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| INTRODUCTION |
| Chuck: This is Beginner Series, Lesson 6. |
| Judith: Willkommen zurück. |
| Chuck: Welcome back! John and Michaela are at home, and John met Michaela’s husband. Are you excited about what happen now? |
| Judith: I bet you are! Let’s jump right into the new dialogue. At this point, it’s the next morning and there’s just John and Michaela. |
Lesson conversation |
|---|
| Michaela: Guten Morgen, John! |
| John: Guten Morgen, Michaela! |
| Michaela: Wie geht es Ihnen heute? |
| John: Gut, danke. |
| Michaela: Mein Mann ist schon auf der Arbeit. Wir sind allein. |
| John: Schön. Was gibt es zum Frühstück? |
| Judith: Now read slowly. |
| Michaela: Guten Morgen, John! |
| John: Guten Morgen, Michaela! |
| Michaela: Wie geht es Ihnen heute? |
| John: Gut, danke. |
| Michaela: Mein Mann ist schon auf der Arbeit. Wir sind allein. |
| John: Schön. Was gibt es zum Frühstück? |
| Judith: Now, Chuck will translate and I will read the whole. |
| Judith: Guten Morgen, John! |
| Chuck: Good morning, John! |
| Judith: Guten Morgen, Michaela! |
| Chuck: Good morning, Michaela! |
| Judith: Wie geht es Ihnen heute? |
| Chuck: How are you today? |
| Judith: Gut, danke. |
| Chuck: Good, thanks. |
| Judith: Mein Mann ist schon auf der Arbeit. |
| Chuck: My husband is already at work. |
| Judith: Wir sind allein. |
| Chuck: We are alone. |
| Judith: Schön. Was gibt es zum Frühstück? |
| Chuck: Nice. What's for breakfast? |
| POST CONVERSATION BANTER |
| Judith: So Chuck, what did you think of this dialogue? |
| Chuck: Well, I thought frühstück is a little harder to pronounce and I remember it. |
| Judith: Oh. It’s frühstück. |
| Chuck: We got two of those little umlauts in the middle. |
| Judith: Yeah, the U sound; U with umlaut. |
| Chuck: Let’s have a look at the new vocabulary. |
| VOCAB LIST |
| Judith: The first word is morgen [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Morning.” |
| Judith: Morgen [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Morning.” |
| Judith: This is used in the expression “guten morgen.” |
| Chuck: “Good morning.” |
| Judith: The next word is heute [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Today.” |
| Judith: Heute [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Today”. |
| Judith: Next we have auf [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “On”. |
| Judith: Auf [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “On”. |
| Judith: Next, arbeit [natural native speed] |
| Chuck: “Work” |
| Judith: Die arbeit. |
| Chuck: “The work”. |
| Judith: Next, there’s an expression “wie geht es dir?” |
| Chuck: “How are you?” |
| Judith: “Wie geht es dir?” |
| Chuck: “How are you?” |
| Judith: Note that this is the informal form. The formal is “Wie geht es Ihnen.” |
| Chuck: “How are you doing?” |
| Judith: Yes. Hard to translate, but there’s a difference. If you’re talking to a friend, you should be using “wie geht es dir” and if you’re talking to a business acquaintance or a stranger, you should say “Wie geht es Ihnen?” |
| Chuck: Also note that talking to close friends, you’ll often just shorten it to “wie gehts”. |
| Judith: Anyway, don’t try to find sense in this phrase because literally it means “how goes it to you?” It’s just something you need to learn as a phrase. |
| Chuck: At least “wie gehts” sounds sort of like “how is it going?” |
| Judith: Yeah. Definitely. So the next word is schon [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Already.” |
| Judith: Schon [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Already”. |
| Judith: Next, allein(e) [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Alone.” |
| Judith: Allein(e) [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “Alone”. |
| Judith: Michaela es allein. |
| Chuck: “Michaela is alone.” |
| Judith: And finally, one more expression, zum Frühstück [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “For breakfast”. |
| Judith: Zum Frühstück [natural native speed]. |
| Chuck: “For breakfast”. |
| Judith: As in the phrase you heard, “Was gibt es zum Frühstück?” |
| Chuck: “What’s for breakfast?” I don’t know about you, but I can easily lose track of which words I still need to learn of foreign language. For example, I may study a lesson, look at the vocabulary and do a couple of exercises with it, but at some point, I just move on to the next lesson and I can’t really be sure anymore if I remember all the words from the previous lessons. I sometimes think some will just slip through the cracks and I just forget them. In the later lesson, they’re used again and I don’t understand things anymore. |
| Judith: I know of the problem. I’ve also had this problem in the past. However, at GermanPod101.com, I hope you will not have this problem because GermanPod101 already comes with a vocabulary trainer. Other companies might charge you with high price if you want to buy a vocabulary trainer from them, but here you just get it with the premium subscription and you don’t even need to enter the vocabulary yourself. You just go to the learning center and look at the vocabulary list of a lesson, you select the words that you have trouble with, and you click “Add to my Word Bank”. Use the Word Bank to practice difficult words from all lessons at once using online flashcards or you can print out a list of these words to carry around. |
| Chuck: It sounds really cool. In fact, I have a full time job, so I don’t have that much time to study languages. That’s why GermanPod101 is perfect for me. I load the lessons and dialogues on my mp3 player and I print out vocabulary lists on small cards, so I can use them while I’m waiting at the airport or during boring house work for example. |
| Judith: Yes. Or you can even glance at the vocabulary cards in an elevator or you can listen to the lessons while you’re commuting… |
| Chuck: Or in a traffic jam heading to work. |
| -- |
| Judith: Now let’s talk a bit about work in Germany. In Germany, the vast majority of people have 9:00 to 5:00 jobs or maybe 8:00 to 4:00 jobs like my father and they’re happy with that. |
| Chuck: So people tend to get up at the same time, drive or commute to the office? It’s not very common to work at home. |
| Judith: Then they spent the required amount of hours there at the office and then go home, relax, and don’t think about work anymore until the next day. |
| Chuck: And you can tell that people have fairly structured lives in this sense because the hours for restaurants tend to be restricted to a few hours for lunch rather than just being open all the time like in the States. |
| Judith: Yeah, for lunch and for dinner. So everybody is having lunch within like, say, 12:00 to 2:00 or maybe 2:30 when the restaurant is open, and then they close again and they open again the evening when people are off work. |
| Chuck: So if you notice that you’re working a little extra late and it’s 3:00 o’clock and you’re hungry, you can have a hard time finding restaurant sometimes. |
| Judith: Here’s a tip: you can then look go and look for an Asian restaurant. They usually have very flexible opening hours. |
| Chuck: Or you can look for something called an Imbiss where you can get more fast-food type stuff. |
| Judith: That works, too! |
| Chuck: So as you see, Germans tend to have more structured life, I guess, you would say, and so you see that there’s less entrepreneurial spirit here. Also, less people would think that work should be fun. |
| Judith: Structures are quite hard normally, unless open to diverging from the rules. It’s one thing that annoys me sometimes, and I’m sure it must annoy the heck out of Chuck. |
| Chuck: Yeah. Also, you’ll find that you have to be much more strict through your budgeting because you tend to get paid here only once a month, whereas in the States, you get paid once every other week or sometimes even every week; but there’s some positive sides to the work in Germany, of course. |
| Judith: For example, laws and regulations take the employee’s side of an issue really often. For example, when it comes to opening hours or to wages, the companies are required to pay employees very well. If they want them to work overtime and they want them to work at night or on Sundays, Sundays are always helped open to a family day, for example. |
| Chuck: And one thing that you’ll notice right away is that there’s plenty of holidays. For example, where I worked before, I had 26 vacation days a year and this is in addition to the regular and national holidays. Of course, by telling an American that, they say “So much vacation time?” But if I tell a German that, they said, “They’re ripping you off on the vacation time.” |
| Judith: And also, I don’t think you are working quite as many weekly average hours as you were at an American company, were you? |
| Chuck: It was about the same, though. |
| Judith: Really? They must have ripped you off. |
| Chuck: Of course, it always depends on whether you’re working for something like a start-up or whether you’re working for like a regular company. |
| Judith: What’s also nice is that here in Germany, you have a mandatory healthcare and pension plans and the employer pays half of it and you pay half of it, and generally you’re getting a very good deal especially on the healthcare. Pension plans are not so secure. |
| Chuck: So notice that if you’ve worked in Germany and your job ends and you have to start looking for another job, you have to sign up for unemployment so that your healthcare will be covered. I, unfortunately, had to learn that the hard way. |
| Judith: I think that we’re pretty well-off. I mean, generally people don’t worry about healthcare. They just have it. |
| Chuck: Also, it’s pretty standard to get a Christmas bonus every year. That’s about the same as your month’s pay check. |
| Judith: I think Germany is a great country for employees. I’m not so sure about customers, though, because of the strict opening hours. For example, hardly anything is opened on Sundays and shops may close early on Saturdays. |
| Chuck: So be sure to buy everything you need for the weekend on Fridays because Sundays, you can’t, and Saturdays, you’ll find a huge crowd shopping. Also, of course, be very careful if a vacation day is, for example, on a Monday because then there’s two days in a row that you can’t go shopping. |
| Judith: In the biggest cities like Berlin, there are 24-hour stores, but everywhere else, you are limited to kiosk and gas stations then to provide everyday items at outrageous prices. |
| Chuck: Wait a minute, what’s the word for price in German? |
| Judith: It’s “der preis”, spelled P-R-E-I-S. It’s masculine because of the “der”. So you have “der” for masculine, and “die” for feminine, and “das” for neuter nouns. |
| Chuck: But wait, from what I remember, arbeit is feminine, so “die arbeit”, but in the dialogue, we heard “auf der arbeit”, so I think she made a mistake in the lesson. |
Lesson focus |
| Judith: Not true! There’s a reason for this change, and that is German has something called cases. |
| Chuck: Cases! What are those? |
| Judith: Cases means that words change depending on the circumstances in which they are used. |
| Chuck: Can you give an example of that? I’m a little confused. |
| Judith: Well, usually, a word after a preposition requires different case than using it as a subject of the sentence, the one who does something. Well, arbeit was an example, wasn’t it? It’s “die arbeit” if you use it in a sentence like “die arbeit ist schwer” – “the work is hard”, but if you use it in a sentence similar to the one we heard in the dialogue like “ich bien auf der arbeit” – “I am at work”….actually, we say “at the work” in German, then it changes from “die” to “der”. Most changes are made to the article so the noun stays recognizable. Der, die, and das are articles for subjects, and these becomes “dem, der, dem” when using the same word after a preposition. So der becomes dem and das becomes dem and die becomes der. |
| Chuck: Okay. I think I’m getting it, but could you go over another example? |
| Judith: Okay. Let’s use “das haus” – “the house”. “Das haus ist schön” or “the house is nice or the house is pretty.” That’s “the house” being used a subject, so it’s “das haus”. If you want to use it after a preposition, you could say “Ich bien auf dem haus” – “I’m on top of the house.” You notice that “das haus” changed to “dem haus”. One more thing to pay attention to: when the ending of a preposition is N or a vowel, the native M will simply add itself to the preposition or it will overrun the N that was there before, so you no longer need the article. So instead of “in dem”, you would say “im”; instead of “von dem”, you’d say |
| Chuck: Wait, wait, let me try this one, “vom”? |
| Judith: Yes.”von dem” becomes “vom”. And how about “zu dem”? |
| Chuck: Would that be “zum”? |
| Judith: Yes. |
| Chuck: Like zum Frühstück? |
| Judith: Exactly! We already used it. So if you want to say, “I am in the house or I am inside it”, you have to say “Ich bin im haus”, not “Ich bin in dem haus.” In very colloquial German, you can even hear contractions like “aufm” instead of “auf dem”, and “aus” instead “aus dem” and so on. |
| Chuck: So Michaela’s husband is auf der arbeit is not in house. Yeah. |
| Judith: Let’s read the dialogue again. |
| Michaela: Guten Morgen, John! |
| John: Guten Morgen, Michaela! |
| Michaela: Wie geht es Ihnen heute? |
| John: Gut, danke. |
| Michaela: Mein Mann ist schon auf der Arbeit. Wir sind allein. |
| John: Schön. Was gibt es zum Frühstück? |
Outro |
| Judith: All right! That’s it for this lesson. |
| Chuck: Let us know if you have any questions about the cases. Well, Judith will take care of those. German culture, I might be able to handle or actually anything. We’ll try to help you. |
| Judith: And be sure to check out the Word Bank tool to keep track of your vocabulary. |
| Chuck: Thanks for listening to GermanPod101.com and see you again soon! |
| Judith: Bis bald! |
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