Sentence structures not acquired yet

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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby lusan » Mon Jun 13, 2022 10:35 pm

german2k01 wrote:Yesterday I was having a conversation with a German lady. I noticed that my subconscious mind had acquired certain grammar structures and could express them effortlessly. However, certain structures seem to me they have not been acquired as yet.
For example, I am still not sure how to express thought involving structures like "getting used to" "used to be" in German esp involving different subject pronouns.

My query is, how do you tackle such issues? Do you write thoughts in Engish with those structures and use a translation tool and memorize them in Anki? I am saying this based on my hunch but I am not 100% sure.


FSI has many of these structures.... drills, drills, and more drills does the job. For example, for French "Il faut che...", Italian, "ci vogliono...." or Spanish: "No me parece que...", etc.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby BeaP » Tue Jun 14, 2022 4:47 am

I only know how they're presented in monolingual communicative textbooks. The units are always based on situations, and the frequent structures used in a given situation are collected. For example, 'used to' is taught in the 'Things were different in the past' unit, when people recall their childhood, we compare two photos about a neighbourhood, and so on. If 'used to' is not there, it either doesn't exist in the foreign language or the corresponding phrase is very rare / considered formal. The 'got used to' structure is just there in a text somewhere probably with an exercise drawing attention to the form. Verbs with similar structure are often grouped together in a unit and in grammar books.

This kind of instruction doesn't help in a clear way if you want to translate (although I'm personally fine with it), so you need to look things up in a book for English speakers. If you google 'German typical mistakes English speakers', 'German typical problems English speakers', you'll find a lot of resources on-line. (Maybe 'problems' is better, try synonyms.) There are even some books on this subject, but at the moment I don't remember any in German.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby zgriptsuroica » Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:45 am

I tend to just google "How to say thing in language," or if I'm already there, I'll look for it in the target language except for my phrase in English. I look more at websites like the WordReference forums where you can get an explanation of nuance or an indication as to where various users are posting from. If I'm looking for "How to say 'getting used to' in Spanish" and I only see response from Spaniards, I might make a note to double check their suggestion, or outright reject it if it sounds too weird to me, since the majority of the people I speak with normally are from the Caribbean. I can't think of how it would really come into play with "getting used to," but for other concepts or phrases, it definitely warrants some consideration.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:02 pm

tatoeba.org can be a great way to investigate this sort of turn-of-phrase stuff.

If you look up "I used to", it will give you a bunch of English sentences, then you can look for the equivalents in whichever language. Take everything with a pinch of salt, as these are not intended as one-to-one mapping -- you're supposed to look at multiple examples, see the other ways they're translated back into your own language, possibly even go away and look up a dictionary/grammar book.

It's a very clever, very computer-science approach to searching and sorting through the naturally unstructured data that is human language.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby Caromarlyse » Tue Jun 14, 2022 1:46 pm

Modern German grammar by Whittle has the following examples:

1. Das ist die Schule, die wir früher besuchten. That is the school we used to go to.

2. Jeden Samstag machten wir eine Wanderung. Every Saturday we went/used to go/would go for a walk

3. Er machte sonntags gewöhnlich einen langen Spaziergang. OR Er pflegte sonntags einen langen Spaziergang zu machen. (slightly formal) He had a habit of taking/He used to take a long walk on Sundays

4. An dieser Stelle stand einmal eine Kapelle. There used to be a chapel on this spot.

5. Das Staubecken bedeckt eine große Fläche, die früher Weideland war. The reservoir covers a large area that used to be grazing land.

6. Früher war der Main oft zugefroren, und wir konnten darauf Schlittschuh laufen. The (river) Main used to get frozen over and we were able to ice skate on it.

They are spread throughout the book, not in any one place.

There are also other examples of how to express "used to" in the "accustomed to" sense:

1. sich ein*arbeiten to get used to the work

2. Wir müssen uns erst an die neue Umgebung gewöhnen. First of all we must get used to the new environment.

3. Die Augen müssen sich an die Dunkelheit gewöhnen. The eyes must adapt to the darkness.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:18 pm

Something that struck me is that both expressions include "used to". Perhaps by chance, perhaps by imagining that there is a one-to-one match between languages (...in the case of which translating "used" in isolation would be a big no-no).

Just thinking aloud... Maybe the next app will have a zillion sentences on the "used" theme, and every single one will shoehorn the drills into a pattern based on "utilize". :shock:
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby Caromarlyse » Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:53 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Something that struck me is that both expressions include "used to". Perhaps by chance, perhaps by imagining that there is a one-to-one match between languages (...in the case of which translating "used" in isolation would be a big no-no).

Just thinking aloud... Maybe the next app will have a zillion sentences on the "used" theme, and every single one will shoehorn the drills into a pattern based on "utilize". :shock:


And you have to filter out the "used to" (same words, slightly different pronunciation) as in "colours are sometimes used to describe emotions". I don't really like learning by translation; I find just trying to soak up the language's internal logic easier. But occasionally I find I need a translation, if it's something I'll say all the time in English and want/need to know the right way to say it in the other language, or if the verb tense usage is different.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby Iversen » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:53 pm

For me it is different: I see the differences easier when I have them side by side, as in a bilingual printout. Then I wonder why the 'target' language version is different and whether it is something that is part of a pattern or just a dubious formation in the original (which always is a possibility!), and ideally I should then look it up in a dictionary or check it through Google, but in practice this is the exception - I normally just notice it and continue. But being primed in this way will make it easier to spot the same thing later on.

But there is one snag to this: the text I use for intensive study are short, and they can't possibly contain all the formulaic formulations I need, so in practice I also have to rely on the the unstructured and inefficient sucking-up process during extensive reading - however my impression is that I don't suck many valuable phrases and structures up before I already am a relative proficient reader.

I like to search for the logic behind different ways to express yourself in different languages, and an important part of the learning process is to formulate explicit hypotheses concerning the different mechanisms and test them out - but as I have written in another thread you will ultimately have to feel grammar as something semantic, not as some kind of mathematics.

And idiomatic expressions? There is almost alway some logic behind them, although it may have become almost opaque with time. That's why I separate translations from a weak into a strong language from translation the other way. When the target is a strong language you don't have to pretend that you are learning it, and here I 'think' not only idiomatic expressions in the form of hyperliteral translations, but as far as possible also syntactical patterns. However the other way round, from a strong language into a weak one you need to collect "ways to say things" almost as words, or in other words: for everything you might want to say you need something you can use in the weak language, and it takes time and diligence to build that store house piece by piece.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Dict.cc used to be (!) a good resource when I was working on my German many years ago.

To me the formulation here (with its exclamation sign!) indicates that dict.cc isn't a good source any more. With "was" (the simple past tense) it might still be a good source. Or maybe it really has deteriorated so much that the compound past tense is necessary? I don't use it so I don't know ..
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby luke » Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:09 pm

Iversen wrote:I have written in another thread you will ultimately have to feel grammar as something semantic, not as some kind of mathematics.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Dict.cc used to be (!) a good resource when I was working on my German many years ago.

To me the formulation here (with its exclamation sign!) indicates that dict.cc isn't a good source any more. With "was" (the simple past tense) it might still be a good source.

Speaking of semantics, "used to be" implies was and may no longer be or no longer is, as you said. I bring it up here as I'm not aware of a "named verb tense" that is the "was and no longer is" past tense. We all know how it's done in English, but in other languages...

I also enjoyed @Caromarlyse's "colours are sometimes used to describe emotions" example, which takes us back to semantics as well.
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Re: Sentence structures not acquired yet

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Jun 15, 2022 5:09 am

So, maybe I should have written "was" instead. (But I don't know how useful Dict.cc is nowadays, since I'm not using it.)
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