Say I'm staying in Cologne or Nuremberg and my flight home is in Frankfurt. Flight is at 12:45. Google says I can get on a 6am train in Nuremberg to arrive at airport at 8:30am which seems plenty early to get through security. Would all of you with experience trust that?
And this has nothing to do with anything but is there a difference between burg and berg when Germans named towns? I'm never sure which way to spell Amberg, Bamberg, Nuremberg. Hamburg, Pittsburgh, Parkersburg...
Train will be o.k.
Add a few more....Rheinsberg, Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Pinneberg bei Hamburg, Flensburg, Burg, Magdeburg, Freiburg, Colburg, Oldenburg, Lauenburg an der Elbe.
To answer the 2nd question, yes. In modern German, Burg means castle or fortification and Berg means mountain. So a town that ends in -berg should be named after a local mountain. And one that ends in -burg should be named after a castle.
But in reality it is usually not that simple. Burg is also an older word for town. Add to that local names that get changed over time as the language evolves and a number of towns that where originally named in other languages and later "germanified", and it can get complicated.
Your plan seems fine. When take the train to Frankfurt from where I live, I try to make sure that there are at least two later connections that will get me there in time for my flight, in case there is a problem. That is in no way scientific, but it is just the fist rule that I use to estimate timings.
About your second question: "Berg" and "Burg" are two different words in German: A "Berg" is a mountain. A "Burg" is a castle (not a palace, which is a Schloss, but more of a defensive castle). I think for a lot of English-speakers, these words sound quite similar. But for a German-speaker, they are quite distinct, so it is not really possible to confuse them. As to why some towns are named after one feature and others after the other...that is more confusing.
I tend to be cautious when it comes to international flights. You'd probably be just fine most of the time, but the DB can fail you when you are most anxious to get somewhere. Would I trust it? Yes. Would I trust it with an expensive and important flight? Depends on my flexibility level and the availability of other options. If it's "make the flight or miss the wedding," I wouldn't trust it. If it's "guess I get a bonus day in Frankfurt and am heading into work tired on Monday," I would trust it.
And yes, there is a huge difference in German. Berg means mountain, Burg means fortress. They are pronounced completely differently in German. Berg is pronounced closer to "bairg" and Burg is closer to "boorg".
On-time performance for long-distance trains (IC, ICE, EC, etc.) was only 75% in the previous year. Regional trains have a better record at around 90-95%.
On departure days it is my practice to stay no more than an hour away from the airport, preferably closer, and to use only DIRECT regional trains. I love Nuremberg but I've never stayed there on my final night - not close enough to FRA for me.
It's not just train delays that concern me. If you are planning to buy a "saver fare" ticket from Nuremberg to Frankfurt Flughafen, well, what if you miss that train for whatever reason? It's of no use - then you buy a full fare ticket and arrive even later.
In your situation, I'd travel from N'berg on a saver fare the night before, either to Frankfurt Hbf or to Mainz Hbf. From either one of these, there are 3+ direct regional trains per hour that take 10-25 minutes. On an extra-long travel day across the Atlantic, I have no interest in getting up so early or in skipping breakfast, or in rushing my morning routine to be on a 6 am train - not for a 12:45 departure (maybe it's me, but I always seem to leave something behind when I'm rushed.)
Berg is pronounced closer to "bairg" and Burg is closer to "boorg".
What Howlinmad said except for what my German phonetics professor called *Entvokalizierung im Wortauslaut¹ *, or devocalization of the end of the word. Consonant sounds at the end of a word are devoiced. Those words are pronounced like "bairk" and "boork", with the 'r' sound kind of subdued.
1 Corrected
I hope I've explained that correctly. I invite our native Germans to correct me if not.
Consonants come in pairs - b & p, d & t, g & k, z & s, w (pro. like a v) & f - with the mouth parts in the same position for both of the pair, and the difference being that the first of the pair is pronounced using our vocal cords (voiced) and the second of the pair is merely "exploded" out of the mouth (de-voiced). So in German, Zug is pronounce "tsuk", Tag is
"tak", Alb is "Alp",a dog is a "Hunt", etc.
The cuckoo clock town is Tree-bairk (Triberg).
In assessing German trains on time performance you have to understand that Germans are pretty fussy about punctuality. If a train is going to be 5 minutes late, they put it on the arrival board, "5 min verspätet". Their definition of late is a bit tighter than ours. I would point out that the light rail stations in Denver don't have clocks.
Nevertheless, I would still be cautious about depending too much on trains being on time when you have to make a set flight time. Three times out of eleven I have travel 1 to 2 hours to get to the airport on the day of departure, but once it was a direct train, twice was with only a connection with local transport on one end. More often, I try to be within about 20-30 minutes from the airport with one leg of local transport and no connections.
On my last trip to German, I used 1H45 hours getting to the airport, a 1H15 RE to Frankfurt Hbf and an S-Bahn (12 min) to the airport, and made it with plenty of time to spare. The fact that the S-Bahn runs every 15 minutes was reassuring. If my transportation is delayed, and I still catch the flight but if my luggage were to miss the flight, I'm going home anyway. And anyway, I'm carrying on, so if I make the flight, my luggage does too.
I would trust the direct trains but be a bit hesitant on connections especially if its just 10 minutes or so. A few minutes delay can always happen add the fact that long distance trains usually do not wait for regional trains that can be a recipe for disaster.
"...so it's really not possible to confuse them." How true !
"I'm never sure which way to spell Amberg, Bamberg, Nuremberg. Hamburg, Pittsburgh, Parkersburg..."
Welcome to the club! If you don't speak German, you have lots of company.
There is no way to figure out whether "e" or "u" is right by using your own English pronunciation of these place names. Without knowing German already, you can only learn this spelling place name by place name - the same way you learned whether Pittsburg, Parkersburg, Edinburg, and Plattsburg are supposed to get an "h" at the end or not. As an English speaker, you have no phonological cues to rely on.
The reason this is so much harder with German place names is that there are so many -bergs and -burgs for you to remember individually. We don't have so many of those in English. It's a big brain task.
OTOH, small German children who are pre-literate have no problems learning to spell these places correctly later on because they have learned certain German phonological patterns which English lacks - patterns that ensure that places like Rothenburg and Rothenberg are not confused when they eventually learn how to write. To the kids, they sound different - so they automatically get spelled differently. Knowing how they are pronounced makes spelling them easy, as German spelling is highly consistent with the spoken word.
English however has certain sound-sequence restrictions on which vowels get pronounced in a "closed" syllable prior to "r" + certain consonants:
gorge ("o" vowel is present)
barge ("a" vowel is present)
But other sounds aren't permitted and disappear entirely - only the "r" sound is heard in these words, for example; vowel letters and vowel sounds are irrelevant:
urge/emerge/dirge/
skirt/hurt/Hertz
So when they're confronted with "-burg" and "-berg", English speakers oversimplify as they would in English, making spelling distinctions tricky.
Throw in some more into the mix....Marburg an der Lahn, Lüneburg, Naumburg an der Saale, Warburg/Westfalen, Hohensyburg bei Dortmund, Wolfsburg, Harburg, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Babelsberg,
Where I am from the g at the end is not a k ("bairk" or "boork"), but more of a "ch". A Zug is a "tsooch" with the oo sounding like look or book. The r in -burg gets a bit lost as well up here in Hamburch. But Lee more or less has it right.
For the German linguists in the group, this "weather forecast" from 1973 captures both the linguistic and cultural elements of some of our speech patterns pretty well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7a6ak8QggY
Re Howlinmad: Great clip. And, yes, totally agree. The (really quite accurate) description by Lee applies generally to Standard German pronunciation, but not to dialect, which actually influences regional pronunciation even of Standard German a lot. I would say that very few really pronounces the "r" in either of these words, though (in Standard German at least)--they should both be the vokalisches "r", rather than the harder throat-produced "r". I had never heard the term Entvokalisierung to describe this before (though it may well be a technical term in some branch of linguistics)--we commonly call this Auslautverhärtung, if people want to look it up.
And, just to tie together the two comments from Russ and Lee: Although German children would know which vowel to use in "Burg" vs. "Berg" pretty automatically, it is quite likely that they might occasionally spell it "Burk" and "Berk" actually. This type of thing is a very typical spelling error for young children: My nephew wrote me to tell me about his new Fahrrat recently (which should have been his Fahrrad, or bicycle--a particularly cute mistake, because "Rat" is also a real German word, with a very different meaning from "Rad").
Azra's "Berk/Burk" misspellings by young German writers is mirrored in English as well. Spelling the English word "choose" as "chooze" - or "kitty" as "kiddy" - is a perfectly understandable developmental error. Such kids are strategizing that they should spell it as it sounds PHONETICALLY, which works for most words, and works well on one level here; any adult will know exactly what the child means with "Berk" or "chooze".
The German kid who writes Burk or Berk knows his phonemes already but has yet to learn that spelling represents PHONEMES, not the actual PHONETIC variants that we all utter in speech, and that sometimes, the same sound variant, "k" in this case, can serve TWO phoneme masters; the k in "Burg", while it sounds just like the K sound in the German word "Tank", in Burg, belongs to a different phoneme.
But Berg vs Burg, the distinction that the OP asked about, is solely a phonemic issue. Kids who make spelling errors in German just don't confuse the e with the u in "Burg" and "Berg". To make this error, you have to have grown up speaking some other language, like English, with its unusual sound-sequence constraints.
Just as a sidelight, the -urgh ending for Pittsburgh is a Scottish ending for "Burg". Sometime, back in the early 1900s (I think), the US Post office decided that all -burg- towns should have names ending that way, so for a few years Pittsburgh, Pa was Pittsburg. Glass manufactured in that era has the name "Pittburg" embosed in it. Then, somehow, the Post Office was lobbied to allow the Pennsylvania town (only it) to use the -urgh ending. Today, collectors of antique glass can tell when it were made by the spelling of Pittsburg(h).
The trains from Mainz and Wiesbaden are still having problems due to bridge problems and an accident that happened in Rüsselsheim. So, my pick would be Frankfurt, either in the city where there a ton of restaurants and some sightseeing you could do your last day in Germany or you could stay at Gateway Gardens which has a lot of new hotels. Trains from Frankfurt city take about 13-17 min. depending on where you are getting on the train. Gateway Gardens is one stop on the S-8 or S-9 trains.
I always want to be close enough that I could afford a taxi to get to the airport if the trains are out. All it takes is one small incident to back everything up. It could be a heart attack on a train, a log on the track or a person wandering in the tunnels. It becomes a domino effect for the rest of the day. Seriously.
Azra, I am impressed by the use of the Dehnungs-h and the capital letter. I usually see farat or, more frequently, farrat. And yes, lots of words spelled with a -ch at the end (almost anything with an -ig ending, for example) when kids write phonetically.
Find a version of Lotto King Karl singing one of the two unofficial city anthems ("Hamburg meine Perle") to hear our local accent. The other local anthem is the Hans Albers classic "Auf der Reeperbahn" for those wanting to know.
My 2 cts to each of those questions:
That train should give you plenty leeway. Even if something goes wrong, you probably still have enough time to catch the next one.
Which is something I watch out for when I need to take a train to a destination I absolutely have to reach at a certain time: I never take the very last one. Also, I try to avoid having to change trains, because that's usually where things go wrong. With a direct train being late five minutes, so what. But if you need to catch a connecting train, those five minutes can have you end up being two hours late.
Berg and Burg: The difference has been explained, and for German speakers, there's really no way to confuse the two as the pronunciation is quite different. For (American) English speakers, in my "diagnosis", it's the R that will tend to throw you. "Birg", "Berg", "Burg" all sound more or less the same in an English pronunciation. Leave out the R and you'll realize how different they are.
It's difficult to write down the German pronunciation in an "English" way, some of you have tried, and I am not sure my attempts would be better. I'd go with something like "bay-ahk" vs. "boo-ak". The most important pronunciation tip I would give is leave out the American R.
Now just to further confuse you, there are a few regional differences in how to pronounce the g in "Berg" or "Burg". Generally the g is pronounced like a k, but there are some regions (Northern Germany) that will say the g like a soft ch (as in "ich"). Hamburch. Heidelberch. I do, actually. :-)
Azra, I am impressed by the use of the Dehnungs-h and the capital
letter.
The Dehnungs-h was actually there (the child is obsessed with vehicles, and must have just somehow learnt that spelling correctly from the thousand books on them he has); capitalisation I added without realising it in my typed version ;)
Anyway: This has been an enlightening conversation for me--I see the misspelling of place names all the time here (also Frankfort), but I didn't really think about the phonological reason for it from a native English-speaker perspective.
Very true about the "g" pronounced as if it were the soft "ch." You definitely hear that when these two words indicating the place are said, "Hamburg-Harburg"
"I see the misspelling of place names all the time here (also Frankfort), but I didn't really think about the phonological reason for it from a native English-speaker perspective."
It's true, Azra - there are certain truths about 2nd language learning that are non-transparent. And IME it's often the fault of one's own native language. Those 1st-language phonological patterns end up creating a lot of havoc, even after spelling is learned.
Spelling German place names is crazy-tough for most of us at first. Most native-English-speaking forum members do not know any German at all. They've never heard correct pronunciations for most of the places on their itineraries. They have no clue about German spelling patterns, and even if they did, they have no phonological cues to guide their spelling. Many of us struggle with spelling in our own language (which is inherently less predictable than German) and have inferiority complexes when it comes to English spelling, so why bother trying hard when confronted foreign-language place names?
But even those who have learned German and German spelling do not normally acquire the full phonological system. The influence from their English phonology is overpowering. German vowels are huge hurdles; some do learn to de-vocalize their final consonants, but not many; they can spell "Tag" just fine, but can't pronounce it correctly. I've known American professors of German whose pronunciation in German was dismal. I'm sure that one of them never even realized how bad his pronunciation was. (Sandra Bullock's spoken German BTW is extraordinary, way better than other public personalities I've heard - but she is a rare exception.)
But we shouldn't believe that native English speakers are the only ones with this problem. Germans who speak fluent English may not realize it, but they very often have the same sorts of pronunciation problems. Their pattern of "Entvokalisierung im Wortauslauf" is a good example, one of the main reasons their English sounds so German to our ears, and the reason their individual words are sometimes hard to understand. From our native-English speaker perspective, we just don't get why they can't make a "d" or a "g" or a "z" sound at the end of a word. If they know how to spell "road", "pig", and "buzz", then what's their problem?? "Road is not "wrote" - "pig" is not "peak" - and "buzz" is not "bus." But that's how they come out. Angela Merkel is a good example. Overall she has an outstanding command of English - she's way more fluent in English than most Americans who learn German can ever hope to be. But she still applies her misguided "Entvokalisierung" with great consistency when she speaks English. "Leave" is "leaf". "World" is Worlt. "Granted" is "Grantit." It's part of the phonological baggage that she and most Germans will always carry when speaking English.
Not Surprising that Sandra Bullock speaks German well. She lived there 12 years as a child and her mother is German
Correct. Sandra speaks German like a native, because she is a native German speaker. Duh.
My daughter speaks German like a native Frankfurter and English like a native Ohioian. That is what happens when someone has parents from 2 different countries.
Didn't realize SB grew up in a 2-language environment at a young age. English-speaking dad, German-speaking mom. That surely explains her mastery of both sound systems.
So Bullock is not an exception to the generalization that mastery of a SECOND phonological system in a second language learned SUBSEQUENT to the first language is very unusual (though not so unusual when languages are learned SIMULTANEOUSLY by children.) Her case instead lends support to the generalization that native acquisition is superior to what most of us have to go through to learn another sound system. This difficulty is what prompts bilingual schools to immerse kids at the youngest possible age in both languages - so that phonology and other language components can be acquired more authentically.
I don't know about her parents' childhood language environment (or yours and your husband's, Jo) but unless those 4 individuals also grew up in a multilingual household like Sandra (and your daughter,) their odds of attaining authentic pronunciation in both languages are very small.
Ah, but it can happen. My mother's German grammar gives her away, but her pronunciation when she is reading is almost flawless. You really have to listen closely to detect her accent if you are able to at all. My father has a slight accent in English, but only on certain words; people often think he is from another part of the US and not from another country. So yes, it can be done.
And if you grow up moving back and forth between the two countries and speaking the opposite language at home, you can be completely bilingual in terms of accent. It's often grammar, vocabulary, and turns of phrase that give a person away more than accent.
I would never argue that it can't happen, Howlin' - "it" meaning acquisition of native-like English pronunciation as teens (or older) subsequent to L1 German acquisition. Does this condition apply to your parents? And because a lot depends on who the judge is, I also wonder... does "people" mean native English speakers when you say, "...people often think he is from another part of the US"??
I suspect you're right about the influence of back-and-forth moves between languages, which probably does push a few more individuals into the native-speaker category. There are other factors that might tick up the success rate for Germans too - the prominence of English-language media, for one. Then there's the status of English in Germany as a Lingua Franca, which means you're using English in all kinds of interactions with Europeans crossing into Germany from outside, as well as with "newcomers." And the very early introduction of English in public schools, as well as the heavy reliance on English in secondary and post-secondary education and the workplace, provide many more opportunities for language development to English-speaking German citiizens than our American institutions provide to their wannabe German-speakers. With these factors in place, I have little doubt that some German adults who learned English as a second language really do achieve native pronunciations. (I've never met one, but I'm comfortable with the idea that some do exist.) All language skills considered, I think Germans rank near the very top as some of the best English speakers in Europe - so a greater number of truly native-sounding individuals should be expected. But I still expect that this group is still extraordinarily small.
I like to stay near where I flying out of especially if it is a morning or noon flight. I wouldn't chance it, DB isn't the most reliable at times and I'd rather be relaxed in the morning rather than running around hoping to catch a train to the airport. Stay in Frankfurt the night before and relax.
Yes, both of my parents learned the other language in secondary school. My mother has near native German pronunciation despite her late start, but of course her grammar often gives her away. But she did live in Germany starting with a high school exchange and off-and-on throughout her 20s and has an excellent ear. Even so her accent in German is very hard to detect, even to locals here.
My father has excellent pronunciation in English (and perfect grammar) and has lived in the US for decades. He doesn't sound local to where he is in the US, but most people where he lives (so native English speakers) don't peg him as a foreigner, either--until they hear his name, that is. His pronunciation is really quite excellent, but there are still some tells to a very fine ear--but none of them typically "German."
What's more important : near native accent or near perfect grammar? Which is within reach? Given these two choices, I've made my choice.
I think that depends on the language you are learning!
And yes, your own strengths and weaknesses as well as your education in your native language. A good musical ear, a grasp of linguistics and phonemes, an understanding of one's native grammar, and understanding the functions / purpose of grammatical systems--those are all factors in where one would excel.
All very true, above all , one's level of education in one's native language and knowledge of its grammar.
The better you know your own grammar, the easier you are able to tackle the grammar and master it in the language you are studying, especially as it applies to German and French when writing and speaking.
