One mindset shift that really helps your learning is to start thinking literally. What do I mean by this?
Most translations are made to sound natural. In a textbook you might see a German phrase with its English translation.
Wie geht’s dir?
How are you?
This is not optimal for the learner, especially not for a beginner. The reason being that it obscures what is really going on ‘behind the scenes’.
When using a new language, you have to lose the crutch of translating into English – you have to process the new language ‘raw’, which looks as follows:
Wie geht’s dir?
How goes it to you?
By thinking literally in this way you will get a clearer picture of how the language actually works, and will be in a much better position to process it on the fly.
The Slovakian polyglot Vladimir Skultety refers to this as ‘Neanderthal’ on his website, which I found rather amusing, so I’m going to use that term as well.
Let’s take a look at a more complicated example.
Mir ist aufgefallen, dass du in der letzten Zeit sehr viel arbeitest.
Me is up-fallen, that you in the last time very much work.
I noticed you’ve been working a lot recently.
There’s a lot going on here so let’s break it down.
- If something stands out to you and you notice something, you could say it “falls up” to you – es fällt dir auf. Imagine a crowd of people and a specific person falls upwards – you would definitely notice them!
- Secondly is in der letzten Zeit. Germans don’t say ‘recently’, which is far too Latin-sounding. They say ‘in the last time’.
- The next most striking part for me is the word order, with the conjugated verb arbeitest appearing at the end of the sentence. This is due to the subordinating conjunction dass which repels verbs to the end of the clause like an evil negatively charged magnet.
- You could break it down even further, for example by noting that Zeit is feminine, and the preposition in requires the dative case – in der letzten Zeit.
Phew that was hard word! Harte Arbeit.
It is most helpful at the phrase level but it can also be helpful at the word level, e.g.:
das Schweinefleisch ‘swineflesh’ = pork
das Krankenhaus ‘sickhouse’ = hospital
das Streichholz ‘strikewood’ = match
die Freundschaft ‘friendship’ = friendship (some make sense already…)
die Mannschaft ‘manship’ = team (…others not so much)
der Ausländer ‘outlander’ = foreigner
Another trick you can use is to note how Germans express themselves in English. This will often give you a window into the German. I remember a German lecturer giving a PowerPoint. She proudly mentioned how she had integrated certain content into one of the slides. I knew this from the context, but what she actually said was “I took this part up into the presentation.” From this I guessed that the German would be:
etw. in etw. aufnehmen
And sure enough, quickly checking dict.cc shows:
Thinking like a Neanderthal is an essential paradigm shift in your learning which will make things much easier. Whenever you read, listen, speak or write, start thinking in this new, crazy mode of expression. Some of the ways German expresses things are highly amusing from an English perspective. Have fun with it!