As a linguistics major, one of my favourite aspects of the InterDaf language classes were the phonetics classes.
I think it was really cool that they taught the language with particular attention to the pronunciation and the production of german sounds that we don’t have in English. In particular, I enjoyed learning about the certain environments in which “ch” is pronounced /ç/ and when it is pronounced /x/.
Another interesting observation that I was able to make about the German language were the similarities to French.
For example, when answering yes to a negative question, you would reply “doch” , whereas for a positive question you would reply “ja” and I was able to compare french “si” and “oui”. Further, the tenses in German have similar purposes as the tenses in French. It also helped me to decipher when to use think and know “wissen” vs. “können” as it is the same in French with “croire” and “savoir”.
Additionally, I was really delighted to learn that in general, many of the irregular verbs that change the vowel when forming the past tense are shared amongst German and English. I was really happy to have been able to cross apply my knowledge of historical linguistics here as these verbs such as “ Iswim” which becomes “I swam” in English and is “ich schwimme” and “ich schwamm” in German are a class of verbs called strong verbs- which English Inherited from Proto-Germanic!
