German/Level I/Wie heißt du



This lesson deals with basic conversation topics such as saying hello and goodbye and asking people how they are feeling. This lesson features audio recordings by native speakers to help you with the pronunciation.

Dialogue
Read and listen to the following dialogue between two students: Franz and Greta. You don't have to understand anything! You should rather try to find out how each word is pronounced.

Now try to understand the dialogue with the help of the following list of vocabulary. (A complete translation is given in the answers to the next problems.)

Hellos and Goodbyes
There are many ways of saying hello and goodbye in German; some of them are:

* You will need to know each expression with an asterisk (*) after it. The others, of course, would be useful to know if you are traveling to regions where they are used. (As you can see, the different German-speaking regions often have their own ways of saying hello and goodbye. However, you will not be required to know any of these less common phrases for any problems or tests.)

The more formal phrases are guten Morgen, guten Tag, and auf Wiedersehen. The less formal ones are tschüss, Tag, servus, and ciao. The others are somewhat inbetween formal and informal.

Mr. and Mrs.
In German, Herr and Frau are used instead of Mr. and Mrs. before a last name; e.g., Mr. Schwarz – Herr Schwarz.

Frau is used for married and unmarried women. Some people still use Miss – Fräulein in spoken German but it is no longer used in written German since it is considered an inappropriate discrimination of unmarried women.

Literally, der Herr means the gentleman and die Frau means the woman. If you use these words without a last name after them, you have to use an article before them; e.g., der Herr or die Frau. This is actually just like in English. For example:
 * The woman's name is Mrs. Weiß – Die Frau heißt Frau Weiß.

Note also that the German translation of the man is der Mann and the lady should be translated to die Dame. Thus, without last names you would rather use these pairs:
 * man and woman – Mann und Frau
 * men and women – Männer und Frauen
 * lady and gentleman – Dame und Herr
 * ladies and gentlemen – Damen und Herren

Replies to Wie geht's?
There are many ways to reply to the question Wie geht's? Here are some of them: * The more formal form is Wie geht es Ihnen?

After replying to the question, you could continue with: Or shorter:
 * And how are you? — Und wie geht es dir? (formal: Und wie geht es Ihnen?)
 * And you? — Und dir? (or: Und selbst?; or formal: Und Ihnen?)

Test
The test consists of three parts: pronunciation, vocabulary, and translation. As always, you should write down your answers before you check them. (Writing the German words is in fact a great way to practice the spelling of German words.) The vocabulary and translation problems are all from English to German because this is what you have to learn if you want to communicate in German. Once you are able to translate an English word to the corresponding German word, it won't be any problem to translate the German word back to English.

External resources

 * Vocabulary drill for this level on Memrise