still this finality to it in the very sound of the word and it makes me a little giddy when words sound like their meaning. Even if it does mean "dead" lol

I've also found that nouns derived from verbs, ie. "das Essen" from "essen", "das Schwimmen" from "schwimmen" tend to be neuter, if that helps. (Are these called verbals/gerunds in English? I am less familiar with English grammar than I am with German grammar ) Although if they have an ending like -heit/-keit/-tät/-ung in order to form a noun then they take the feminine because of the endings like Manuel said.

"Ich wünsche, dass ich als Kind Tennis zu spielen gelernt hatte." <-- most likely (argh word order!) I wish, that I as a kid had learned to play tennis.//I wish I'd learned to play tennis as a kid. Although probably you'd want wünschen in the present tense, because you're wishing now, not wishing then. Unless you were wishing then, I don't know. and "Als Kind" is "as a kid" kind of like how one would say "Ich bin Amerikanerin" or something of that nature. It's idiomatic. :/ Willst du mit mir einen Bier trinken? Ich sterbe vor Durst. (I'm actually headed for the fridge, lmao!)

Characters for morphemes, probably not all of them. But Hiragana and Katakana cover just about every single phoneme contained in the Japanese language. It's definitely beneficial to be able to read it, but you also don't have to. But everything can be spelled out in either hiragana or katakana. We didn't even start kanji until the fourth chapter of the book, or halfway thru the semester! Good to have you here, Honi.

Hi! I'm Kait. I'm mostly-fluent in German and just started learning Japanese this semester. I'm a supersenior set to graduate in Dec. 2014. I'm really, really fascinated with the historical development of languages and dialects in particular, so I hope I don't bore anyone. I hope we can be friends! Hallo! Ich heiße Kait. Ich spreche fast fließig deutsch und ich habe seit das Anfang dem Semester Japanisch studiert. Ich bin "Super-Senior" und werde in Dezember 2014 meinen abschluss machen. Ich interessiere mich für die Entwicklung der Sprachen und besonders Dialekten. Ich hoffe, dass ich euch nicht langweilen werde. Ich hoffe, dass wir Freunden sein können! はじめまして。 わたしのなまえは ケイト です。 だいがくで ドイツご と にほんご を べんきょします。

And Korean, too. Chinese characters are used by the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. (I just learned that recently from a friend who is from Korea!) I believe all three are tonal languages instead of using stress like English and Indo-european languages, which for me, learning Japanese, makes it a bit harder as I tend to respond in class with a higher tone at the end because I'm not that confident in my answer so statements sound a bit like questions. Mandarin, at least, has five different tones (yikes!!) and Korean I think differs quite a bit just between its own dialects. Some use tones and some don't. It seems to be really clearly divided into dialects geographically, just from a cursory internet search. Korean is definitely high on my list of 'to-learn' languages. German and English have very, very similar structure and a lot of cognates. Dutch is quite a bit closer to German, though, and while British, American and Australian English all claim to be English all three have and are definitely developing away from each other into distinct, well, dialects, I suppose. I'd really love to learn middle and old English and old High German. When I was talking with my professor about German vs. English she mentioned old High German and old English are nearly indistinguishable, which makes sense seeing as they have the same originating language family, and developed apart from old High German when brought to the British Isles by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes, similar to how American English developed away from its mother British English. Sorry, I wrote a novel. Please tell me I'm not the only one fascinated by linguistic history though. Please? lol

Oi jeez, yeah that happens too. There was a woman in my Intermediate-level German class who had both an old lady voice (she was indeed an old lady) and a slight northern Kentucky accent, which colored everything she said auf deutsch. I still cringe thinking about it. I know she was older but.... nails on a chalkboard, you know? D: He shouldn't take it as an insult though, especially if it's an American putting forth an honest effort to learn Spanish. I know a lot of Americans who won't make that effort and would tell him to learn English instead.

Indeed. "Use it or lose it" in terms of language acquisition and retention. My boyfriend's mother is fluent in around seven? languages? I'm not fully sure what all of them are but most of them I believe are southeast Asiatic languages. She talks to her sister every day or every other day on the phone, and they mostly speak Tagalog with a few English words mixed in that always catch my attention if I'm in the room when she's on the phone (whee cocktail party effect). I'd like to ask how fluent she is in most of them. I know she's lived in a lot of different places and she's almost 60. I don't think there's such a thing as "too many languages". I've got a sort of Pokemon mindset when it comes to languages. I'd love to learn all of them. I took a semester of Spanish in 7th grade (I'm not sure why only a semester) and took German through high school and most of my college career. My major is German studies now but I'm also taking Japanese 101, and 102 next semester. I have another semester after that so if I have room I'd like to take Japanese 203 and French 101. I mean... with like 7+ languages you might not have a fully fluent grasp of all of them, like, you probably won't be able to discuss philosophy and abstract concepts in all of them, but having a basic working knowledge of a lot of languages in order to get around, make friends with people, meet your needs and whatnot doesn't seem like a bad idea. It's a lot of fun learning about a new language and culture. And for me I like to pick apart the structure, behavior, demeanor and other characteristics of the language and speakers to understand why the language and culture grew and developed into its modern form. It's so very interesting.

Well, I certainly hope so. I'm supposed to be graduating next December with a BA in German Studies! Knowing a second or even third language really opens up a world of possibilities to you, and employers know that.

Ooookay, hold on. I think we need to hear what your definition of "speaking English right" is. Former President George W. Bush was born and raised in Texas, in the southwest portion of the country. Texan dialect and accent is very different from the more "common", "proper", "accent-less" Midwestern dialect and accent we're used to hearing on TV. No, it's not "proper" English, but it's proper for the region and people who speak that certain dialect. I think some of the most extreme examples we have of dialects and accents in America are Boston and New Orleans, but Texas is also very far to the south, very far away from the Midwest. I don't really know anything about African American Vernacular English (AAVE) but I do know it's a thing and also incorporates manners of speech such as "you be", which isn't technically grammatically correct. Yes, some of the things he's said are ridiculous and the words have been misused. But if we all have to speak the same way, what's the point of America? I thought we were all allowed to be ourselves here, physically and vocally. Personally I'm enjoying identifying and picking up bits and pieces of accents that aren't KY-IN-OH Tristate-area accents. When I met my boyfriend's friends, they told me I had a northern accent (They live two hours south of where I grew up) and laughed when I used certain words or modes of speech they didn't. My brother's girlfriend is from way up north near Gary, IN, and she's got the sort of nasally, sideways-mouth Mid-north accent you expect coming from nearer to Minnesota and Michigan. ("beg" instead of "bag") I don't know why you think it's your place to sit around with a red pen and judge everyone's ability to speak what you consider to be perfect English, but I think you need to put the pen down and appreciate the diversity within a single language and how it develops differently between regions and countries and communities. One of the things I'm most interested in moving to Germany for is investigating German dialects and accent/dialectic differences in words, pronounciation etc between towns, states, regions, and different communities within cities. Languages are not just this static "thing." People learn language, use it, and tailor it for their own use within communities and families. It evolves. It changes. People pick up others' modified usage. Why does there need to be any judgement if 95% of the time, the message gets across? PS. Dubya could have had stage fright and stumbled over his words because he was nervous? I mean, he was the president. The president gets blamed for everything and people look to him to change everything for the better even though it's hardly a one-man show. I know I'd rather jump off a cliff than be president. lol

German is more closely similar to Dutch and a little farther away English not Spanish. Spanish is part of the romantic languages stemming from Latin. German and English stem from the Germanic language family, although the Germanic and Romantic language treess both belong to the Indo-European language family

Hi Ashlea! I'm a senior starting with Japanese 101 as well.