I want to learn a Celtic language

Oof, okay, this autocorrect thing - I suppose I'll have to stop auto-correcting it myself () to avoid repeating the same conversation.

Well, actually, word order is deadly simple: the verb is always in the second place, everything else is pretty much free game. You'll see the subject, objects, adverbs... adjectives, I suppose, in the first place, shifting the rest of the sentence forward.

Of course, then you come to nuances, as to which part of the verb you take, when it's a complex verb structure, like the past perfect. And it works differently for questions and for subordinate and other clauses. But don't worry about that for now. It's just to prevent you from getting more confused later by all these new rules suddenly appearing.

Back from a very productive, apparently, ride in several forms of public transportation - well, I'm just dying to share the discoveries I made while reading the German book.

1. So I knew what TV was called and probably at least intuited how to say "to watch TV", but I finally saw it in a book - "fernsehen". Or in the present tense "ich sehe fern". Which literally translates to "I see far"... or, I suppose, you could also say "I see out there".

2. I came across a verbal construction about which I just learned from the grammar book, and without that knowledge I wouldn't know what to do with that construction (or at the very least interpret it completely wrong)... I'm actually kind of frightened by this. It was listed as one of only 3 ways to use Partizip I, and I knew nothing about it after who knows how many hundred hours of German Youtube videos watched, and several unadapted books read... And I must have encountered (and misinterpreted) it at least once before.

3. It suddenly occurred to me that one of the difficulties with German is that a lot of the same roots get reused for widely different phenomena. It's true for English to some extent (for example, "stand" vs. "understand"). But I think in German the situation is "worse" (if only for this argument) because, I believe, it has pretty much always belonged to a dominant nation (from the time of the Holy Roman Empire) and only imposed itself on other languages, as opposed to English, which had to at least compromize with different languges multiple times. In English often even similar meanings get completely different stems - like "to come" and "to arrive". But in German it's "kommen" and "ankommen". I often get confused and can't tell if that's a word I already know or one with a slightly different meaning, or something completely new.

So the verb is always in second place, but the next lesson was about putting the verb at the end, it didn't really explain much, the example sentence was, "Wir gehen nicht einkaufen, well wir kein Geld haben". And the verb gehen is in second place but the second part of the sentence beginning with "well" the verb is at the end, but it wasn't explained very well at all. I guess it happens with dependent clauses. It did give examples of what they called subordinating conjunctions, words like dass, well (because), damit, obwohl, bevor, and wenn (which they're translating to "when" but everytime I look it up it translates to "if"). And it says that they always end with the verb. I'm so confused on what this all means, it like they teach you one thing that seems concrete then its like no hers another way to do this or as in verb endings saying verbs end in -en then you see some ending in just -e or -st with no further explanation as to why that is. Verbs are confusing period.

Wow, so root words get reused multiple ways? Like it happens in English but it's happens even more in German?

Oookay, I actually think I should shut up now, because that's going to turn into an unpleasant competition with your book - unpleasant for you, because we're going to contradict each other, trying to go at our own paces. But yeah, as I said in my previous post, there are nuances, among them dependent clauses which completely flip the word order around... And to be honest, based on my experience, I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. It took me ages to get the various word orders... I mean, I'm still getting it... Maybe you'll do better, but I haven't found a very simple rule to all that. Some conjunctions flip it, some don't, and also they change the way verbs are conjugated.

All in all, the book probably did its best. And yeah, you said it... Well, not just verbs, a lot of it is confusing, like a language with a many-thousand year history should be.

...Hopefully you got the right idea from my confused explanation.

But yeah, I would say, more.

"Sprechen" - "speak"; "versprechen" - "promise"; "entsprechen" - "correspond".

"Geben" - "give"; "angeben" - "hint"; "wiedergeben" - "pass (onto somebody)".

And my favorite, currently - "führen" - "lead"; "verführen" - "seduce"; "vorführen" - "demonstrate (how something is done)".

...A whole mess. :shrug:

You know what's fun (or "fun", depending on your point of view) about French? Its spelling is so far removed from its pronunciation (I'd say further than in English), that I'm convinced native speakers a lot of the time don't know the correct written grammar. I mean, the spoken French barely has any tenses at all (because letters that would distinguish them are not pronounced)... and there's only traces of articles (apart from very formal speech)... Although this also makes learning written and spoken French two very different undertakings, simply because one rarely helps the other.

German, despite all its conjugations and declensions, is a blessing in this regard. Heard an expression, immediately can use it in a message... It would be appropriate to illustrate the phenomenon here, but I can't recall anything appropriate right now.

Okay, yeah the book did do its best, I mean I'm kind of understanding it a little more but it'll take time before I fully understand it though.

Yeah that makes more sense now thanks. English definitely doesn't have a lot of that so this is somewhat new to me.

Well I don't think I'll be learning French anytime soon, my sister took it in highschool and said it was hard for her, but I have two people I went to highschool with on Facebook who are pretty much fluent in it. I took Spanish and didn't retain any of it unfortunately.

Todays lesson was on forming questions, this actually as brief as it was had decent explanations, in yes and no questions the verb comes first then the subject, the verb "do" is not used in those types of questions. Any other types of questions (what, where, how, when, why, and which) the verb comes second like usual. So that was pretty easy to understand especially since I am confused on verbs.

I feel like right now I'm not really retaining anything, I've been learning since December and I don't know how much progress I've made, I mean I know a couple phrases, and my reading and listening skills are getting better (but my ability to speak anything is almost non-existent). I'm also getting better at pronouncing words aswell. So I see some progress but not a lot, and as much as verbs are confusing me I do think I'm understanding a little better or atleast memorizing how they end I'm different forms versus actual understanding of how and why some end in -en, -e, -t or -st but pretty much memorizing the ending in the ich, Sie, du, wir, forms and so on. Eventually I'll understand why say why they end that way.

I'm just trying to... well, obtain a language partner, for lack of a better word... Hm, I'm really not sure what an appropriate word would be.

Anyway, they are native but clearly floundering in the convoluted system of written tenses, and I'm... well, an intermediate learner at best (taking all the skills together)... It kind of feels like a mind game. For some reason I want to make an analogy that imagine if we suddenly decided to communicate in verse (rhyming, that is).

All I can say is, welcome to the club. I mean, English is my second language and, like, my parents took me to lessons somewhere around kindergarten age... and I still barely had any grasp in, well, somewhere around the middle of secondary school.

And German... well, I began in the spring of 2013 (which makes it my 5th anniversary!). Anyway, for me every language has had an interminable period where I felt I wasn't making any progress. If I'm counting right, in the winter of 2015 I still couldn't understand basically any spoken German. Of course, then it started moving pretty steadily because that's the time I found a reliable source of German sounds that I could enjoy for a long time (gaming-related).

One exception to this rule was Dutch... Well, I'm still bad at understanding speech, but I was able to pick up an unadapted book in about a month, because the written language is very similar to German... Of course, I relied on a dictionary a lot, but at least I after that things made sense, grammatically and whatnot.

...I mean, there's pretty much only one antidote to slow progress - immersing yourself in as much German as you can find. :shrug:

Oh, okay, that makes sense, and I wouldn't know what word you'd be looking for for the wanting a language partner, so I'm no help there.

I think for me it's the whole instant gratification issue, we live in a society now where a lot of things are instant, so we expect almost all things to happen right away, but that isn't always the case. So I think that is where my problem lies mostly, and yeah immersing myself would be a good thing. Lately though every time I try to listen to music on any of my music apps I use up all my phone storage somehow, I had to delete all songs out of my Google play app so now all I have for use is Spotify and Amazon music. I did not have this problem with my old phone, so I think I'll have to get a new phone when I can afford it which won't be for awhile (I'm also having other problems besides the storage issue).

I just started on tenses today, learning the present tense, a little confusing but that may just be me because it was explained okay, I wish it would have described verbs in the present tense though. It may go into verbs in the past tenses though I hope. The example sentences had verbs in them but it didn't explain them. Ahh, I wish verbs weren't so confusing.

Okay, what you wrote there made little sense to me. Especially what did you mean by "I wish it would have described verbs in the present tense"? Did it explain them or not?

Oh, yeah, I've got this problem, too. And I wish Google play used the SD card, but it dumps it all into internal memory, so every other update I have to empty my music... Although I don't find it so disastrous as you seem to. Except last month I pretty much used up my internet limit because of it. But most of the time I barely use my phone internet at all, so it's not so bad.

So I wonder, besides translating German songs into English, do you ever want to translate an English song into German? I ask because, well, it's kind of this thing I have (which I had a thread about on here but I don't think I've mentioned it in this one), related to my OCD I believe, where sometimes... well, often, while listening to things in English my brain runs sort of a parallel track where it tries, rather in vain, to translate into French. That happens with songs, too... I said "in vain" because, a) my French is not so good, b) songs also happen to rhyme, which can be a tough thing to pull off even in your native language. So I sometimes want to actually get down to it seriously and once and for all make a definitive translation and "correct" my restless subconscious...

Yeah, it'd be pretty weird if you matched these... "symptoms". Well, anyway...

I'm desperately trying not to be greedy, and somehow that worked with languages like Chinese and Japanese. I feel not a slightest impulse for them. Maybe it has to do precisely with the fact that they are so popular and omnipresent and thus... not "cool" to me.

Whereas, well, the titular Celtic languages - they were at times a desperate craving, which... well, made no sense in many respects. And I still have other cravings like that. I've mentioned Greek, but also Italian and Latin...

Maybe, even though I don't collect any physical things, that's how the collector's instinct manifests in me. And the exotic theme of my collection is Indo-European languages...

And there's a conflict. Probably it's similar with collectors. When they buy things that really don't have any use, but cost a lot. So my "collectibles" while I've been managing to obtain them without investing much, if any, money, they do take a lot of time.

Sorry, just re-read my post and I see where it doesn't make sense. I don't think it explained verbs in the present tense at all, they just were there in the example sentences.

On the other hand I started the lesson on the past perfect tense, it explains that sentences using the perfect tense are more versatile than say the perfect tense in English, which can only be used in certain contexts. It gave an example sentence showing how the sentence using the perfect tense works, "ich habe Anna letzte Woche gesehen" (I have seen Anna last week), it says it's grammatically correct in German but doesn't quite work the same in English. It also describes verbs pretty well from what I read and skimmed through (I didn't finish the lesson because it's pretty long and I did not sleep last night and can't focus much today). It also explained in sentences where there is more than one verb, the second verb gets pushed to the end of the sentence (I'm probably not explaining this well, I'm sorry in advance). So that was explained pretty well, I just have to finish the lesson after I get some sleep. I don't know if any of what I just wrote makes sense or not, let me know is it doesn't.

I wish phones still came with memory card slots too, my first smartphone had one, but my last one and current one don't, I have a feeling that the reason they don't is because the phone manufactures want you to pay more for the latest phone to get more storage. I only have 16gb of storage, and now with the deleted songs I have around 1gb left. I think every time I use a app or the internet I lose more storage, especially if I'm using Spotify, I don't know how that is as that didn't happen on my last phone, it's strange.

I think it would be interesting to translate an English song into German once I get good enough at the language where I can do that, maybe I should make that a goal for myself, a long term goal, but still a goal.

That's an interesting perspective, I don't seem to collect anything, maybe posters to hang on my walls, but I've pretry much ran out of room on my walls, or music in the digital form between the 401 songs I have on my Amazon music app, plus the around 800 I have on my mp3 player and my playlists on Spotify which have up to 2,500 songs. Yeah maybe I'm obsessed with music, which can get expensive.