Du hast mich tausen mal belogen

Andrea Berg has been lied to, a thousand times in fact.

Useful schalger words in this song:

das Gefühl - the feeling

du hast mich tausend mal belogen - you have lied to me a thousand times

der Himmel - the sky

der Wind - the wind

meinen Flügeln - my wings 

(not sure why there is so much flying about in schlager)

erzählen - to tell

fehlst Du mir - I miss you

Ich glaube an

I already knew the verb glaiuben (to believe) but today I learnt two new things about it:

ich glaub or ich glaub' is a slang way of saying ich glaube.

If you want to believe in something you say 'ich glaube an.....'

mein gebet = my prayer

I haven't been able to find the lyrics to this online yet so not sure what it is that he's been praying about.

Dich / Dir

Sometimes German says dich and sometimes they say dir.

Same with mich and mir.

What I learnt yesterday was this:

Reflexive verbs take mich/dich e.g. ich wasche mich

Otherwise it depends on the case: Accusative: mich, dich. Dative: mir, dir.

The words accusative and dative bring back hazy memories of Romanian classes at university but I still have no idea what they actually mean.  What I will say is that all the verbs I have come across so far seem to take mich and dich.

You can tell I've been learning from schlager from the fact that so far I've not learnt the words for him/her/we/they. These singers only have eyes (and lyrics) for their one true love.

Separable verbs

Until this week I was a bit scared of separable verbs.  It felt a bit like Germans were doing something unkind with their verbs, cutting it in half like a magician's assistant and then banishing it to the end of the phrase.

But I realised....

We treat some of our verbs just as cruelly!

And I can even demonstrate this with an English song:

aufwachen = to wake up

Genders

German has 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neutral.

I'm not sure whether to admire the German language for it's gender flexibility or be annoyed with it for making things more complicated than French or Spanish.

der
die                        the
das

Did you know that regardless of their gender, all German objects become feminine when they are plural?

Why this should be I don't know.

What is Schlager?

Schlager means hit/beat and is a style of light sentimental ABBAesque euro-pop music.

I'll be honest and say that I think schlager music is quite awful.  However, I find that if you listen to it for too long you can end up with some kind of aural Stockholm Syndrome. 

What's more the songs often deal with themes such as love, feelings and relationships in quite simple language - perfect for someone learning Deutsch!

Here is the radio station I found to listen to some schlager

www.deutsch-total.de

I started learning German!

I had German classes in Year 8 and Year 9 at school so I have a basic knowledge of German but I've decided to try to learn a bit more seriously.  Aside from school I did a Beginners Plus German course back in 2008 and I have worked with German colleagues so picked up a few words since.

As I am quite a fan of blogs these days I thought I'd write down my progress with German, not particularly for anyone to read, but because writing things down might help me to remember them.