Delusion-Elle

Nein! As my life has found a certain rhythm and routine, I've come to realize that I have quite a bit of free time on my hands, so I've started to learn German. I'm following BBC Languages' "German Steps" to give myself some structure and a syllabus to follow. The aspect about this BBC Languages guide that enamoured me is that they send me weekly e-mails telling me which unit I should be working on in order to keep on track to finishing the "course" in 12 weeks. However, I do find that the BBC Languages guide presents information in a somewhat jumbled fashion where phrases are favoured over individual words so I have come back to this blog with hopes of sorting things out in a manner that seems more logical to me.

Lesson 1: Basics
- To me, the way to learn language is to pick up the basic building blocks first -- not to have structures presented to you to be memorized for duplication. With the basics, I hope to get the simplest bits of language into my arsenal early so that I do not doubt myself when these bits come up later in much more confusing contexts. This information by itself is not very useful, but they are common knowledge: pronouns, verbs, numbers, months of the year. The vocab is not meant to be memorized right now, but rather my intent is for early exposure to get these things to stick in my memory better.

Pronouns:

German	English
ich	I
du	you (informal)
er/sie/es	he/she/it
wir/sie/Sie	we/they/you (formal)

*Note about 'sie':

It can mean...	When...
you (formal)	It starts with a capital letter The verb ends with -en
she/it	It starts with a lower case letter The verb ends with -t
they	It starts with a lower case letter The verb ends with -en

Basic verbs:

• Sein (to be)
  ich bin
  du bist
  er/sie/es ist
  wir/sie/Sie sind
  
• Haben (to have)
  ich habe
  du hast
  er/sie/es hat
  wir/sie/Sie haben
  
• Können (to be able to)
  ich kann
  du kannst
  er/sie/es kann
  wir/sie/Sie können
  

1 - eins 2 - zwe 3 - drei 4 - vier 5 - fünf 6 - sechs 7 - sieben 8 - acht 9 - neun 10 - zehn

11 - elf 12 - zwölf 13 - dreizehn 14 - vierzehn 15 - fünfzehn 16 - sechzehn 17 - siebzehn 18 - achtzehn 19 - neunzehn 20 - zwanzig

21 - einundzwanzig 22 - zweiundzwanzig 30 - dreißig 34 - vierunddreißig 40 - vierzig 50 - fünfzig 60 - sechzig 70 - siebzig 80 - achtzig 90 - neunzig

100 - (ein)hundert 101 - hunderteins/hundertundeins 132 - hundertzweiunddreißig/hundertundzweiunddreißig 200 - zweihundert 300 - dreihundert 400 - vierhundert 500 - fünfhundert 600 - sechshundert 700 - siebenhundert 800 - achthundert 900 - neunhundert

Months:
Januar
Februar
März
April
Mai
Juni
Juli
August
September
Oktober
November
Dezember