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Alphathon’s G&G log: Gaelic & German | ||
Tags: Gaelic (Scottish) | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Alphathon Groupie Scotland Joined 4124 days ago 60 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Scottish Gaelic | Message 9 of 44 05 April 2015 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
If I understand you correctly you’re saying my main problem is with my word order. (I’m not 100% sure what you mean by …, was bei deinem Niveau nicht zu bewundern ist. I translate it as “…, which are not to be marvelled at/admired at your level.”, which could either mean that they’re not surprising or that they are particularly bad. Could you please clarify?) This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I feel like I sort of understand the rules but only really well enough to facilitate reading, not to actually put them into practise. I certainly don’t know them well enough to apply them consistently. Am I correct in thinking that the main problem is to do with the order in subordinate clauses? Prior to these posts all I’d written was 1 post on Lang-8 about 2 years ago. Other than that my only practise of output has been DuoLingo, which is fine to a point but doesn’t really go beyond simple sentences. The problem is I’m not really sure how to study it. I do have bookmarked a pair of pages on dartmouth.edu ([1], [2]) which I could have a read through, but other than that I really don’t know. Do you have any other suggestions? EDIT: Well I’ve just started reading the first link and right off the bat I’ve come across something I didn’t know: verb complements go to the end of the clause like separable prefixes. I already knew this about secondary verbs but didn’t know other parts of speech did the same thing. It would seem I really do need to give this some attention. :/
For the most part I am reading extensively. (I’ve been (mostly) lurking on these forums about a year and a half, so I’m pretty familiar with the commonly used terms.) What I tend to do is read more-or-less extensively, but write down any words I’ve not come across before. I then look them up at a later date. I do this as much so I can add them to my Anki deck as anything else, not so I can follow the story better as I’m reading. I do check a few words while reading, either when it’s something important or keeps cropping up, or when I think I know what it means already but can’t be sure, especially for (what I think are) conjugations of strong verbs. The latter is mainly so I don’t accidentally learn the wrong meaning. I understand that the main drawback of intensive reading is that you’re constantly being pulled out of the story to look up words, and that the way I’m doing it does have some elements of that, I don’t find it too bad. Edited by Alphathon on 06 April 2015 at 12:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alphathon Groupie Scotland Joined 4124 days ago 60 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Scottish Gaelic | Message 10 of 44 06 April 2015 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, having fully read that piece on dartmouth.edu, I can identify a few pretty obvious word order errors I’ve been making/rules I didn’t know:
• I’ve been putting the Hilfsverb (haben/sein) in the wrong place in subordinate perfect clauses with double infinitives - I thought it went at the end (like it would with only a single infinitive) but apparently it precedes the other verbs. This seems a bit arbitrary to me (not that all grammar rules aren’t arbitrary). There’s probably a logical reason for it but dartmouth.edu didn’t provide it. • I’m pretty sure I’ve been doing infinitive clauses wrong. I’m not even sure I knew they existed, or at least as grammatically distinct from other subordinate clauses. It certainly explains all the separable verbs with zu in the middle that I’ve come across in Der kleine Hobbit, which I never really fully understood the purpose of (divining their meaning wasn’t hard though). • Other than when und or oder have been used, I’ve been treating all sentences as if they have exactly one independent clause, and so treating other clauses as if they are subordinate, with the obvious issues that causes. I’m pretty sure I knew a sentence could have more than one but didn’t really know how or why. I’m also pretty sure I’ve even treated some und/oder sentences like that in some cases, but I haven’t checked. • I have no doubt that I’ve mis-ordered the “middle part” or put nicht in the wrong place. These rules I kinda knew but as I said, not really well enough to use consistently. (They simply haven’t cropped up enough for me to practice them sufficiently.) How these all passed me by I don’t know. I may go through and try to fix some of my earlier posts so that my other mistakes are more likely to be commented on/fixed. EDIT: Here’s a quick question. Is the underlying structure of this sentence (taken from my first post) valid? (ignoring specific word placement): Ich werde gerne mehr Dokus und Fernsehserien anschauen und mehr verschiedene Artikel und Bücher lesen. or, to simplify it (so as to avoid other potential issues): Ich werde Dokus anschauen und Bücher lesen. What I’m asking about is the combination of what is essentially two independent clauses (Ich werde Dokus anschauen. and Ich werde Bücher lesen.) into one sentence using a common “head” (Ich werde) and und. In English one can write the equivalent (“I am going to watch documentaries and read books”) but it just occurred to me that this may not be valid in German. I don’t think it’s covered on the dartmouth.edu page, which is what got me thinking about it. Edited by Alphathon on 06 April 2015 at 4:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4632 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 11 of 44 09 April 2015 at 1:29am | IP Logged | |||||
I seem to recall being confused once upon a time by the idiomatic use of "bewundern" myself, come to think of it. I just meant "it's not a surprise," more or less exactly as you said yourself. Based on your self-reported estimated current skill level, it's not surprising that you should still have some mistakes. It's normal, you're doing fine, and you should keep up what you're doing. Since I learned German originally by childhood immersion, I learned Wortstellung mostly through intuition. My intuition is sometimes wrong, but it's OK. I don't remember ever studying the topic, so I'm glad you seem to have been able to figure out a bit of it. I think the more reading you do, the more correct conventional word order will seem natural. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4632 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 12 of 44 09 April 2015 at 1:33am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't see any big problems with these sentences. In the first one, I think it should be "Ich WÜRDE gerne," not "werde," but the remaining sentences could use either. You're saying "I would like it if such-and-such were the case," which is a subjunctive, and German has a different form for that (two of them, actually). Your simplified sentences could simply mean "I will do such-and-such," in which case your future indicative is correct. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alphathon Groupie Scotland Joined 4124 days ago 60 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Scottish Gaelic | Message 13 of 44 09 April 2015 at 1:40am | IP Logged | |||||
Hmm, I hadn’t even noticed that. I’m aware of the subjunctive and I’m not sure why I didn’t use it there. Maybe I originally wrote it as “I’m going to… ” but then changed my mind to “I would like to… ” and didn’t notice that the form of werden was wrong. Whatever the reason, It’s effectively a typo. When I posted it again I wasn’t really paying attention to the meaning, just looking for an “und sentence”. Edited by Alphathon on 09 April 2015 at 1:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4632 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 14 of 44 09 April 2015 at 3:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Also common would be to say "ich möchte gerne," as you probably know.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4788 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 15 of 44 09 April 2015 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
geoffw, you probably mixed up "bewundern" and "verwundern". The sentence you wrote doesn't make any sense. If you meant to say "it's not a surprise", you'd better say: "... was mich bei deinem Niveau nicht verwundert". Alphaton, your German is comprehensible, but there are so many mistakes in it that I often have to read a sentence twice in order to understand what you meant to say. Writing in a foreign language when one doesn't know sufficient grammar is dangerous, because you're likely to produce mistakes you don't recognize as such. If no one corrects these mistakes you think they're correct and use them again and again, thus affecting your ability to produce correct speech. As a golden rule, I only use constructions I know and understand when writing in a foreign language. Everything else is absolutely dangerous and ill-advised. Other than that, good luck with Gaelic! Good to see other lovers of the Celtic languages here! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4632 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 16 of 44 09 April 2015 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, Josquin. I've been letting my German deteriorate for a little while, and I was sure I'd lead Alphaton astray
sooner or later if nobody corrected me. And FWIW, I suspect there are others here who would push back against any advice to reduce output at this level. I'm not a strong advocate either way, but I think we might at least agree that an ideal situation would include regular output with immediate feedback? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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