6 mistakes YOU should avoid when speaking German! 🇩🇪 | Feli from Germany

Which of these tips did you find most helpful? :) And what are YOUR TIPS when it comes to learning German or which MISTAKES should people try to avoid? Let me and everyone else know in the comments below! EDIT: Yes, "ick" or "icke" is also part of the Berlin accent/dialect but that's the only place where people say that and in my opinion, it doesn't really work if you only use that one word of the dialect.

I'm German. I'm watching an English video how to speak German correctly. Something is wrong with me 😂

Most important: when speaking German, don't try to sound like Nazis in the movies. Talk like a normal human being.

I always think of "Bier" and "Wein" to make sure I pronounce "ie" and "ei" correctly since these words are so similar to the English equivalent.

Another one: Assuming that an "e" at the end of a word is silent. Like Porsche.

Learn. Every. Noun. with the. Article. From the beginning. It will save you A LOT of problems later.

EVERY TIME I mention to an American I’m German, they start to yell the 3 German words they know at me aggressively... I usually reply with my best cowboy impression...

Your english is so perfect its hard to believe you aren't american

I started learning German w/ duolingo about a year ago, and in one of the sections where users can leave comments someone said it helps to think of the "ch" sound as mimicking the hissing sound a cat would make. That helped me a lot to get close to its correct pronunciation.

Ei vs ie is important. In my beginning German course at university, the professor was teaching the use of the word "gern." And we had to form a sentence using it and write it on the board. At the time, I was on the university rifle team, so, I wanted to say that I like to shoot. However, in my haste, I misread the dictionary, and I wrote, "Ich scheiße gern." The professor looked at me and started laughing. He said, "I think you meant "schieße." What you said was that you like to shit." Lesson learned.

My high school German teacher told us "when i and e go walking, the second one does the talking" - never forgot that how to pronounce "ie" and "ei" after that.

Ich verstehe zwar nicht warum, aber irgendwie fand ich das Video sehr spannend... auch wenn ich Deutsche bin😂

In Scotland the "ch" sound is used for words like Loch and its pronounced the same as german

The "ei" / "ie" confusion was illustrated in a very amusing way in a documentary I saw some years ago. Some German veterans were interviewed about how they came to surrender to the Allies and one of them recounted an anecdote. His unit had been surrounded by American soldiers who had all been taught the phrase "Hande hoch oder ich schiessen!" ("Hands up or I'll shoot!). One of the Americans shouted this phrase at the German unit but inverted the "ie" in "schiessen" and actually said "Hande hoch oder ich scheissen!" ("Hands up or I'll shit!"). The Germans found this so amusing that they burst into laughter and one soldier who spoke some English shouted back "Anything but that! We surrender!".

"When I and E go walking, the second does the talking". That's the way I was taught a long time ago.

My German professor got a huge laugh out of one of us students reading a passage about an amusement park and telling about scheissbuden. Between his laughs he managed to spit out, "yes, a shitting gallery..." (Schiessbuden would be shooting galleries.)

Always ask, “Ist es dir kalt”, And never, never say. “Bist du kalt!” As we do in English!

In my German class, someone once asked why the grammar were so tricky. He responded that the German language was invented during a long winter.

A couple tips that I give my students: 1. Even though it is hard, do not skip learning noun genders. At some point everything else is going to focus on that. You have to know genders once you start applying cases, and then you have to know genders really well once you learn adjective endings. 2. In the same spirit as my first tip, learn the endings that are commonly one gender or another. For example, -er is commonly masculine, -e is commonly feminine (I tell my kids, "if it ends with -e, its probably 'die'"), -ung is always feminine, -heit/-keit are always feminine, -chen is always neuter. There are others, but these are common ones that you encounter early. 3. There are no helping verbs in the present tense. Even though we say "I am playing" in English, you just say "ich spiele" in German (not "ich bin spiele" or something). 4. Word order is important. In a statement, you have subject+verb (du singst=you are singing), but questions are verb+subject (singst du?= Are you singing?) Also, if you have two verbs in one clause, the second one is at the end, not right after the first one (ich MUSS nach Hause GEHEN= I MUST GO home) 5. Be able to understand how nouns function in a sentence. For example, you have to know how a subject, direct object, and indirect object differ (ich gebe dem Kind einen Hund "I give the kid a dog" is very different from "ich gebe dem Hund ein Kind" "i give the dog the child"--notice the endings on the words "the" and "a")

I don’t know why I’m watching this (I’m a fourth year Germanistics student 🤣), but I can’t stop. P. S. Good job!