MoonshineSally

That is a great list, and a great help for people learning German. But I would like to tell those who think they should look at them for grammar help, corrections etc, that this can be a false friend! I am a German in the USA, and I am reading German news online everyday, to keep the contact to me country, to keep informed about what's going on etc. The decline of writing skills in the ONLINE magazines is scary! I know that many others who care about good grammar are also upset and disturbed about this. Nowadays you don't need to have good grammar skills to become an online writer. SpOn (Spiegel online) is such a disaster, for example. I hear from others that the printed magazine (that you would have to pay for!) is still of good quality, but the free online issue is really a disaster for linguists. They often ignore the Dativ, have never heard of genetive cases, and in general their skills are below what you would expect. Now while I am cringing at their poor writing, a student still learning might not notice this and might even pick up some wrong things there that will embarrass him in later situations elsewhere! Please keep this in mind!

I see you are a fellow native speaker! I, just like you, do not think German is especially rough. But we are obviously looking at this from the inside, and people who don't understand our language hear a rough, sometimes even aggressive sound. My American husband does tell me that it sounds aggressive, stakkato-like even, while I think that is completely untrue. I am learning Swedish and Norwegian, and they have some pretty rough dialects up there! But to an American that doesn't mean anything.

Correct, "auf den Putz hauen" is an idiom from the 50s/60s, but it still still widely understood. It can also refer to "create trouble" or "complaining in a very strong manner". It literally means to knock on the wall's stukko, so hard that it crumbles off. Of course, this was once the original saying, and nobody means that literally anymore, but that is where it's going back to.

Very good example! Let me expand it a bit: Rechtsschutzversicherungsangestellter = the employee of that legal protection insurance company! And the salary (Gehalt) he would be paid would then be = Rechtsschutzversicherungsangestelltengehalt Please note that these single words, when GLUED together, mostly (not always!) need a glue in between them! I am a native German speaker, so I lack the technical term for that, I just call that the GLUE LETTER when explaining to my American husband why his word combination went wrong. Recht and Schutz are glued together wits an s, while the added Versicherung is just added without that. But when you add another term after Versicherung, in this case Angestellter, you will need another s inbetween them. Now when adding the salary (Gehalt) to the employee (Angestellter), the r at the and becomes an n. Angestelltengehalt

I think you have to divide this topic a bit into speakers of their native tongue, and speakers of a foreign language. Obviously, almost all speakers of a foreign language will keep an accept, even if a very tiny one, if they are really good speakers. But you will always hear a foreign speaker's accent, if they are speaking in YOUR NATIVE language! Now, if you are speaking a foreign language and you hear that same guy now talking to you in a mutual foreign language, you might not notice his accent. Because you have that accent yourself! I am from Germany, have learned English 40 years ago and think I am pretty fluent. Living in the USA for 10 years now, and STILL have that accent! Of course, I would say I have no accent, but my husband tells me I do.

Hello, I have just found this forum today and wanted to say a quick hello. I am a 50 year old female from Germany, married to an American, and we live in a rural area in the Northeastern USA. Very far away from any place you have ever heard of... Besides English I have learned French at school, but haven't used that since 1980. So I guess that can be considered "forgotten". Although, when I watch a movie with Daniel Auteuil or Audrey Tautou, then I think it comes back a bit... But it is never enough to last... I am also pretty good (but nowhere perfect!) in Dutch, and my Swedish is half OK. It always depends on my contacts. Right now I have a Dutch friend, so I have the opportunity to chat in Dutch, and that way I can learn more. Once I had forgotten my Dutch, but my Swedish was fresher, because at the time I had a Swedish friend. That is how it goes. German is my native language, and English I have been using every single day for the last 35 years, so that's why I am pretty fluent in those tongues, and I am probably not in danger to totally forget them... I have been looking around here on this forum already, and I do like it so far!

Hi, and sorry, your translation is totally off! Da koennte ich mich 'reinlegen (correctly it would be 'hineinlegen', but nobody except those in the Southwest say that) refers to something really delicious. Food or drink. It is so good, so delicious, they would want to bath in it. Literally, they want to lay in it. Of course that makes no sense literally, but that is what we say. If this cake, this pizza, this chocolate ice cream is soooo good, I want to lay in it. That is what I am saying with that idiom! About your own sentence I am suggesting "I'm fed up with these scams/scammers/thieves"

Hello, no, sorry, your translation wasn't right (the posted question wasn't correct either, but it had a minimal mistake in it). "Willst Du ein Bier mit mir trinken" is an invitation to have a beer with someone, and he is certainly not asking someone else (you!!) to get it for him! Quite the opposite! When someone is inviting you to have a beer, he will have it already there, or will get it for you. He will not ask you to get it! That would be an insult! The quote you brought up about the beer and the wine are practical idioms teaching people what to do. They are rhyming, that makes it easier to remember. "Bier auf Wein, das lass' sein!" Bier after wine, leave it! (as in "do not do this! Do not drink beer after you had wine before! You will get sick if you do that!") Wein auf Bier, das rat' ich Dir" (Wine after beer, that is what I am recommending to you)

Hello, native speaker here. I am sorry, but the poster was correct, and you have misunderstood something. Wuenschen is not in the present tense, but it is conjunctive (I wished I were American, I wished I had learned this as a child). And about the beer: das Bier in German is neutral, therefore you cannot use "einen" hier (that would only go for a male word, if it were "der Bier", but it is "das Bier"). But the rest is correct. Willst Du mit mir ein Bier trinken? Ich sterbe vor Durst. (Would you like to have a beer with me? I am dying from thirst) about the "Du" (instead of "du"), I am 50 years old and old fashioned. It is a matter of politeness to address the other person that I am writing to (you, the reader) with this polite form. I honour you by writing Du, Dir, Dich etc with a capital D. Just in case anyone wondered...

Hi, I am a native speaker. You have mixed two things up in your example. First you mentioned your bird (one, singular), then you mentioned you are feeding THEM (plural) dietary feed. So, it would be either: "my bird is way too fat, and I am already feeding him/her/it diet food" or: "my birds are way too fat, and I am already feeding them diet food"

Hello, when I read your question, I first thought of answering that I simply learned it by repeating what my Oma had said to me when I was a baby. Then I saw you are a fellow German! Hallo! Schoene Gruesse aus den USA!