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Learning sentence construction

  Tags: Syntax | German
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
zekecoma
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5336 days ago

561 posts - 655 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish

 
 Message 1 of 2
23 January 2011 at 4:35am | IP Logged 
Sorry if this is in the wrong forum. Well see English being my native language. I have no
problem constructing any kind of sentence, except for possible run-ons. I'm trying to
find a way to remember what all these adverbs, pronouns, etc mean again. Because of that
it's making it confusing when I'm learning words in German. Well, I mean I probably don't
have a problem learning words and what not.

But, when it comes to pasting words together, it starts to become a different story since
some words can mean different things depending on where it is placed. Like "Sie ist ganz
allein", now that would be correct but "Sie ist alle allein" would be wrong since alle is
a pronoun and not a adverb. Just even worst when it has dual adjective/verb (example),
etc.
1 person has voted this message useful



lingoleng
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5290 days ago

605 posts - 1290 votes 

 
 Message 2 of 2
24 January 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged 
zekecoma wrote:
But, when it comes to pasting words together, it starts to become a different story since some words can mean different things depending on where it is placed. Like "Sie ist ganz allein", now that would be correct but "Sie ist alle allein" would be wrong since alle is a pronoun and not a adverb. Just even worst when it has dual adjective/verb (example), etc.

If I understand you correctly, then there are two things to be said: It is good that you have noticed these difficulties on your own, because many people may indeed think that learning a language means learning some words, some grammatical forms and then put them together 1:1 just as in your native language. Well, as you see, it is not like this.
And now the bad news: There is not really an easy way around this phenomenon. Some words have a good partner in the other language which covers pretty much the same meaning, but in many cases the similarity is only deceiving and the words are rarely used in the same situations. Your example is a good one, "all" has several meanings, or better is used in several situations, and in German there are different words for these situations.
In such a case it is useful to link "all alone" together and to contrast it with the corresponding "ganz allein". Don't think about the isolated words only but try to remember and get a feeling for the phrase, the chunk, the idiomatic expression, well, whatever. But certainly noticing the difference is the first step to using the phrase, and in fact there are many such differences, one can only hope to learn many of them step by step, chunk by chunk, with the goal of being able to think from the point of view of your L2. As long as you try to make the simple word-to-word equations based on your native language you won't get far in this regard, but slowly we can get a little closer to thinking in the new language, with mistakes, of course, but nevertheless.
So don't let these differences get you down, with time and patience one can make progress. (And don't count my mistakes in this text, I said progress, not perfection ;-) )
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