The Lernen to Talk Show: Episode 16

This week’s episode (or rather, last week’s episode) answers the question that’s been burning in everyone’s minds, “How exactly does a Brazilian learning German sound compared to an American learning German?” Thanks to Lucas Barbosa, the world can finally see for itself. He tells me about bilingual schools in Brazil and I tell him how I get around Germans’ insistence on speaking English. It was interesting to me to see how we both have a tendency to put verbs that belong at the end of a sentence earlier in the sentence. You can also see how his ability to speak English fluently sneaks into his German. Now that I’ve seen the video, I realize that I should have made him the show’s first musical guest, too. Because that guy can shred.

0:32 – This is a weird thing to say anyway, but if I wanted to say it more correctly I would have put the word “werdest” at the end of the sentence. And then I would have changed the “werdest” to “wirst”.

0:55 – How embarrassing.

4:17 – The word for “medical Doctor” is Arzt. That looks a lot like “art”, does it not? Hence the mixup. Kunst is the correct word for “art”.

5:17 – One peculiar thing about German is the use of both the word kein and the word nicht to negate something. Here Lucas says “Ich habe nicht Deutsch gesprochen.” I correct him by saying “kein Deutsch”, implying that he should say “Ich habe kein Deutsch gesprochen.” I suspect that both are acceptable, but I think that kein is more often used. It is the equivalent of the difference between saying “I have not spoken German” and “I have spoken no German”. In English the former sounds more natural, whereas in German the latter is favored.