I’m starting to learn German from a total zero starting point. This is already a very humbling experience. I keep thinking how similar it is to being a toddler once more. I’m getting a set of lessons from a tutor and I’ll also be using a CD course from Michel Thomas. Anyway here are a few sentences that I’m aiming to use in these early days of learning the very very basics.
| Ich weiß nicht. | I don’t know. |
| Bitte noch einmal. | Again please. |
| Ich verstehe nicht. | I don’t understand. |
| Entschuldigung, sprechen Sie langsamer. | Sorry, please say that slowly. |
| Wie heißt das auf Deutsch? | What does it mean in English? |
| Buchstabieren Sie bitte. | Spell it please. |
| Wie schreibt man das? | How do you write that? |
And perhaps most useful:
Hilfe! Help!
There is one tech thing that struck me in one of my early lessons. It was when I was learning to count. The German for zero is “null”. That strikes me a quite problematic. If I talk to a German colleague and say “null” he might easily think I’m saying “0″! Of course null and zero are quite different and mixing the two could cause some very hard-to-find bugs in code. I wonder if this is a common problem, with IT teams that span the English and German languages.
