Tag 01 - Erste Wörter

Tag 01 von 60 - Aussprache, Begrüßung, sich vorstellen. Zwei Stunden.

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Today is the smallest possible day: how German vowels actually sound, six greetings, and enough to say who you are and where you live. It will feel too easy. That is intended - the first week exists to get the sounds right before bad habits set, and to make day forty possible.

How to run this page

Work top to bottom. Say every answer out loud before you type it, including the ones you are sure of. Nothing on this page is saved - if you reload, every score resets to zero, which is the point. Type umlauts properly if you can; the checker accepts ue for ü and ss for ß but will tell you off politely.

1. Aussprache - die fünf Vokale

German vowels are pure. English speakers slide one vowel into another without noticing: the English “o” in go is really “oh-u”. German does not do that. The mouth holds one position for the whole vowel.

Each vowel comes in a long and a short version. The rule of thumb that covers most cases:

Signal	Length	Beispiel
Vowel followed by h	long	Bahnhof, ihm, wohnen
Vowel doubled	long	Tee, Saal, Boot
Vowel before one consonant	usually long	Tag, gut, Name
Vowel before two or more consonants	short	Mann, kommt, ist

Say these pairs aloud, three times each. The difference is length, not quality:

Lang	Kurz
Tag	Tasche
wen	wenn
ihn	in
Ofen	offen
Mut	Mutter

Three sounds to fix on day one

w is an English v: wohnen starts like vohnen. v is an English f: Vater starts like fahter. z is ts: zehn starts like tsayn. Get these three wrong now and you will still be fixing them in month four.

2. Neue Bausteine - zwölf Stück

Read each one aloud twice before you start the drill. The English is only there to point at the meaning; you are learning the German, not the pair.

Deutsch	English	Wann
Guten Morgen	good morning	until about 11:00
Guten Tag	hello	the safe daytime greeting
Guten Abend	good evening	from about 18:00
Hallo	hi	informal, any time
Tschüss	bye	informal
Auf Wiedersehen	goodbye	formal, and on the phone
Ich heiße Ravi	my name is Ravi	literally: I am called
Wie heißen Sie?	what is your name	formal
Ich bin aus Indien	I am from India	origin, country
Ich wohne in Hamburg	I live in Hamburg	where you live now
Ja, genau	yes, exactly	very common in conversation
Nein, danke	no, thank you

3. Drills

Four kinds, borrowed from the old Foreign Service method. They are mechanical on purpose: the point is speed and automaticity, not thought.

Substitutionsdrill

Replace the word in brackets and say the whole new sentence.

Konversionsdrill

Give the matching pair: the greeting for the time of day, or the question that fits the answer.

Antwortdrill

Answer as yourself, in a full sentence.

Übersetzungsdrill

4. Sofortwiederholung

There is nothing from yesterday to review, so today’s repetition happens inside the session instead. Shuffle this and run it twice - once now, once at the very end of your two hours.

5. Text und Hören

Every line uses only what you learned today.

A: Guten Tag! Wie heißen Sie? B: Hallo! Ich heiße Ravi. A: Ich heiße Anna. Ich wohne in Hamburg. B: Ich wohne in Hamburg. Ich bin aus Indien. A: Auf Wiedersehen! B: Tschüss!

Read it aloud twice, both parts. Then cover the text and say B’s lines from memory.

6. Bidirektional

Translate into German. Then compare - and read the difference between your line and the model out loud. On Tag 03 you will translate these back the other way, so do them properly now.

7. Sprechen - zehn Minuten

Paste this into a voice AI and actually speak. Ten minutes, out loud, standing up.

Du bist eine freundliche Person in einem Café in Hamburg. Ich bin absoluter
Anfänger (Tag 1, A1). Sprich sehr langsam und nur mit diesen Wörtern:
Guten Morgen, Guten Tag, Guten Abend, Hallo, Tschüss, Auf Wiedersehen,
Ich heiße, Wie heißen Sie, Ich bin aus, Ich wohne in, Ja genau, Nein danke.
Stelle mir nur zwei Fragen: wie ich heiße und wo ich wohne. Maximal fünf
Wörter pro Satz. Wenn ich einen Fehler mache, wiederhole den Satz einfach
richtig, ohne Erklärung. Fang jetzt an und begrüße mich.

What to do when you get stuck

Say Wie bitte? and let them repeat. Do not switch to English and do not apologise - at day one you are supposed to be bad, and the ten minutes are for producing errors at speed, not for composing good sentences.

8. Auf Papier

Diktat. Play the shadowing audio again. Write down any five German words you hear, by hand, without pausing. You will get some wrong - that is fine, the point is ear to hand.

Satz des Tages. Write these three by hand, from memory, then check them against section 2:

1. Your name.
2. Where you are from.
3. Where you live.

Then write them a second time as one connected sentence using und.

Fehlerliste. Start a page in your notebook called Fehler. Write down every item the drills marked wrong today, in German, correctly. Do not write the English.

Genus-Farben. Nothing to do today - the first nouns arrive on Tag 03, and from then on every noun goes in your notebook in colour: der blue, die red, das green.

Goldlist. Not today either. The first Goldlist page is Tag 03.

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Weiter: Tag 02 - sein und Fragen - die Umlaute, das Verb sein, und die Fragewörter wie, wo, was.