The German language

I’ve been learning German these last few weeks. I’m at German lessons three hours per day + homework and five days per week. Its very amusing and interesting. We are doing prepositions. It seems that most German prepositions can be translated into most English prepositions. You just have to know the right context to do it. For example an English preposition is ‘at’. In German it can be an, auf, bei, für, in, mit, nach, über, um, von, vor, zu. That covers about half of common German prepositions. I have made a small matrix to map German prepositions against English ones. There's a dot where one can mean the other.

Yesterday we studied a short passage about Grunewald, which is a huge wood in Berlin and is ‘beloved of Berliners’. In the six year war (Weltkrieg II) it got bombed to bits. (God knows why the Brits an Yanks were bombing a forest.) The Berliners replanted it and also build ‘devils mountain’ (Teufelsberg) with the rubble from the destroyed city. As homework we were asked to write a short essay about Grunewald. I am proud to say that I invented a new word. It’s Weltkriegschutt. That means world-war-rubble – quite an important natural resource in Berlin! When I read out the sentence: Der Teufelberg war vom Weltkriegschutt gebaut, my teacher looked up and nodded in agreement. Hurrah.