Learning German

Fortunately or unfortunately I am in Germany these days. Why? Because I got a scholarship to do my PhD at a German university. Bravo! That was a great achievement. But it also included four months of German language learning. I will not write my PhD dissertation in German, nonetheless it was kind of compulsory to avail the offer from German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). So I spent last four months in a language school here in my university city Münster at a very good German language school Kapito. It was a great experience to learn a foreign language (a little hard at first because I used to be an English language teacher in Pakistan and it was difficult for me to accept myself as a student of a foreign language). For about four months, I and my class fellows did our best to enjoy and have fun in our class and our teachers tried their best to teach us German. So after all these months How do I feel? What is German like? Is it easy to learn? Is it like English? A lot of questions can be asked. Let me try to answer and share my observations about German.

• At the beginning I wanted to learn German Phonology because I am trained in English Phonology using Phonetic charts and tables. I was wrong, you cannot learn to pronounce the sounds of a new language simply by knowing place and manner of articulation. It needs a lot of practice which I still lack to be frank. But it is good to know that German is a lot more phonetic language as compared to English.
• I thought German is like English. I tried to understand German grammar w.r.t. English grammar. Resultantly I failed badly. German grammar is awfully more complex as compared to English grammar. The inflection system, the articles and grammatical gender, the case system, pronouns (and their case specific forms) and the word order (a lot more fluent due to rich inflection system) is a nightmare at the start. All of these things are bombarded on the beginner on A1 level, and one has to cope with it, because it is the base. I still only know about half of it by heart.
• German has a lot of similarity with English and Latin (and other European languages). But these similarities can only be traced in etymology of words and some general grammatical concepts (prepositional phrases for instance as opposed to post positional phrases in my mother tongue Punjabi and Urdu). German gives a lot of importance to Verb at second position in main clause. Conversely verb(s) in a dependent clause are put at the end (in reverse order if an auxiliary is involved as well). Having been trained in English Linguistics, I find it (after 4 months) easy to learn German syntax.
• German verbs have a lot more forms (inflections) because of more complex pronoun system (distinction in singular/plural and formal you). German does not have a progressive tense (but there are adverbs to fill in the gap). I am not sure how many tenses, but I just know Present, Perfect, Past, Past Perfect and a kind of future tense using verb 'werden'. German modal verbs are more or less like English but they are confusing as well (Subjunctive mode has different verb forms, 'will' in German is 'want to').
• German loves to make compound nouns with just putting various words together (no dash or indication of sub parts). One has to be familiar with the sub parts (sub words) to pronounce and understand the noun. These nouns can be quite long sometimes.
• Germans love their language. They encourage foreigners to talk in German and they become very happy when you do that. So I am also trying these days to do the same, as being a linguistics student I know that language cannot be learned without using it properly.
• Lastly, German is easy if you give it some time, hear FM in German and watch German TV, read German newspapers and websites and try to use it (even if it is wrong). My biggest flaw being a student is I like to listen or read (and write with the help of dictionary) German but does not speak. Perhaps it is because I learnt English the same way i.e. a lot of years without speaking. My teachers also asked me to break the barrier and speak even with mistakes, in simpler words and not to look for sophisticated vocabulary and (after failing to do so) switch to English. I hope to be able to do that in coming days.

So if you want to learn German, it just needs some dedication, motivation and usage to learn a language. You provide these ingredients and just within six months you will see the positive results.

What is Langauge

Some definitions of language (including Sapir, Hall and Chomsky). A few points on nature of language and study of language.

Characteristics of Language

The presentation was a part of lecture by our teacher in 1st semester. It helped us learn about characteristics and properties of language.

Characteristics of Language

More PowerPoint presentations from Pa G

SEO or Spam Generation?

I've never been able to agree with SEO strategies the 'experts' use to promote websites. Perhaps I am not even a person who can talk about it due to lack on knowledge. But in last 5 years, being online I've heard, read and seen a few things about it. You have to build links and back links. You do it by providing your link to website directories, forums, by commenting on different blogs etc. You write articles about something and publish them in article directories with carefully adding you own website link as well. And what does people do? They go to a blog, "its very good" paste their link and run away. I hate such comments. They write rubbish content, non standard language in the name of article writing, insert a link and put in an article directory which is already full of such crap. When a user will go to Google to search a query, he will come across such directory articles on the topic he was searching. But what is the worth of such topic? Same things said in a different way, to avoid search engine plagiarism detection, sub standard language and content which is produced by someone at $1 per article, what can someone expect from it? So the user disappoints because the article is not helpful, rather it embraces him. I always hated such search results who come to my screen while searching useful content. The webmasters are creating spam, loading internet with tonnes of unnecessary, crap, spam data and there are websites who are happy to store it, show it in their showcase, and there are search engines who are happy to dive again and again in this pool of stenchy water to pull out this crap again and again. What are we collecting in the name of information? How much of today's Tera Byte data is useful and not the regeneration of same old crap, repetition of same thoughts again and again, a mixture of 10 similar articles in 1? I really wonder.

Conflict

In Pakistan, mostly Linguistics is taught with respect to or in association with English literature studies. BZU Multan is the most biggest institute regarding Linguistics education in Pakistan. The students of BZU whether they are mastered in literature or language they have the basic knowledge of the other discipline. MSc Linguistics know the basics of literature and genres and, on the other hand, MA English Literature students have a basic knowledge of the major areas of Linguistics.

Linguistics at GCUF is trying to establish its roots. The Applied Linguistics Department was established in 2006 and after some time it was merged with Department of English. It was run under the head of English department of almost 4+ years. Here at GCUF, we have typical problems of management, favoritism and other such social evils of our society. People cannot see something progressing so linguistics students were suppressed in the department. Thus a dichotomy and tension was created among the two discipline's students. There is a fair state of hatred among them.

The department of applied linguistics is now a separate department but still we do not have equipment, managing staff and sufficient teaching staff. We share everything with department of English. The cream of university, the higher management is also in favor of English department. We need a language lab and today the controller examination of our university announced that department of English should re-submit the proposals etc so it may get the hosting of this language lab. I was wondering what is the need to have a language lab for an English Literature student.

I am not against the merger of these two departments. But the problem is what I mentioned above. The poeple are not ready to accept our existance in university. So we had to separate. Although it looks strange in Pakistani context that linguistics department is separate from english literature department. We should accept the existence of each other in every field of life instead of cutting the roots of each other.

Language Monster?

We are studying Sapir Whorf Hypotheis these days. Along with it there is another cousrse regarding Literary Theory in which we are studying Strucuralism. Both of these theories regard language as if it were a monster. The quotation from Whorf's writings "Humans beings are at the mercy of their Language" is the most controversial one. And then the strcutulists and post-structuralists say that language is superior to our thought. Every thing is a construct of langauge. What we perceive is due to language and nothing else. I am quite confused here because my personal attitude is towards medial way. I think language influences our thought but not determines it. There are lots of examples when human mind breaks the cage of language and thinks beyond the so-called singnification system. All the scientific discoveries and revolutionary ideas are the product of same process. We create words often to name the concepts which we have thought of or oberverd. I personally do not think that langauge 'determines' our thought. Ok I admit it influences but this influence is a biletral process.