French – German: describing your living situation

Today was our second lesson and we decided to focus on some phrases to describe our living situation. So we looked at phrases to describe our apartment layout, how many and which rooms we have and on what floor the apartment is located.

I was still struggling with the pronunciation of some French words, but I felt a bit more confident than last time. Sometimes it was a bit difficult to get the pronunciation just right because of the zoom audio. Especially in short words, it would sometimes cut off parts of the word.

This time German had a big surprise for me. Building the plural form of German nouns is surprisingly hard to explain. This is something I never thought about because it comes naturally as a native speaker. We searched online to find some grammar rules on this topic, but they were quite complex as well. Even with these rules, there are quite a few exceptions. We looked at the words for “kitchen” (Küche) and living room (Wohnzimmer). If you build the plural form of “Küche” you just add an “n” (eine Küche, zwei Küchen) while the noun “Wohnzimmer” does not change when you build the plural form (ein Wohnzimmer, zwei Wohnzimmer). While the German plural forms were quite complicated, the French ones were straight forward. To build the plural of a noun you simply add an “s”.

It was a lot of fun teaching some German today and I feel that I can learn something from it as well. I am eager to see what other surprises German has for me as a native speaker.

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