German in bite-sized chunks

Lesson 2: Introducing yourself

This will be the first regular lesson and it is about introducing yourself. Let's have a look at such an introduction:

"Guten Tag! Ich heiße Lisa Müller. Ich wohne in Washington, aber ich komme aus Deutschland. Ich arbeite als Fremdenführerin."

Vocabulary

Explanations

1. You probably already noticed that there's an entry for e.g. "heißen" in the vocabulary list but not for "heiße". That is because "heiße" is a conjugated form, like "am called", whereas "heißen" is the infinitive "be called". You wouldn't say "I be called" either, would you? That's what "ich heißen" would sound like to a German. So take off the -n from all the verbs listed in the vocabulary or a dictionary in order to get the 1st person singular form (the one to be used with "I").

2. Why is Fremdenführer just one (admittedly long) word? Germans don't like to put spaces in between nouns that obviously belong together, so in such cases you will often find them glued together while English uses two words to convey the same meaning. The words glued together here are: "Fremden"(strangers) and "Führer"(guide, leader). In your pronunciation you should always reflect that these are separate parts and pronounce it "Fremden-führer". If you pronounce it "Frem-denführer", people might have difficulties understanding you.

3. Why is Fremdenführer spelled with a capital letter? This is not a typo. In German, you actually have to spell every noun with a capital letter. This may look strange to you at first, but it is very useful, because it makes the language less ambiguous, at least in writing.

Exercises

Use the words you have learned in this lesson as often as you can in the next few days. If you don't know any Germans or German-learning friends on whom you could try them out, at least call them up in your memory whenever you have a few minutes to spare and imagine how you would introduce yourself to somebody in Germany.

If you have some spare time left, do the exercises I created for this lesson: there's a quiz, a crossword as javascript game or for printout and a fill-in-the-gap exercise.

Extension

If you'd like to learn more words that you can use without having to study another lesson, use this section in order to find them. Feel free to learn selectively, picking out words you consider useful for your situation or interesting. If you don't have the time, feel free to just skip this section. I will not require you to know any of these words in the next lessons.

Additional expressions: "Ich spreche Englisch und Französisch. Ich lerne Deutsch."
New words: sprechen (to speak), und (and), lernen (to learn) and language names from the list below.

Word lists (not complete) for use with this lesson's expressions: