Grammar (Aimee)

For this weeks tandem lesson Sarah told me a little bit about her mother tongue as we enjoyed a cup of tea. For English being my native language, languages are not something that a lot of time is spent on in schools back at home which makes it harder to learn new languages. Sarah taught me a few new words such as:

Hello - Hallo
Good morning – Guten Morgen
Goodbye - Auf Wiedersehen or Guten Tag
Tea – Tee
Biscuits – Gebäck
Milk – Milch

Sarah told me that in her language there are lots of dialects which some people do not understand at all. I find this strange because this is so different to what I am used to with my own mothertongue. In Sarah’s language there are three genders. I learned that the word for woman is die frau to make this plural en is added to make it ‘die frauen.’ I realised that this is a similar aspect in the English language as the plural for women changes to women – which too has an added en. Sarah told me that if there is one verb in a sentence, it will appear second, if there are two verbs in a sentence they appear second and at the last of the sentence. In English when it is translated the words are in a different order as in English we write the verbs just in the same order as we would say it verbally. Now I understand from Sarah, why it can be hard for some people to learn German as the rules and sentence structure is different to English. Sarah’s way of talking me through this worked as she repeated the words to me while pointing at the objects which helped me to remember them. I spoke the words to her and she helped me if I wasn’t pronouncing the words right. 

Another aspect of the German language that I didn’t know was that three months of the year are spelt the same as they are in English. I now know that these months are: April, August and September. Sarah told me that to say your birthday is on 19th June, in German the day of the month is placed after the month not like English where the day of the month comes before. I learned a lot in this lesson about the grammar, structure, rules, the dialects and how some parts of the language can sound different depending on where you are in the world.