German Two-Way Prepositions

This video, which appears to be a class project of some sort, made me laugh out loud. It's delightfully dorky and taught me some grammar. Win!

Verbs Past, Present and Future

No matter what some people say about the joys of "living in the moment" one still can't get by in this world without being able to discuss things that happened in the past, could happen in the future, or might happen if certain conditions are met. Being a native English speaker, I've got a fairly good handle on saying things like "I had some awesome beer in Bavaria" and "I could soooo eat a giant plate of hot wings right now.*"

Since my study of the German language has been largely catch-as-catch-can, I've missed out on a lot of the basics of the grammar. I understand a lot of the German that I read and a bit less of what I hear, but as it turns out, producing grammatical sentences is going to require a lot more work on my part. Speaking as the grown-up version of that one weird kid in your English class who actually liked diagramming sentences, I say bring it on.

The German course I'm taking right now is great. The software's full of multimedia goodness and interactivity. The emphasis seems to be on virtual immersion. There are almost no grammar drills. Since my goal in taking the course is not merely to pass, but to dramatically improve my fluency, I've been hunting around for resources.

My current favorite is this Vocabulix site. It offers verb conjugation drills in English, Spanish and German. It's quick, user-friendly and has actually helped me install the future tense of the verb werden (to become) into my brain in the last 48 hours. Seriously. Three days ago, I couldn't have told you in German that I will become a ninja. Now, I totally can!

Ich werde ein Ninja werden**!


* Mmmmmm . . . hot wings.
** You know, in case I get tired of linguistics or need a career to fall back on.

Gremple: Systematizing German Verb Conjugation

My German grammar skillz. Let me improve them.

This site, Gremple should help me do just that (at least when it comes to conjugating verbs). From the site:

"Gremple is a German verb conjugation tool. Its purpose to help non-native speakers to learn to conjugate German verbs. The idea underlying Gremple is to develop a precise description of German verb conjugation, with a minimum of data stored for each verb, and as much of the work of conjugation as reasonably possible transferred into a system of rules. This aids learning because it is easier to understand a system of rules, particularly where their underlying motivation is reasonably apparent, than to memorise a large quantity of apparently disordered (and therefore meaningless) data."

Enter a German verb and click "Konjugieren" (conjugate) or "Show How." The former gives you the same sort of verb-conjugation table that can be found at lots of other sites. The latter? Well, that's where it gets interesting.

Here's the "Show How" for the verb sein (to be). The verb and its conjugations are broken down into their component parts (stem, ending, irregular ending, etc.).

There went the rest of my morning.

Ausflippen und Das Jupiterprojekt

New words are fun, and my favorite new fun word is ausflippen*.

From Langenscheidt's German-English Dictionary (thank you, Google Books):

"'ausflippen v/i (sep, -ge-, sn) F a) freak out, b) flip one's lid."

Ausflippen sounds as if an English-speaker made it up as a joke. It's exactly what I'd have come up with if I were trying to say "flip out" in German and didn't know the word for it**. In my never-ending efforts to lovingly poke fun at my husband, I've come up with similar constructions over the years such as "I have your ass ge-kicked (at Tetrinet)" or "That got totally up-ge-messed***."

I ran across this word last night while perusing my pocket dictionary. I picked up the book intending to look up "gern", "waehrend" and a word which I think means "airlock" but which wasn't in the dictionary. As usual, I got sidetracked, reading through column after column, watching words morph into other words through the addition of various affixes.

The reason I'd been looking up the-word-that-I-think-meant-airlock, by the way, is that I'm reading Das Jupiterprojekt (The Jupiter Project. My husband read this when he was a kid. The cover of our copy is all old-school sci-fi, complete with a space station that looks like a tin can with a rocket motor in one end. How could I not read it?

Usually, I read a book in English first, then tackle it in German (I've yet to finish a German edition of anything, by the way. The older I get, the less free time I have for fun reading). This time, I'm reading the German edition first. Tempted as I was to read the summary on the page linked above, I refrained. It'll be fun to read the English version and find out how far off-base I was (or, more optimistically, that my German is better than I thought).


*Still not quite as funny as ausfahrt.
**and was trying to be funny
***Oh all right, we rarely say "messed", but this is a family show