You guys...

[highlyeccentric]

This language is going to drive me mad¹. I think modern German may have been designed to bamboozle whatever weird people learn Anglo-Saxon first.

Consider the matter of first person pronouns:

1. Anglo Saxon: Ic - pronounced "ick" or "ich", there might even be a rule to which one you use, but I've forgotten it (Sorry, Venerable Alex.)
2. Middle English: Ich - pronounched "ich" or "i-ch", depending on who you're listening to.
3. German: Ich - prounounced some way I can't possibly reproduce, but which is most definitely not "ich" or "i-ch".

And then tonight, because I'm weird, I was reading the grammar at the back of my dictionary, and discovered that the past participle is formed by whacking 'ge-' onto the present tense. I HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO IGNORE RANDOM GE- prefixes, people!
... although, glod, what wouldn't I give to know what this wandering ge- thing did in Proto-Germanic...

~

1. For those new to the world of Me Learning New Languages, this is my battle-cry and expression of glee.

Comments

[tea-fiend.livejournal.com]

How are you having trouble with ich? The ch is the same as the Russian letter x, if that helps.

And why did you used to ignore the ge- prefix? I found it dead handy whenever it cropped up. But then, I learnt German first, and in Middle or Old English or wherever I was coming across it, I could use it as an indicator of tense. It does make sense, really.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

You'd love learning Dutch then, because they do the ge- thing as well :P

[sjazzmreow.livejournal.com]

The ge- is confusing even without having learned anything else first, trust me. I never got the hang of German tenses.

Also, how are you saying "ich"? Are you getting the roof of your mouth involved enough?

[kayloulee.livejournal.com]

In Middle Welsh (dunno about Modern), f is v, ph is f, u is u or v, w is oo, ll is hl, ff is f, dd is like OE thorn, th is like OE eth... You get the picture.

The first letters of words change if they're preceded by words that end in vowels, or if there's a feminine singular noun after the article, or [one of a thousand different reasons]. This means that if you don't know a word, and you look it up in the dictionary, it might not be there because it actually starts with a different letter.

[anachronisma.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to say except MUAHAHAHAH.

I don't really have an "evil face" icon so have Robin Hood looking smug.

[metaphoroflife.livejournal.com]

I think Deutsche Welle does iTunes radio streaming again (after having been down for goodness knows how long) so that's a decent place to start just to expose yourself to the phonemes of the language, and so you have an idea how it sounds. The only tip I can think of is to speak in the front of your mouth ('vorn im Mund!') like my Austrian German teacher told me to all the time, because English is spoken in the throat by comparison. Apparently it helps? Uh. Yes. And there are my learnings.

[eggs-maledict.livejournal.com]

Um I hate to be the one to bring it up, but Rammstein can be helpful for pronunciation, and for 'ich' in particular, they've done a song called Ich Will (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlPhAmaFtVE) which gives a pretty good idea of what it should sound like. I know there are massively varying opinions on the usefulness of Rammstein to German students but it worked for me...can't hurt for pronunciation.

[kishnevi.livejournal.com]

Do you have any Jews handy? Because the German ch is almost exactly the same as the sound of the Hebrew letter chet. If you know how to pronounce the Hebrew words l'chaim or Chanukah, you know how to pronounce ich.

It's also the same sound as the one that ends the Scots word "loch".

Failing these, put your tongue at the roof of you mouth and prepare to spit. That's as close as I can describe the actual mechanics of pronouncing it.

To further complicate matters, there are some dialects which pronounce it as a soft sound, as in church or chatter.

If random prefixes wierd you out, just wait until until you start dealing with verbs that get split up. I think they're called separable prefixes. Thus:
I come to Berlin = Ich komm' zu Berlin. (infinitive is kommen)
I come back to Berlin = Ich komm' zu Berlin zuruck. (infinitive is zuruckkommen).
I have come back to Berlin = Ich hab' zu Berlin zuruckgekommen.
Zuruck has an umlaut there, but my ascii-fu is too weak to get in.
Usually the separated part is a actually a preposition or adverb on its own, but glommed onto the main verb. Just remember that the prefix shows up at the end of the clause or sentence unless it's one of those cases where the verb itself is required to be at the end, in which case the prefix is joined to the parent verb, but ge- gets put between them because the prefix is only a prefix.

And after you've got a semester worth under your belt, look up Mark Twain's tirade against the German language. Not only is it funny, but it's deadly accurate; sentence ending verbs come in for more than their share of the diatribe.