I want to learn a Celtic language

I mean, if that's your thing. I personally wouldn't watch those movies even if they were on Netflix (and that's not a given). As already mentioned several times, I'm not big into depressing fiction. I just want to give you a heads-up that you can check quite easily whether something is on Netflix by googling... well, I wanted to use a German word which I can't quite translate into English, so that's progress I suppose... zwar (maybe "indeed") "Is [this movie] on Netflix". From doing just that I can tell that at least one title from that list isn't.

Let's see if I can remember the days of the week: Montag, Dienstag... blimey... Mittwoch! Barely... Donnerstag, I think. Freitag... Okay, legitimately can't untangle Saturday from many different (but confusingly similar) namings in different languages. Sonntag... Yep. Quite pathetic.

I mean, if I had occasion to productively use the language every day... But I mean, I don't live in a German-speaking country, and online, well, you have to actually set aside a significant amount of time. For example, you might take 10 minutes to write what you need on a forum like this... But for me that same amount information could easily expand into 2 hours if I had to convey it in German, what with checking and rechecking the connotations, conjugations and (can we get another alliteration?)... er, cases? Well, grammatical gender, really... Sigh.

I think I've just recently managed to grasp the difference in pronuncation between "o" and "ö" after an "l" (by trying to improve my accent). That's... Well, I've long classified myself as a slow learner... By the way, the sounds are quite distinct in the way the lips are supposed to be shaped. Or, well, I think there might be another hidden distinction - between the short "o" and the long "o" (which is similar to English). But the sound for "ö" calls for a kind of timid smile. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Swiss High German doesn't have the letter "ß"!

I just kind of got blindsided by this fact, and wanted to share. I mean, you learn these major languages in one variety, and don't get exposed to others, so I always find facts like that fascinatingly surprising.

And, of course, if you just find that letter unmanageable, you now have a choice.

I didn't read the description of the movie titles to well to figure out genre, just wanted to share the list. I tend to like comedies myself also crime dramas aswell. So I'll have to look for those.

I wrote down the days of the week in my notebook, Montag (Monday), Dienstag (Tuesday), Mittwoch (Wedensday), Donnerstag (Thursday), Freitag (Friday), Samstag (Saturday), at least I think that's Saturday, and Sonntag (Sunday). I also wrote down the months, but might have the incorrect translation for May (Mai is one of the translations and I'm hoping the correct one). I'm going to start writing down the days of the week, and the month in my notebook to start memorizing them.

[QUOTE=ArcheM;6076381]I think I've just recently managed to grasp the difference in pronuncation between "o" and "ö" after an "l" (by trying to improve my accent). That's... Well, I've long classified myself as a slow learner... By the way, the sounds are quite distinct in the way the lips are supposed to be shaped. Or, well, I think there might be another hidden distinction - between the short "o" and the long "o" (which is similar to English). But the sound for "ö" calls for a kind of timid smile. I don't know if that makes any sense.[/QUOT

There are going to be so mamy nuances I'm going to have to grasp with this language especially with ppronunciation of words. I'm a slow learner too.

I didn't know that. I think I'll stick with Germany German, I'll eventually learn how to write ß, it'll just take practice.

Damn it. On a whim I decided to try subtitling a youtube video in French, because I started off pretty well, finding the correct words for the wrong auto subtitles... And then, as usual (I try this stunt every few months) came across... well, a combination of sounds that makes no sense to me and I can't find in any dictionary, no matter how I interpret it (and it's not a name of a fictional city)... Makes me kind of mad. I mean, I guess there's English where my mind is adapted to produce meaningful sentences, and anything beyond that is me floundering in a sea of either primitive vocabulary that I know well and on the other hand barely familiar definitions (requiring double-checking)... And all the other many many words that I'll die before I'm able to simply memorize them, let alone learn to appropriately use...

Damn it... I mean, okay, I can't transcribe a video now. When am I going to be able to? Ever?

The kind of questions I like to ask the uncaring universe.

Yep, of course it's Samstag, a name that makes no sense. (The rest of the days are easy if you have an etymological inclination, like "Donnerstag" - "day of thunder".) On that note, apparently it's not universal. Wikipedia says that in northern and easter Germany it's Sonnabend. That's suits me much better.

And yeah, Mai is Mai... is May, I mean.

Okay, thanks. My favorite thing about the days of the week is that every day ends in "Tag" except "Mittwoch", I mean it's just kind of there and there is no explanation why (that I have found). In English every day of ths week ends in "day" it just makes sense, we don't have any day that doesn't end in "day". I don't know.

In my book today I started the chapter on grammar, and went through a paragraph on how to make a semtence. First it showed what words were pronouns, nouns, verbs etc. Then it put them into a sentence, well they added words to the sentence that weren't there or turned the words that were used as the nouns and verbs etc spelling them a little different. The sentence was;

"Ich ziehe Schnell meine neunen schwarzen Socken an."
(I quickly put my new socks on).

First ziehe was "anziehen" in the description, and "neunen" was "neu", "schwarzen" was "schwarz". And "meine" and "an" weren't even in the description of what words to use, and it didn't explain how to use the words, it just told you the sentence and translation. This is frustrating, I wish this book explained things better. Next it will explain genders and I wonder how well that will be explained.

I mean, I'll give you that, but eventually you have to take care of the first part of those words, and deal with the particular ordering of Sun, Moon, Tyr (which I was able to determine only thanks to Wikipedia), Woden, Thor, Freya... and Saturn (suddenly a Roman god, among all the Germanic ones).

Compared to that (and all the different languages' variations on the theme) I find Mittwoch a breath of fresh air... I mean, you've noticed that the translation is "middle of the week", right?

Which made me realize the sharp contrast to Slavic languages, where normally it's some variation of "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day"... Although the rest are a bit more complicated. Except that for Monday, at least in Russian and Polish, it's (at the root) "the day after Sunday".

Hm. That's unfortunate... And I've just checked on Duolingo, and I guess it also doesn't explain these points anywhere close to the start... I mean, I can try to explan, although I have to say that my, if not theoretical, then practical grasp on adjective declensions is shaky at best.

Also, you shouldn't have capitalized "schnell" when copying. It's an adverb, doesn't require capitalization.

Anyway, in the order of appearance:

anziehen is a compound verb which consists of the root "ziehen" ("to pull") and the prefix "an", which is in the category of separable prefixes. This means that in certain cases they part ways with the root, to usually take place at the very end of the sentence. In a fashion, they're a hint of the quite regular phenomenon in English - phrasal verbs, such as "give up", except... well, they're very different. But I think, also similar. So you could try to translate "anziehen" as "to onpull", and then that sentence should make a little bit more sense.

neuen and schwarzen are part of the same problem - adjectives in German also require declension, and the way they do it depends on a lot of factors, among them the presence and type of article and gender and number of the noun (if any). In your sentence, for example, neu and schwarz follow "meine" (plural for "mein") and precede a plural noun - Socken. "Mein" is kind of in the same category as the indefinite article, as far as what it does to adjectives... which is, well, adding "en" to adjectives before plural nouns. I'm pretty sure it doesn't depend on the case (if you're wondering, Socken are also technically an accusative object, although it doesn't do anything to it).

Yeah, that's pretty complicated. Don't know if you can understand what I tried to explain, on rereading it seems pretty dense.

The literally first result of a search, which nevertheless might be very helpful with respect to "schwarzen" and "neuen": Adjective Declensions - German for English Speakers There's still things I don't even know (although maybe it's because I've already become more familiar with the terms in German), but at the very least there's examples.

Thanks for the explanation, I don't even know why the days are named the way they are in English, except for Thursday being like "Thors day" or something like that.

I did notice that Mittwoch could translate to "mid week" so I guess that makes sense, Wednesday is the middle of the week, but in English we named it Wedsesnday for some reason. I really should look up the reason the days of the week are named what they are in English.

I think my phones autocorrect capitalized "schnell" by accident because I didn't, but I should have looked through my post before posting.

I think I understood a little bit of that, but not much, like I said the book only so far spent a paragraph on making a sentence, then went to parts of speech, gender, and nouns. So I'm hoping as I go along in the chapter I get a little bit of a better explanation of how to make a sentence.

Thanks for the link, I'll have to translate a few things in Google tranate, but it doesn't look like that bad of a site.

The book I'm going through explained genders a little bit, what types of nouns are masculine, feminine and neuter. Apparently there are a lot more masculine nouns than feminine or neuter. Then it showed what word endings made a noun either masculine, feminine or neuter. It's just a simple brief description, I'll have to look up more explanations of gender in German.

I mean, I listed there the etymology for English days of the week: Sun, Moon, Tyr, Woden, Thor, Freya, Saturn. Tuesday through Friday are old Germanic gods. Saturday comes from Rome, although according to Wikipedia, not from the god... Well, part of those obviously matches for German: Montag, Sonntag, Freitag... You could arguably also say Donnerstag (Thor being the god of thunder).

Don't hesitate to ask again. They say explaining things to somebody else is the best way to remember them yourself, so maybe this way I'll finally thoroughly learn German grammar, instead of floundering in it with a few scraps.

I don't know about masculine verbs being more common. They might be right (I haven't counted), but just based on how German grammar works, I'd instead expect it to be neuter nouns. That's because any verb can become a noun, a neuter noun. And a lot of masculine or feminine nouns also have (or can become) diminutive counterparts, by adding the suffix -chen, which turns them neuter. For example, der Hund - the dog, das Hündchen - the puppy (they also often change a vowel in the root).

Stumbled on a topic that mirrors my thoughts about language learning: https://blog.thelinguist.com/active-...ive-vocabulary And also my problems with Duolingo. Well, it gives you (or maybe it's just me) topics that you don't care about (without an option to opt out). And starts you with creating sentences without an ounce of understanding. I dread to think what my experience using it for Welsh would have been. I certainly wouldn't have any idea about the pronunciation (it has some pretty tricky sounds)... Well, alright, I guess I can't escape this critique unscathed. I suppose I'm going to make time for daily Welsh study... Although I've already confirmed (as if that was necessary) that learning words on their own is useless. Struggled for tens of repetitions with words from a word list, then found a short story, got some example sentences from there, and those words popped into my head almost instantly, it seems.

The article also contains a promotion for the author's app, which, well, you might want to check out, but it's paid... and, of course, requires some free memory, so... Anyway, wanted to give you a heads-up, because the promotion is kind of abrupt.

Okay sorry, I misread or misunderstood the other post.

Thanks, yeah the book explains somethings but not others, and the explanations are very brief aswell.

Like today it went through plurals and parts of speech, and there weren't many examples for the different plurals, the examples were of gender and how the nouns become plural. It showed how it breaks up into two groups but didn't explain well just basically went into examples, so I'm still confused on plurals of nouns and how gender factors into it.

I was going by how the book gave examples of what was considered a masculine noun, feminine noun and neuter noun. Like names trees and flowers were considered feminine, while cars, people (and a few other things) were masculine. And probably what didn't fit into masculine or feminine was neuter. But again everything wasn't well explained and very brief. These books are like "read this book and you'll be conversing with natives in no time". They fail to mention that it takes month to years to learn enough of a language to hold a conversation with a native speaker.

So if I am thinking correctly an example of a neuter noun that seems to be both plural and singular (spelling is the same) is Mãdchen, which for some reason Duolingo translates to both girl and girls (that's why I think it's both singular and plural), would you put "das" infront of it to make das Mãdchen? I don't know, I think I'm confusing myself here.

Thanks for the link to the article, there were some helpful tips in there, my reading (and some listening skills, as I'm finding out being able to understand a few words here and there while listening to music), is better than my ability to recall words on the spot to speak them, but when I see or hear the word I know what it means, but have a hard time pronouncing some of them (especially if they involve ã, ö, or ü in them), but the more I hear the words I'm sure the better I'll get at pronouncing them (as long as whatever I find to pronounce them like Google translate, which has been wrong before, pronounces them right).

As fpr Duolingo, the app just updated, now they have this thing called crown levels which I really have no idea what that is or means, but it doesn't give you a choice on a lesson anymore and no longer tells you what your weakest words are, plus with the lessons it took away matching pictures to words, I have to start all over as all my progress was lost in this update, and the first thing in the lesson was a picture of a boy with a blank space to write what the word for boy is in German, if I didn't already know that Junge means boy, I wouldn't have been able to find out what it means, yeah I'm a little upset with the update, it already has problems, but I think they just made the app worse and more confusing than it already was. Don't fix what isn't broken.