FOOD UNIT

Das Essen

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written curriculum. I’d forgotten how much fun it is. Anyway, I love food. This month will be devoted to food. 

Day 1 - Mittwoch, 3 Juni

Starting off the day with vocabulary and thinking about the week’s topic.

Vegetables!! It’s perfect. 

The vegetable garden is coming along nicely, with a few notable exceptions – the beans didn’t sprout, and I swore I planted more than 3 bok choi seeds. That’s what comes from resorting to the hardware store to snatch up whatever they have left. I tried to order from Burpee’s and Territorial Seed Company, but they weren’t taking orders! Horrors! The Coronavirus Catastrophe caused the entire world to decide to buy seeds, grow a garden, and achieve self-sufficiency. Well, I don’t know how many gardens actually got planted, are growing, and will be harvested with the veggies canned and frozen, but I’m betting not a whole heck of a lot. When the seed companies finally reopened their online ordering, they were out of a lot of stuff. So, making do, I schlepped to Tractor Supply, the grocery store, and the hardware store to see what I could find. Got quite a bit piecemeal, but note to self:

ORDER IN JANUARY NEXT YEAR

On to Vocabulary and assessing prior knowledge.

I know there are 8 parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections (ejaculations we were taught to call them back in the day, but that’s taken on a whole new meaning).

Nouns are used to give objects names. German nouns have gender, and there are three genders: der -masculine, die - feminine, and das - neuter. Figuring out a noun’s gender isn’t always easy. Some make sense (die Frau -woman) while others don’t (das Mädchen – girl). So, when learning a new noun, it’s imperative to learn its correct definite article –der, die, oder das - as part of the word itself. Which it is. One additional bit of info: all plural nouns have the same article: die.  

And in that last sentence, I decided to use oder instead of or because I knew the German word. I’m going to do this throughout this journey. More and more, as my German gets better and better, I’m going to increase my usage of German until, hopefully, by the end of the year, these posts will all be written auf Deutsch.

Today’s Top 10

I’m going to try an experiment. Where I can, I’m going to not write the English vocabulary word but use a picture instead. Wondering if associating the German word with the object and eliminating the English middleman will get better results.

    

      

Das Gemüse – die Gemüse

  

1. der Mais
   
2. der Spinat
   
3. die grüne Bohne (n)
   
4. die rote Beete (n)
   
5. die Karotte (n)
   
6. das Brokkoli
   
7. der Blumenkohl
   
8. der Kohl
   
9. der Paprika (s) * not to be confused with the condiment der Pfeffer!
   
10. der Salat
    

Pronunciation help on Google Translate and it’s free!

After another cup of fortifying coffee, I settled into my armchair and headed to FB.  I decided to stop at the first post I found that was written in German. It belonged to Die Schlagerpiloten offizielle Fangruppe. 

For the first time, I really studied the title.

Die Schlagerpiloten - That was easy. There are 3 singers in the group who sing Schlager music while dressed in airline pilot uniforms. Der Pilot  is the German word for pilot. Since there are 3 guys, the article becomes die and the plural form of Pilot is Piloten. That’s actually stealing from tomorrow’s grammar lesson, but I thought it was kind of interesting. More on noun plural forms tomorrow.

Die  is the article used for plurals.

Schlager + Piloten  = Schlagerpiloten. It’s a word made up of two nouns (that’s a compound noun). When you make a compound noun (and German can get really, really long compound nouns), only the first noun is capitalized and the next one just follows along as if it were part of the original word all along. Clever! And, I looked up Gruppe in the dictionary and found out it is feminine. Compound nouns always take the gender of the last noun in the series.

offizielle ­– adjectives aren’t capitalized. (All German nouns are capitalized. That makes decoding German writing a bit easier!) This word looks a lot like its English counterpart.

Fangruppe – another compound noun: Fan + Gruppe.  Since Gruppe is feminine, the compound noun is die Fangruppe.

And now I’m going to listen to a song by this group on YouTube. I just type in Schlagerpiloten YouTube and a whole bunch of songs pop up. It’s like shopping in a musical candy store. I don’t understand all the words, but I’m going to enjoy the music – Schlager has such a nice rhythm - and understand as much as I can. 

Later, I’ll type the title and group name into an online search, adding songtext to the search. Not always, but many times the lyrics will come up (in German) and I can print them out and refer to them while I’m listening to the song. If I get really ambitious, I can look up the words I don’t know and write them in.

Day 1 ist komplett.