German Lessons

Ich habe einen Hund gesehen nicht. Ich habe im mein Büro bin alle Tag.

(Not sure about the habe bin, or the placement of alle Tag, but I did my best.)
 
Ich habe keinen Hund gesehen. I war den ganzen Tag in meinem Büro. (or: Ich bin den ganzen Tag in meinem Büro gewesen)

That would be gramatically correct. When you use 'be' in our past tense, you never use 'haben'
 
So the "keinen" replacing "einen" indicates negative instead of "nicht?"

I'm working on some online lessons, and things are starting to make more sense (phew!), but can anyone explain to me the use of "denn" in questions and how I know if/where I should use it?
 
Do you mean like 'Kannst du mir denn sagen wo du wohnst?' ?
Honestly, if I were you, I'd leave it until you know the basics of the language and get the feeling where to use it. Things you don't have in your own language (and I can't think of an equivalent in English right now) are bound to be tricky (believe me, that's why Russian verbs with their aspects are such a pain in the butt anf also somehting I'll never understand). The best thing to do is look for many many examples how it's used and then in some time you'll get how it works.
Here's the English wiktionary page http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/denn for this word, if you're feeling brave you could also switch to German to try to learn more.
Ah, I'm probably a bad help for learning German, I never know how to explain stuff 🙁
 
Exactly. The lesson page says it's a "flavor word used in questions." From the little bit of work I've done so far, it doesn't seem to translate into English at all--just gets left out of the translated sentence entirely. I wasn't sure how essential it was in German, though.
 
Social Suicide said:
Do you mean like 'Kannst du mir denn sagen wo du wohnst?' ?
Click to expand...

Vielleicht kann man das so übersetzen:
(Maybe it can be translated as follows)

"Then can you tell me where do you live?"

(though I have to admit that I do not know exactly where to put the then... )
 
I PASSED MY GERMAN TEST!!!!!

Though by all rights I shouldn't have. I finished about 65% of it, but since the minimum word count was 300 and he gave me 375, he graded me on the basis of 300, which gave me an 86%.

I'm gonna keep working on it, though, cause now I feel guilty for not knowing it better when I took it.
 
Tueuse de Vampires
Tueuse de Vampires
congratulations :D
Ack, I'm double-posting. But how would you call someone a horse-face or something equally insulting? The reason I ask is cause I'm writing a take on Sleeping Beauty and I want to name the bad faerie something hideous (to help account for her bad disposition).
 
I think the literal translation would be 'Pferdefresse' but I'm not sure you should use it, it's really informal.
 
Hi there, I only just registered here... Social Suicide commended the board to me. 🙂 I'm a native speaker of German, so if I can be of any help, feel free to ask.
 
B
Blondie Bear
Awesome, great to have you!
Okay, here's a few more questions:
1. This is mostly just out of curiosity. Why does German use "haben" for expressing hunger but not other things? I thought it was weird that I'd say "Ich habe Hunger" (which literally translates to "I have hunger") instead of, say, "Ich bin Hunger" ("I am hungry"), BUT you don't say "Ich habe krank," for example.

2. Can anyone explain present and past indicative to me? I'm also working on Old English, and really struggling with these tenses cause Modern English lost them, but it appears German still has them.

Thanks!
 
1. That an easy one: 'Hunger' is a noun, ergo, you have it (except when it's a noun you can actually be, like 'Ich bin eine Frau'). 'krank' however, is an adjective. If you wanted to express your hunger with 'be', you'd have to use an adjective, in this case it's 'Ich bin hungrig'.

2.Could you give an example maybe? Do you mean words that you only use in present, or only in the past?
 
Present indicative and past indicative are, as far as I can tell, verb tenses. I'm just not sure what they are or when exactly I'd use them, and they affect the endings of the verb. In Old English, for example, a singular verb in first person and present indicative ends with -e ("hopian," or hope, becomes "hopie"). I'm not sure how it works in German; I haven't got quite that far yet.
 
Well I think we only have one present tense.
In English you can say either
He walks to the supermarket
or
He's walking to the supermarket ,
depending on the situation.
The only thing I could understand as indicatives would be adverbs, though. Like if in English I would use -ing because it's happening right now, in German I would have to say something like 'jetzt grade'. I never really think about any of this, we haven't had any grammar lessons in German since the 7th grade (the real ones were in 4th grade) and I talk instinctively anyway. But I think we do have a lot of trouble with tenses in English, and this is exactly why.
Btw., is German hard to learn?
 
November
November
yes german is hard to learn :p I gave up after 3 weeks lol
It's not easy. We don't have as many cases as you guys do (we lost most of them). And the compound words can get hairy.
 
Indicative is simply the normal, regular form, the opposite of Conjunctive (which you use mostly for 1) indirect speach or 2) expression of possibilities)... thus English lost the conjunctive and replaced it with the "would"-auxiliary. Btw, exactly the same process is currently going on in German, the formal conjunctive is dying out in spoken language and is less and less used even in written language anymore, you're almost certain to come across as a posh intellectual if you actually speak like that. :wink:

Example:
Formal conjunctive: "Er sagte, Peter hielte das für keine gute Idee."
Colloquial form: "Er sagte, Peter würde das für keine gute Idee halten."
Both translate as "He said Peter wouldn't consider that a good idea."
 
That's kind of what I figured; the Wikipedia article (which we all know is the height of reliable information) seemed to indicate that there's really only one present tense in German (and hence Old English), while English has present simple, present progressive, and present perfect progressive.
 
Question:
The lesson I'm working on currently says I ABSOLUTELY MUST memorize the declensions of Vater, Mutter, and Haus. Is there a really good reason for this? Are these the only ones whose articles change when they change case?

(If it helps, here's the link for the lessons I'm using. http://learngerman.elanguageschool.net/mod/resource/view.php?id=128)

Edit:

Also: for animals, do I use neuter or male pronouns, or does it depend on the gender of the noun?
 
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