Extending vocab

Victoria and me met again today in Café Europe to work a little bit on the vocab of each other.

Therefore I printed out the 500 ‘groundwords’ when learning German. In theory these are the most commonly used words. If someone knows those words, he is able to apply rules and endings of those 500 words to words they hear for the first time. Today we just talked about the first half, as 500 was really too much for one day. Victoria already knows a lot of words from her German class, so I did not have to explain and translate every word, so we could move on quickly.
But I realized again, that it is really hard to teach German, if you do not know the rules, but just know everything from childhood. For example for the German articles ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’ there is no official rule which one to take for which words, but Victoria could teach me like rules of thumb, that she learned from her teacher in class. Even as German you never stop learning the German language.

In return she gave me some vocab for the house and the household I could use when talking to my parents at home. Some of them were already familiar to me, but some were really weird. We realized that my parents often use really old vocabulary at home, that Victoria knows, but which is usually not used in general. That is really funny, because I can teach my parents the commonly used Russian words, even though they are the regular Russian speakers.
I am really looking forward to use the learned things back at home in May!

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