Tage in Tirol mit Tah

Welcome to another post. We are going back to the early A1 days of articles and some tips to figure out which is which. So sit back and let's talk about der, die das. If you are a native English speaker, this is a bit of a new idea, but if you have experience with a language like Spanish, you might be more familiar with the idea. In language, we have nouns, which are persons, places, things, or ideas. Here is a list of a few: cat apple country freedom In English, when you make a sentence, with one of these nouns, you will need to at times place "the" or "a/an" in front like this: the cat, a cat the apple, an apple the country, a country the freedom, a freedom For English, that's the basic idea. The is used for a specific noun (definite article), and a/an is used for a non-specific or general noun (indefinite article). In German , it's a bit more complicated, because each noun has a gender: masculine, feminine or neutral.  So we need t...

Good day to everyone, I hope good things happened for you and your families. Today is going to be a simple picture blog from a short jog through a really beautiful forest near Sistrans! Sistrans is part of Innsbruck, but as you can see in the picture, it's not in the main part of the city, but up the mountain! And you can see Innsbruck very well from up above! The jog started around the corner of Patcherkofel and Badhausweg. One thing I love about hikes around here is the delicious cold and refreshing water from the mountains! The water is always running. This one had a wooden squirrel design! Along the way in many different hikes, you can find directions with a rough estimate of walking time it would take to get there. Also you'll find signs. I'm personally not that great with directions, so my strategy when I'm by myself is just to go straight in one direction, so that way I can just turn around to go back without getting too lost.   T...

Good day everyone! These times we are experiencing today are changing, hopefully to a more united, loving, and peaceful world. We need love to bind the world together. We need language to bring more communication with each other. And so I hope that today we can learn a little bit more about how we can say this "We need... to..." in German. So let's dive in! We need love for unity. ( pic: Instagram @perrygrone) Wozu? means roughly What for? in German. And this has a very specific kind of response in return. Let's look at the sentence: Wozu benutzt du die Schere? (What do you need the scissors for?) You would respond... Ich benutze die Schere, um Papier zu schneiden. (I need the scissors to cut the paper.) If you look at the structure of the response, you see that the sentence has the verb in second position (benutze) and the object that you need (die Schere) followed by a comma (,) with the other object (Papier) and the verb at the end (schneiden). ...

How are you doing? This was an eventful week in more ways than one, and this included a German exam. Today's post will be about my B1 ÖSD Exam experience in Austria and also sharing a bit on how I prepared for the exam. Feel free to skip around to what works for you, and as always, a German language exercise is provided at the end, this week's exercise has you look at old advertisements. The Exam Day My B1 Exam took place at 8:30 a.m. this past Saturday with Mundshutz (mask) and Abstand (distancing). All those taking the exam were separated and I was very grateful our room had a digital clock, since I discovered my old wrist watch had indeed stopped ticking. Sadly my Fitbit which I normally use now isn't allowed in the testing room. As the other A1 and A2 ÖSD exams, there were 2 teachers there. Sometimes you met an old teacher of yours. This day had two I wasn't familiar with, but one did have a good sense of humor. Of ÖSD Exams, you have 4 parts in this ord...

How are you doing today? I'm hoping that it involved a lot of whatever it is you like. For me, I was very lucky and had a great day of Klettersteig, which will be another post because it's really a beautiful thing when you combine hiking and climbing in nature. So the topic of this week came from a friend who mentioned how difficult it can be to figure out the different cases within the sentence and... I felt that pain. I'm only starting to feel more comfortable with it myself and thought maybe I can share a bit of what helps me figuring out the 4 German cases in sentences and also provide a short exercise at the end. So for those of you brand new to German, you might not exactly know what I'm talking about. No worries. But the idea is that in the German language you have 4 different cases that help you determine how to handel the article (e.g. der, die das). The four cases are Nominative , Akkusativ , Dativ , and Genativ . This is not something that we really h...

This is a different kind of week, with a little more origin story about how I ended up in Innsbruck. The short answer is I got married to an Austrian from Tirol. The longer story is hopefully interesting enough to read for you. If not, and your mind begins to wander, feel free to look at some of the pics and skip to the German exercise at the end which is about prepositions or Präpositionen in German. One of my favorite views in Innsbruck, near  Markthalle As time passes, it's strange to see different similarities with my parents. Maybe you've experienced this too, with your smile, how you talk about money, or how you might not be able to handel beans. In my case, I find myself in their language-learning shoes when I moved to Austria in 2019. I’m a daughter of two immigrant parents who moved from South America to the US and learned English along the way. Despite having Spanish-speaking parents, my younger-shyer self never quiet learned how to speak the language. ...

Hello and good day to you all! Did you have a good morning? Are you getting outside and getting that vitamin D from the sun? I hope you are healthy and ready for part 3 of our conjurations! First, let's do a small recap of what we've done in part 1 and part 2. In  Part 1 of Conjunctions , we spoke about coordinating conjunctions which allow you to combine two sentences with  und ,  oder ,  aber ,  dann ,  sondern  or  doch . With these sentences, you follow the normal sentence structure with the verb in 2nd position for both of them as seen below: Coordinating Conjunction Example (verb 2nd position for both) Ich  esse  fish  und  du  trinkst   Milch. (I eat fish and you drink milk.) In Part 2 of Conjunctions we learned about subordinating conjunctions which combine two sentences with words like weil , wenn , während , seit , bevor , obwohl and damit . In this situation, one sentence depends on the other ...