German Tenses | Antimoon Forum

Spanish is the primary language in America. Followed by French, and then German.

Other noteables are Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese.

Clark
These methods you're speaking about are used for teaching English in Primary schools in France, at least in those I know. We call those images 'flash cards'. A flash card is a card with a word, words or a number and sometimes a picture on it. Flash cards are held up for pupils as a visual aid to learning. You show the picture of an apple and you tell them the word 'apple' and you ask them to repeat after you. You may write the word 'apple' overleaf. Falsh cards are very efficeient as a method of language teaching.

Clark
Do American students learn Spanish as a second language because of the large Spanish speaking community in US or for other reasons ?
In your opinion, is Spanish easier than French for An American student ? I mean as a second language.

Kabam
Did you learn any foreign languages or "langues vivantes" as we call them in French at primary school ? I think "langue vivante" is somehow softer than "forign languge" ?

Clark
Sorry ! efficient

Don't tell me Present Perfect is more used in German than in English?

Dorian, in my personal opinion, French is grammatically easier, and the vocabulary is much closer to English. However, Spanish is very phonetic, and every letter is pronounced, even in the spoken language. Whereas French-speakers tend to not pronounce letters and such.

All in all, French is grammatically easier whereas Spanish is easier to comprehend.

I have no idea about German, but it's wildly used in English. I love the English Present Perfect tense. French speaking have problems with it. I don't think this tense really exist in French. I believe they use 'passé composé' instead of it. They use it when they shouldn't and vice versa.
I hear like 'I have been to Mexico ten years ago' instead of 'I went to Mexico ten years ago'. Or I study English for 5 years now instead of I have been studying English for 5 years now.

I am trying to find maps of America showing the population diversity of the states. And by "population diversity," I mean the different immigrant groups that have settled in certain areas. For example, I would like to see a map of the state of Indiana, showing all the people of German, Scots-Irish, French, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, etc...

A long time ago on this forum, there were some threads that had several links to sites like this, but they have been erased.

Any help would be appreciated.

I hate the present perfect .. cause my language is the only one that doesn't have the present perfect.

I love the different tense in English. The differences between some of them are very subtles. But in the other end, they're hell to learn.

Chantal
I have begun to learn English in CM2 (we were to choose English or German initiation and naturally, I took English since my mother had been already teatching me some English at this age which made me curious about it).

SagaSon
Your language along with French,....

If you speak German (except in case you want to sound formal), you don't use the simple past very often. Mostly the perfect (She ran away from home : "Sie ist von zu Hause weggelaufen" instead of "Sie lief von zu Hause weg"). In written German, however, you should make a distinction (also very difficult for native speakers!!). If you know some French, then you can easily apply the rules of French to the German tenses : If you have "passé composé", then you use the perfect. If you have "passé simple" or "imparfait", then in most cases you use simple past. Anyway, the German tenses, or rather the rules are not as strict as in English or French - one will understand you. Punctuation is really a big problem - at school, it was very hard for me to learn all the rules :-(