I am just looking for a good German to English Translation site, for checking passages that I write in German??
Thanks.
Hi Everyone.
http://translate.google.com/
http://translation.babylon.com/german/to-english/
http://www.online-translator.com/
http://translate.reference.com/
Hey jrspet.
Thanks for all of these links, was an incredible help!
P.S Do you also know of any sites where you can test pronunciation?
Thank you so much again!
Google Translate .. bottom right corner with the audio icon. You can also use the mic icon for fun.
I wanted to write an email in English about the German election to a friend. I checked my English through googletranlation so that he gets the news!
Try www.freetranslation.com they are quite good as well...
Thanks, I've tried this one too. My English speaking friend will be so well informed:
Hi.
Thanks everyone!
When I spoke to an Immigrations person about my integration here they said that a good way to learn German is by writing a diary entry in German every day.
I was thinking the best way to do this is write the entry in English first, then translate it into German myself then use a translation site to correct myself. However I am not sure about writing it in English first as wouldn't that defeat the purpose of me learning German as I would always be trying to translate it literally?
Any other suggestions??
Thanks!!
Hi
I am learning German essentially through classes and watching TV, reading and radio as I improve. I don't think it would be possible ( for me) to learn it through writing texts and then translating them, how would you understand the grammar? It's A very rules based language. Everyone is different though so maybe it works for you. Anyway, I see you live in Ebikon, I can recommend the Stad Bibliotehk in Luzern (löwenplatz) as a great resource , it is free to join and has lots of CDs, Cd Roms, textbooks and easier books to borrow for 1 or 2 franks for 4 weeks.
Thanks alot! Will definitely look into that!!
German is coming along well now so thankyou all for your help!
One more to add to the list:
User submitted definitions with a lot of idioms and colloquial phrases. Very useful and there's an app for it!
Translation is one method to learn, especially for beginners. But after a while, you run into these problems:
(1) word-to word translation does not handle synonyms.
The average English word has 3 to 8 meanings, and German I believe 2 to 5. You need to know the context. Try the same sentence in different machines and you will get to know their abilities. Translation by phrases is better.
(2) you waste time in the back and forth translation. The goal is to think in the second language, even when your vocabulary is limited. Read books which are at a level so that you understand 80-95% of the words, and read short news items (20Min). Don't often look words up, you will get them slowly into your mind.
I like the idea of writing to a keypal for exercises. Translating and reviewing the text is fine, even for advanced learners! It is useful for instance for business letters, which have a lot of fixed phrases which are recognised by a good translation system.
I'm working on a web site with "a thousand ways to learn English" and "two hundred ways to learn vocabulary".
Graham
http://www.linguee.com/ is a great translation service as well, I really like the way they display results in both languages.
Thanks! :-)
kelly it is important to know the vocab first.what i learned in language classes at school was: vocab and practice. try to care about mistakes but dont let this frighten you doing mistakes when speaking or writing.
like if youre looking for the sportsground and you say "wo platz sport?" i do understand and tell you where the sportplatz actually is. and via practicing it though you root it from english will bring you to the stage that you use the right vocab and grammar. thats how it worked for me though my english and russian is not good.
one other way that I personally found very useful to learn languages was to watch Euronews in my mother tongue and then in the language I wanted to learn. It was very helpful to hear the same content in the two languages and make "passively" (i.e. without working too much with dictionaries) the connection between the two languages. The other advantage is that news are short in duration, so you can start / stop / resume at any time and are obviously informative...
How about actually starting with something that's in German. It could be a German magazine or newspaper article, it could be a conversation you had with the old lady from downstairs. It could be a stupid rant by the guy in the pub. It could be something you saw on TV. Then go to your diary and try to write somnething about that. You will still have some of the words and maybe bits of phrases in your head, but can try to bend them around to make them express your opinion or interpretation or just some musings on what you read or heard.
I actually learnt a lot of German through the newspaper. This was before the days of 20 Minuten, so i would go and buy a newspaper every day. I tried different ones to get a feeliong for different styles and levels of German (from tabloids to high-ranking stuff) and I selected one or two articles on topics that interested me and I would try and re-tell the story in my own words. Cheating was allowed at first but I tried to do that less and less. I had an exercise book into which I would write my stuff and also paste the article for comparison. Looking back at it now it's really quite amusing.
The trick with the above is that it teaches you to think in German, and the speaking often follows naturally from that. If you write it in English first, you are preventing that important step.
It really depends what you find is best for you, but personally I don't think this is the best idea. For me I just get too confused if I try and directly translate an English sentence to German, plus the grammar is completely different and it just won't make sense. This happens to me alot when I have been speaking English for sometime and then must switch to German, I end up directly translating from English at first and my German sounds really funny as I use English grammar. I find it best to seperate the 2 lanaguges clearly and only translate words not sentences.