Lesson Two: Learning German with Jemma
Numbers
We watched Jenny and Bodo struggle with this and you soon will see Emma taking a look into a book of it, too. Math. I mean, math! Wtf!? Yeah, so we won't do any math. But numbers? Hmm ... yeah they could come in handy. Like when ordering those croissants for your traumatisierte Freundin. I mean, will she eat one or two? (If she was actually going to stay and not storm out.) So yes, numbers are something important. So this lecture might seem long, but it should be easy. (If you can count. - I won't be able to teach that to you, too. I mean Jenny isn't that good in math, so I guess math shouldn't be that important to us either anyway. But if you do need to learn math then call Timo (or JI.org's 'Federal Chancellor' Frieda =P ).)
Let's start by counting up to twelve – let's call them the 'irregular-', or up to ten 'basic numbers'.
Now we'll do a little 'game' here. You'll find german words which sneaked their way into the descriptions.
Can you riddle out what they mean? :)
One – Eins (Like Saal Eins)
Two – Zwei (Zwei people make an adorable Paar)
Three – Drei (Drei people are always too viel. Get out Hotte+Ben!)
Four – Vier (There are vier Geschwister in Emma's family.)
Five – Fünf (We get fünf new Folgen of Hahe each week, except there are these damn german holidays ;) )
Six – Sechs (Like the sechs Seiten of Emma's dice earrings)
Seven – Sieben (Sieben days a Woche we yearn for Jemma)
Eight – Acht (There were acht Szenen in which we were blessed with our girls kissing. (until ep177))
Nine – Neun (There are neun official Mitglieder+Ex-Mitglieder of the STAG)
Ten – Zehn (Jenny paints her zehn Fingernägel often black, grey or blue.)
Eleven – Elf (Elf is a number of Tage I hope Emma will never ever wear her plaid shirt without changing/washing it.)
Twelve – Zwölf (Zwölf, a number that the actually participating member Anzahl of the STAG will never reach)
(Did you get what the german words meant without looking them up? ^^ )
Now you're being clever for a few numbers and do the 'teen' thing, but hey, we can do that, too!
Thirteen – Dreizehn
Fourteen – Vierzehn
Fifteen – Fünfzehn
Sixteen – Sechzehn
Seventeen – Siebzehn
Eighteen – Achtzehn
Nineteen – Neunzehn
So we take the 'basic number' and add zehn (ten) to it. Easy, right?
We go on with:
Twenty – Zwanzig (pronounciation: 'ig' like 'ich'. Go back and read Kristen's comment on the last lesson. It's gold.)
Now it's getting a tiny bit more complicated, but not as much as the french. Those guys are like crazy. Sorry french friends, but for counting in your language you need a math diploma, adding, multiplying and what not. Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, do I need to say more? It would be nice to tell us what you do with those numbers, beside crunching them. Anyway, let's continue.
Twenty one – Einundzwanzig
What we do is the same like you do, you put twenty and one together, just that we like to do it the other way around and also notify you that we did that by adding an 'und' (and) in the middle.
So it's continuing like this.
Twenty two – Zweiundzwanzig
Twenty three – Dreiundzwanzig
Twenty four – Vierundzwanzig
...
And so on just add the 'basic numbers' and the 'und' in front of the 'zwanzig'. The same you will do with all other tens and you'll notice that most of the time a 'zig' is being added to the'basic number' to create the following numbers.
Thirty – Dreißig
Thirty one – Einunddreißig
…
Forty – Vierzig
Fifty – Fünfzig
Sixty – Sechzig
Seventy – Siebzig
Eighty – Achtzig
Ninety – Neunzig
Hundred – Hundert
Now it's getting interesting again.
One hundret and one – Einhundert(und)eins
One hundred and two – Einhundert(und)zwei
Multiplying eins*hundert and adding eins or zwei or drei or dreizehn or vierundfünfzig at the end. The 'und' after 'hundert' gets swallowed in the spoken language most of the time.
It's going on like this up to Einhundertneunundneunzig and then comes two hundred – zweihundert, dreihundert, vierhundert......
You get the gist. So from now on you are able to count the beauty marks on Emma's arms, the number of times they transfix each other with their passion vision or the minutes and seconds until there will be a new jemma clip somewhere flouting around in the web for you to enjoy, in German.
Grandma Grammar - Articles
Last time we learned that Nouns have souls. So what do we know about souls? Not much, right? Allegedly it weights 21grams, but sadly I have no data if that applies to nouns, too. But, every soul of a human being I know has a gender, so, since going by me the nouns also have a soul, they do have a gender, too. They like to identify themselves and tell us if they're beautiful women or rough men, or can't decide or would rather be seen as neither nor. That are nouns to you - complicated beings.
So nouns like to be addressed as Der (male), Die (female) or Das (asexual).
Let's get to the examples right away:
The flower Jenny left on Emma's plate when she did breakfast for her was very beautiful, so we conclude: Flower? Beautiful! –> female! And guess what, that's true.
- Flower – Die Blume
Let's go on to our male friends. The lockers of Pestalozzi are blue and orange, but that doesn't matter. They are both male, because they are metallic and that's pretty male and they can be thrown shut with a loud clank. So we conclude lockers are male and again that is totally true.
- Locker – Der Spind
What about the asexual nouns? There are the ones that can't decide what they generally are, because they can be both. Like cars. See as an example Ben's car. It's very masculine – edgy, fast and rough, but then look at some other cars with those nice curves and their total beauty. Like Emma's. Imagine which car Emma would drive if she had her own. Would it be male? We conclude, sometimes you can't generalize which gender a noun has because it can take on both shapes. So cars? Asexual.
- Car – Das Auto
But there are other nouns that struggle to put on a defining gender, because they simply do not have defining attributes that make you go 'Oh, that's a girl/boy!'. As an example let's take events. Like 'the event', 'the coming out' or 'the end'. Female or male? Well, all can be beautiful, relieving or soothing. They can be painful. They can be sudden. They can be rough. They can be pretty much everything you can imagine and none of it has to be the case at an other event, coming-out or end.
Like Jemma's coming-out. Love Fool being sung on the books? Beautifully heart-clenching good. Being terrorized by people writing mean stuff on your locker (der Spind, remember?)? Not so beautifully heart-clenching good, but painfully testosterone causing bad. We learn, for example, 'coming-out' can't be defined. All of the above words are very fluent and thus like to stay asexual.
- Event – das Event
- Coming out – das Coming-out
- End – das Ende
Alright, I admit, those rules I just told you will not always or actually never be the regular case. The first one with the beautiful ones being female is actually what my father told me when I was learning the french articles. But generally speaking you can use that rule I told you. It's just that, you know some souls identify as male but just come off as being quite female and the other way around. So you never know. See, language is representative of real life.
But really, learning the articles to the nouns will be a pain in the ass. The only way to get through it is to learn them by heart and pay attention to it when reading/listening to stuff, so that slowly you will get a feeling for it. Sorry, no other way around that.
Sentence of the week
Oh so many! I mean there was this whole Jemma adorableness going on last week! But in the end I decided for this:
One question that you should definitely know how to answer if your girlfriend ever asks:
- Emma: “Wie war ich?” - “How was I?”
What a question Emma! But Jenny shows you what the right answer is, girls. Always.
- Jenny: “Zum verlieben.” - “To fall in love with.”
Vocabular you learned today
Numbers:
From eins to neunhundertneunundneunzig. (Then follows tausend, by the way. Tausendundeins, tausendundzwei, .........)
Nouns:
Der Saal – The (festivity/cinema) room/hall
Das Paar – couple
Die Geschwister – siblings
Die Folge – episode
Die Seite – facet (in the upper context)
Die Woche – week
Das Mitglied – member
Die Fingernägel – fingernails (plural, obviously. Singular: Der Fingernagel. I just noticed that in plural all things are addressed as 'die'...is that true? Someone tell me! Haha I can't find a counter example.)
Der Tag – day
Die Anzahl – number/count
Die Szene – scene
Die Blume – flower
Der Spind – locker
Das Auto – car
Das Event – event (yes, stealing words from you again)
Das Coming-out – Coming-out (and again stealing)
Das Ende – the end
Adjectives:
viel – much
Verbs:
verlieben – to fall in love
Other words:
und – and
der – the (male article)
die – the (female article)
das – the (asexual articl)
Today we hopefully answered the question of those weird nouns and their moods to take on gender. Hope it helped and if not (because actually I doubt it) then I hope you at least got a laugh out of it.
I hope you enjoyed today's lesson.
Rock on & Big Hugs
Lied
Please note: This lesson was once an entry in our blog. If you want to read the original or the comments, or if you want leave a comment - click here.