Guten Morgen Grammar: Simple Past my Ars…t

One of my beloved regular readers requested a lesson on using the simple past in everyday conversation, so hold on to your jimjams because HERE WE GO. First things first: let’s decide on our terminology. Lots of people call this tense the ‘past historic’, presumably alluding to the ‘passé historique’ in French whose sole purpose is to create lingering acidic hatred in secondary schoolkids. I don’t really think this name is very helpful as it just sounds poncey and doesn’t enlighten us at all about what the tense is actually doing. Others call it the ‘imperfect past tense’, which is...

Are you going to Maker Faire / Circuits, lathes, lawnmowers and twine

The craft community has a great many factions. Of course, you always start off with the hordes of grandmas knitting and stitching lovely things for people who can’t wait to wear them ironically outside a pulled-pork food truck somewhere. Then there are the cutesy crafters who insist on making things covered with emblems of cupcakes and owls, and pretend to ‘upcycle’ by using brand-new mason jars for non-jar-related purposes, and fashion cozies for everything and anything which actually manages to stay at a completely acceptable temperature by itself. There are the grunge-crafters, who like old pallets (a coffee table!) and...

Arise, Sir Flance-alot

Alright, first of all let’s get the admin out of the way. There hasn’t been much content on GMB of late, mostly because I’ve been working my guts out on the Glossarama, partly because I’ve been trying my best to write decent chunks of text about funerals and scrap car removal, and most recently because my exciting amazing journey into a whole new vocation hit a brick wall when my course was cancelled. Just called off, sacked off, just as I was hitting my stride, my career trajectory resembling the flight pattern of one of those paper planes you make...

Guten Morgen Grammar: Weak masculine nouns, and other life truths reflected in grammar

You guys: first of all, I am sorry for the delay in posts at the moment. As I’ll explain in an upcoming entry, life has taken an unfortunate u-turn and I haven’t had much time to blog. But more importantly, this post has been a long time coming because I have been working on a very special present for all of you. At the end of this post. Now you just HAVE to read on. Today in Guten Morgen Grammar we’re going to talk about a special kind of noun in German which tends to catch a lot of people...

Guten Morgen Grammar: Let’s talk about bzw

Boy howdy, German loves abbreviations. Particularly in emails and official municipal writings, the writing is peppered with odd little fragments like bzw and usw and z.B….omg, it’s like fml, seriously wtf. ANYWAY, enough whimsy. Let’s look at some of the most popular ones, and how to use them properly.   usw Stands for: und so weiter – etcetera This is probably the easiest one to use – just throw it in there wherever you would use etc in English, for example at the end of a list or extended description. Just remember that with usw you don’t put a full-stop/period...

SEO (and white gazpacho)

When I applied for funding for the course I am now doing, I was assigned a contact person at the Arbeitsagentur who sent me a very long form to fill in (we’re talking ‘Please use additional pages for your answer if required’-long here, people). I diligently filled in the form extolling the countless virtues in learning programming, particularly for someone who graduated in two subjects which are about as much use in Germany as an MSc in Surfboard Repair. I also diligently found and printed out a minimum of ten job ads which were asking for the skills I would...

How to cycle in the districts of Berlin – a beginner’s guide

  Prenzlauer Berg Maintain a steady speed of no more than 2 miles per hour, but ensure that you remain in a low enough gear that your legs are a frantic blur. You must equip your bicycle with at least one of the following: a) a small child, strapped to a plastic chair, bolted to the back of the bike. b) a small child, eating a disintegrating banana, sealed inside a wheeled plastic cubicle attached to the back of the bike. Ideally, you would have both. Friedrichshain Acceptable styles of bike include: ones with huge, thick wheels like an all-terrain...

School vs. Grown-up-school

1. School – Some kids sneak out now and then during the day for a crafty fag. Grown-up school – Some people go out now and then during the day for a crafty fag. No sneaking is required. Also, it’s less ‘now and then’ and more ‘every damn hour’. Also, the teacher tends to join them. 2. School – The kids get into tight social cliques who spend all their time together and bitch about other people in the breaks. Grown-up school – The people get into tight social cliques who spend all their time together and bitch about other...

Legs that won’t quit

  Last week on Wednesday, I was hit by a bus. Thankfully not to the extent that I was pulverised; the coachdriver was turned right without checking to see if anyone was going across the side-road, so he was going fairly slowly, but I still ended up fully underneath the belly of his massive motor with my arms and legs painfully tangled among the sprockets of my bike. Some wonderful people taking signatures for the Rote Nasen immediately pulled me and my bike out from under the bus and gave me a red nose to cheer me up once the...

Guten Morgen Grammar: Conjunctions part 2 – Fly away, little verb

  In Part 1 we took a look at co-ordinating conjunctions and what I call ‘mixed conjunctions’. As I mentioned, these conjunctions could also be seen as ‘easy’ and ‘medium’ conjunctions, like difficulty levels in Guitar Hero: for ‘easy’ you play with just three fingers, for ‘medium’ you play with four, and for ‘hard’ you have to play chords with your forehead while solving physics equations that flash up on the screen…or something, I haven’t played that game in a while. Anyway – now it’s time for us to dive into the ‘hard’ conjunctions: subordinating conjunctions. Don’t panic, though. Subordinating...