Ihr Lernt Deutsch!

I would suggest fact checking all my info, I'm only a first year German Student

So I thought I'd jump on this merry bandwagon by giving you all an nice little introduction to German. This post will cover the same basic vocab as the others, as well as some simple grammar such as verbs and pronouns.

So to get started, let's look at the title of this thread (Ihr Lernt Deutsh, for those of you who are to lazy to look up). As you probably guessed, this means "You Learn German" in German (The you is plural). That first word is a pronoun and the subject of the sentence. Pronouns in German are as follows-
I- Ich
You- Du
Him/She/It- Er/Sie/Es respectively
We- Wir
You (plural)- Ihr, the one used in the title of the post
They- Sie
Formal you-Sie
Note that this is only the nominative pronouns. For a list of all pronouns, go Here.

The second part of the title is the verb, Lernt. There are two types of a verbs in German (probably more but hey, first year student my knowledge is limited), strong and weak. Lernt is weak, which is good, because strong verbs usually conjugate weirdly. Each German has an infinitive form, which is the root word and the suffix "en". The the case of Lernt, the root is "lern" so the infinitive is "lernen".

To figure out how a verb conjugates, first determine what person the pronoun is (first, second, or third), and whether it's plural or singular. Then you conjugate the verb as follows-
First person singular: Root + e (Lerne)
Second person singular: Root + st (Lernst)
Third person singular: Root + t (Lernt)
First person plural: Root + en aka the infinitive (Lernen)
Second person plural: Root + t (Lernt)
Third person plural: Root + en aka the infinitive (Lernen)

Two notes on the verb: As mentioned in the pronouns section, "Sie" is also formal Second Person singular/a nice way of saying du. It conjugates the same way as third person plural, in this case Root + en aka the infinitive. Second, First and third plural ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS conjugate as the infinitive, whether it's a weak, strong, modal, etc verb. More info on verbs here.

The Deutsch is the direct object of the sentence. I can't really think of anything special to say about it.

Vocab aka the fun part.
Yes is ja
No is nein Thank you is Danke or Danke schon if you want to be extra nice
Good morning is Guten Morgen
Good afternoon is Guten Tag, which also means good day
Good evening is Guten Abend
One way to say goodbye is "Auf Wiedersehen". German has many ways to say goodbye. This does not speak well of Germans.
One is Eins
Two is Zwei
Three is Drei
Four is Vier
Five is Funf
Six is Sechs
Seven is Sieben
Eight is Acht
Nine is Neun
Ten is Zehn
Toilet is die Toilette

Note: Nouns are always capitalized in German, no matter where they are in the sentence.

Uh, that's about it really. If anyone has corrections to make, let me know.

edited 24th Nov '11 9:22:51 AM by rumetzen

Oh German, you are so delightfully yellable. French, not so much, latin's just eh, but German? Time to bust out the capslock.

Need a tall, brawny fella to come by and inspect your pickle? Perhaps I may be this fella.

I have a love-hate relationship with foreign languages.

German in particular. I love the language, BUT THAT GRAMMAR WHAT THE FUCK

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Fun fact: Not even Germans have mastered the German grammar.

I'm serious too, unless you're talking to someone like a German language teacher.

Also, Penis means penis.

edited 24th Nov '11 6:58:17 AM by Excelion

Murrl LustFatM

Almost. There are verbs like, errr... ... okay, there are verbs that end in "-ern", but given that I can't think of any, they're probably not that important.

danke schön

Auf Wiedersehen

Maybe we're very emotional about leaving people.

Viiiieeeer how do you even make that mistake

Fünf, but I might be willing to forgive you for this one.

Not this one, though.

Okay, this is funny.

トイレはどこですか？

Also Excelion is right and Aniventerie is wrong, and I insist on being a dick about correct German.

edited 24th Nov '11 7:05:15 AM by Fawriel

My German I teacher said that every few years a new movement rises in Germany to simplify the german language

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Er, I'm "wrong"? I was merely expressing my opinion about how well the language's phonology lends itself to being screamed.

That makes sense. I will concede this point.

edited 24th Nov '11 9:06:14 AM by Aniventerie

Need a tall, brawny fella to come by and inspect your pickle? Perhaps I may be this fella.

Yes! And I don't think that's true.

German just doesn't have the right rhythm for satisfying screams. Too many words ending in a barely pronounced syllable. A lot of people seem to think it's full of coarse, guttural sounds, too, but that's not really true, either. It might have more hard sounds than English does most of the time, but it's generally a very clean language, if you're talking about standard German.

It's more a language you talk quickly with, rather than one you shout.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Given how much we like to slur words and swallow syllables in colloquial speech, das' ma' wat wo ich zustimm'n kann.

Thanks for the corrections Faw.

Yeh, I hear how Germans forget to fuck with the word order the way you are supposed to in most Germanic languages.

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

German word order has seemed pretty simple to me. Subject, Verb, Direct Object, other shit, or Direct object, verb, subject, other shit if you're doing inverse word order.

Is "it was late and I was tired" a valid excuse?

Also, my computer can't do umlauts, or at least I don't know how to do them, which is why there isn't one in funf

Ue is an apppropriate alternative to ü.

As is ae for ä, and oe for ö.

And ss to ß.

Are you on windows? Then the keyboard config you start with sucks. Your alt row is naked. Learn how to switch to US Extended and then learn how to use the alt row keys.

edited 24th Nov '11 8:55:49 AM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

I'm on a mac.

To write Ä, hold the Alt key down and type 0196 on the number pad. To type ä, type 0228 instead of 0196.

The other alt+numpad combinations are:

Ö, ö (Alt+0214 and Alt+0246)

Ü, ü (Alt+0220 and Alt+252)

ß (Alt+0223)

This is assuming you have a Windows desktop.

Oh. At least people with Windows can learn from this.

edited 24th Nov '11 9:19:02 AM by SantosLHalper

Nach einer kurzen Durchsicht kann ich hier nur anmerken: Lirum larum, blah blah, alles falsch.

Notiz an mich selbst: Alter, in Englisch machst du aber nicht so viele Rechtschreibfehler...

edited 24th Nov '11 9:49:01 AM by Catfish42

A different shape every step I take A different mind every step of the line

Ändern, lagern, wandern, ärgern, altern,...

But there are still more endings for infinitive forms, like "-eln":

Mogeln, wandeln, regeln, handeln,...

Imperativ ahoi!

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.

Ich spreche Deutsch... ein bisschen.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

@ windows config: See? This is why the windows keyboard config is terrible. I never have to memorize Alt codes, I just type alt-u for a deadkey (¨) and hit u to get ü. And þ is just alt-t.

---

Rumetzen: Then your default keyboard configuration is well on the way to being awesome.

Go to international options, and turn on the German keyboard and US Extended. I am always on US extended. Then drop down the menu at the top and show keyboard viewer to study your keyboard.

edited 24th Nov '11 11:42:53 AM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Err. "Auf Wiedersehen", and the more informal "Tschüss". That's about it. Everything else would be equivalent to phrases like "take care" and so on...

Historically, the formal adress was, like in French, the Second Person plural. This form can hence still be found in historical/fantasy novels, RPGs etc., and might still be seen as the proper etiquette to address royalty, at least. Furthermore, less well known is that also the third person singular used to be used as adress - for persons of much lesser rank, or persons you wanted to insult. But that is utterly obsolete.

Conjugating all the verb forms and declinating the nouns must be a bitch... but, OTOH you pretty much only need two tenses in German, simple present and present perfect, so there's that speaking for applied German grammar (alas, German students will still need to learn simple past and future and all that).

That inverse word order is the problem. It's so goddamn useless.

edited 24th Nov '11 12:03:15 PM by Octo

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

Es soll “Ihr lernt Deutsch” sein. Only initial words, nouns and the singular “Sie” are capitalized in German.

One thing that really irks me about German is the word order. You never really understand the real meaning of a sentence until you’ve heard it all the way through (i.e.: those “two part” verbs where a preposition completely changes the meaning). Also, German prepositions can mean virtually anything (look them up in the dictionary, the definition is inevitably “in, on, at, by...” and half a dozen other things) and when to use which is a contextual subtlety I have never learned.

Only it’s pronounced “Pen-eeeeesssss!”

Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883!

pizzle/pezel/pesel

apparently those are germanic cognates

edited 24th Nov '11 1:04:18 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Macs generally have an easy 2-step method of getting a number of international characters:

1. Hold the Option key
2. Press a whole bunch of letter/number/symbol keys, and also try in conjunction with shift, to figure out the stuff that you want.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.

Des is 'en Titel, da geht das große L schon klar.

A different shape every step I take A different mind every step of the line