German words which are the same as English, similar, and capital or small letter for morgen / Morgen

You can use German in Germany, Austria and German-speaking parts of Switzerland.  Also Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and parts of Belgium and Italy.

I am learning German on Duolingo. I also have several books on learning German. The words which I remember most easily are those with the same or similar letters. The challenge is to remember when to use capital letters and add the accents, which are there to help you with the correct pronunciation. 

One puzzle which perplexed me and got solved today was when to use a capital letter for the word morgen meaning both morning and tomorrow - and tomorrow morning.

German - English - the same words

Nouns are capitalised at the start of the word in German.

April - April 

Bank - bank

cool - cool

Jazz - jazz

orange - orange

Party - party

pink - pink

Pizza - pizza

English - German - the same spelling

April - April

bank - Bank

cool - cool

hotel - Hotel

Jazz - jazz

orange - orange (colour)

party - Party

pink - pink

pizza - Pizza

taxi - Taxi

German - English similar spelling 

elf - eleven el

freundlich - friendly fr ... nd

gelb - yellow el

Glas - glass

hilfe - help h l

hassen - hate ha

Hotel - hotel

Musik - music mus

langsam - slowly l

oft - often  oft

shoppen - to shop shop

singen - (to) sing  sing

Souvenirs - souvenirs

Taxi - taxi

English - German similar spelling

eleven - elf

friendly - freundlich

help - hilfe

(to) hate - hassen

music - Musik

often - oft oft

(to) shop - shoppen

(to) sing - singen

slowly - langsam s

yellow - gelb

False Friends

Don't ask for a Gift for your friend. Gift in German means poison. 

Useful Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers

Translate google

duolingo.com

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Swiss-German_phrasebook

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Lost in Translation Spanish

 

campo countryside

manana means tomorrow or morning

sabado is not Saturday but Sunday

sopa soup

soap is jabón

sou - Jabon (accent on the o)

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I Starting Learning Navaho - Why And How?

 I started learning Navaho. the native American language. It is apparently the shortest, easiest, quickest course to finish on Duolingo. I raced through the first task. Abini is morning. I looking at the letter b and thought of the word beginning or break of day, a starts the word as in a.m. 

The next easy word to learn was Ni in Navaho is you in English. It sounds and looks like the Chinese Ni hao which sounds like 'knee how?' which is literally 'you good?', meaning how are you in English. 

After you have learned a word, later in the set of tasks is choosing the correct word in Navaho from a list of three. That is easy. For example, morning is which, abini or ni? It is abini. You is which, abini or ni? It is ni.

Navaho - English

Abini - morning

Ni - you

English - Navaho

Morning - abini

you - ni

Useful Websites

duolingo.com

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Help with from Facebook on learning Swedish on Duolingo

 I reached a certain level of my Duolingo Swedish course and the system asked me if I wanted to share an announcement on Facebook about my achievement. I did.

The Duloingo system put up a picture not saying the language but listing words I had learned.

This forced me to check whether I could still remember them. I could, six out of eight, and in context I can turn them into English. But the word endings were a puzzle. Was it book or books? To laugh, I laugh? I went into translate Google to check the Swedish English and turn the results back English to Swedish and again reversing. Here are the results.

Swedish - English

1 flicka - girl

2 morgon = morning, like the German, morgen

3 bocker looks like bok which is book - is bocker books?

Yes. Add two dots over the o and add two letters of the alphabet and you have the plural, books.

4 Kommer looks like come and sounds like come. It translates as comes. 

5 fragar with a circle above the first a, ask?

fraga is ask. fragar (with a circle above the first a) is questions

6 skrattar - laughing

7 hastar with two dots over the first a is horses

Simple Wiki explains the pronunciation

There are three characters in the Swedish language that are not used in English. These are å, ä and ö. The letter å is a vowel sound between [a] and [o], similar to the English word awe. The letter ä is a vowel sound similar to [ɛ], like in the English word bed. The letter ö is a vowel sound between [o] and [ɛ], pronounced [øː] like the u in the English word burn. These characters are also used in the Finnish language, while Norwegian and Danish languages replace ä and ö with similar characters æ and ø.

Swedish also has some important differences in grammar. Definite articles are suffixed onto the end of their nouns, so ett hus (a house) becomes huset (the house). Also unlike English, Swedish uses two grammatical genders called Common and Neuter. Nouns of the Common gender are sometimes called "en words", and many words for living (or once-living) things are "en words". Nouns of the Neuter gender are sometimes called "ett words".

Swedish	English
Ett/En	One
Två	Two
Tre	Three
Fyra	Four
Fem	Five
Sex	Six
Sju	Seven
Åtta	Eight
Nio	Nine
Tio	Ten
Ja	Yes
Nej	No
Jag	I
Du	You
Mig	Me
Han	He
Hon	She
Vi	We
De/dem	They/them
Jag är	I am
Sverige	Sweden
Hus	House
Hem	Home
Väg	Way
Björnar	Bears
Hjälp	Help

Basic Swedish Expressions

God dag/Hej	Good day/Hello
Hur mår du?	How are you?
Jag mår bra, tack	Very good, thank you
Tack	Thank you
Tack så mycket	Thank you very much
God morgon	Good morning
God eftermiddag	Good evening
Hej då	Goodbye

Useful websites

Swedish and other languages to learn

duolingo.com

Swedish language in Wikipedia

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More Swedish Words - More Travel Triumph

 I spent a lot of time travelling on trains today. But I also learned a few more Swedish words.

Swedish - English

fisk - fish

Morgon - morning (like the German word morgen)

pasta - pasta

vi - we

vin - wine

English - Swedish

fish - fisk

morning - morning

pasta - pasta

We - vi

wine - vin (the same as the French)

I've read several articles about the shortcomings of Duolingo. But it does what I want. It gets me started. It keeps me learning. Yes, I could make more progress later by going on to do other things. Meanwhile, it's better than nothing and it relieves the tedium of travel and relieves the stress of delays.

Useful Websites

duolingo.com

https://visitsweden.com/

Malay Greetings, Signs, Everyday Words

Malay - English

(In order in the sentence)

pintu - door

keluar -exit (adjectives follow nouns in Malay)

kecemasan - emergency / worried

di - at

sebelah - next door

hadapan - forward

dan - and

belakang - back 

kereta - car

api - fire

Malay - English 

(alphabetically)

api - fire (Both words contain the letter i, think of alight, potent)

belakang - back (both words have b a k)

dan - and

di - at

hadapan - forward

kecemasan - emergency (or worried)

keluar - exit

kereta - car (carriage of railway)

pintu - door

sebelah - next door

English - Malay

and - dan

at - di

back - belakang

car - kereta

door - pintu

exit - keluar

emergency - kecemasan

fire - api

forward - hadapan

next door - sebelah

Problem
What are those Malay signs? How do I say goodbye and thank you?

Answers
English - Malay / Indonesian

Welcome - Selamat tinggal
Goodbye - Selamat datang

Good morning - Selamat pagi (Every day is a new page. Good morning.)
Good afternoon - Selamat petang (The letters an in petang looks like a.m.)
Good night -Selamat malam

danger - bahaya (Reminds me of the phrase on beachside signs in tsunami areas - danger ... climb to higher ground.)
exit - keluar (The x and K are a similar shape, like people running from danger, from a door, in two directions.)
Entrance - Pintu masuk
door - pintu

Malay / Indonesian - English

bahaya - danger
keluar - exit
malam - night
masuk - go in
pagi - morning

petang - afternoon
pintu - door
pintu masuk - entrance
Selamat malam - Good night
Selamat pagi - good morning

Selamat petang - Good afternoon
Selamat tinggal - welcome
tinggal - live (If you and this girl are alive, and you are tickled, you are tingling.)

Author
Angela Lansbury, teacher of English and other languages. Home tutor, workshops, speeches for colleges and businesses.

Learning German Language Insights

Problem
How do I / you / we remember that morgen is tomorrow and not just morning?
How do I / you / we remember that drucken is print?

Answer
Imagine that somebody says he will pay you in the morning. However, you are sceptical, and think it will be some time later in the day, no guarantee that the money will reach you in the morning. So when a German or anybody speaking German promises you he / she will do something 'morgen', it means some time tomorrow. (Unspecified when. Only in the morning if you are lucky.)

Tips
German - English
drucken - press / print (verb)
morgen - tomorrow

English - German
press \ print - drucken
tomorrow - morgen

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, teacher of English and languages.
See my books on Lulu.com and Amazon. See profiles and more posts on blogger.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, plus videos on YouTube. Please like, follow and share pages.

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Flowers to photograph in Singapore: how and why to take photos

Problem
Ho can you capture and preserve the flowers you pass? We don't yet have the ability to record and reproduce perfumes and aromas - I've read that this is being researched and one day will arrive - but you can record the flowers. Some tilt up, some tilt down. They may open at night, or open in the day to see the sun and attract the bees and close in the evening.

Answer
Here below are my flowers seen and photographed on the walk from an MRT station back to a condo. If a walk is tiring or boring, you can brighten it up by taking photos. (If your long-legged friends are walking too fast, you can stop them by taking a photo.)

A few days later it's lovely to look at the photos. I spin up and down, seeing something different in every photo each time. Looking at photos of flowers is like meditation, a distraction form stress, calming. Maybe that's why painters, in the days before photography and TV and films, provided still life paintings. From the point of view of a photographer, a flower is easier to capture than moving people, vehicles, animals, birds and butterflies. If you can add a human being, an animal, a bird, a butterfly, even a shoe or piece of litter to m contrast, show size, you are more likely to create a photo different from there average and win a competition.

I went to a lot of trouble to get the flowers without leaves which were turning brown or eaten into holes. I wanted a pretty pictures. I should have taken one with holes, for an article on what is eating your plants, or for some philosophical point about plants are food for insects, or into every life a little rain must fall and some nasty insects as well.

Another way to create a set of interesting photos would be to take the same flowers at dawn and at dusk, or in sunny and wet weather, or in a country which has seasons, in spring and autumn.

Also see my previous post showing a bird drinking nectar with its beak in an aloe vera plant on my balcony in Singapore.
Author Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Author and speaker.

Flower photos by Angela Lansbury.
Copyright Angela Lansbury
All rights reserved

Remembering Indonesian greetings for times of the day

Problem
They all look similar. Nothing like English words.
How do you remember it's s e l a m a t and not s a l a a m which is the Arabic for peace / greeting.

Answer
Here they are in order
Selamat page - good morning
Selamat s i a n g between 11 and 3 pm (like a long French lunch hour)
Selamat sore - good afternoon - until sunset
Selamat madam - good evening /night?

Story
I have made up my own memory aids.
Selamat s a l a a m AT Malaysia and Indonesia.

PAgi - start of the dAy. P A y if you go to work.

SIANG - swings from morning to afternoon.

SoRE - sore we close at sunset.

M A L A M - until midnight.

After finishing the greetings taster "first lesson free', I was invited to sign up at this cost:
One month for US$12.95, charges every month.
Their best seller, they say, is the 3 months commitment, US$8.95 charges US$26.85 charged every 3 months; 6 months for $US 7.45, charges US$44.70 every 6 months; and the 'best price' US$6.95 a month, charged at US$83.40 renewing every 12 months.
If you need this for work, can get an employer to pay, are self-employed and can offset this against tax, are staying at home by choice, or stuck at home and want amusement, are thinking of moving overseas, have a boy/girl relationship and need a language, then it may be worth your while.
If you are short of cash, or can't commit, try DuoLingo.
You might even try both.

Angela Lansbury, teacher of English and languages. Author. Speaker.
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