Kopf, Herz, Hand

The body words themselves are the easy half of this session. Kopf is head, Auge is eye, Hand is hand, Gesicht is face, Mund is mouth, Herz is heart, Blut is blood, Körper is body, Stimme is voice. Several are old cousins of the English words, and Hand is simply the same word.

The hard half is the grammar of feeling, because German builds these sentences differently from English, and word-for-word translation produces sentences no German would say.

Having fear, having luck

In German you are not afraid. You have fear: Ich habe Angst. The same pattern turns up in Ich habe Hunger, I am hungry, which you will meet later. Learn Angst haben as one unit.

Glück means luck and happiness at once, which is either a deep truth about life or a gap in the vocabulary. Glück haben is to be lucky. glücklich is happy, and froh is glad, a lighter and more everyday word: Ich bin froh, dass du da bist, I am glad you are here.

Liebe is love, the noun. Gefühl is feeling, and fühlen is to feel: Ich fühle mich gut, which needs the mich, because in German you feel yourself.

Saying that something hurts

This is the one to learn by heart. weh means sore, and it works with tun: Mir tut der Kopf weh, my head hurts. Word for word it says to me does the head sore. Three things happen there that English does not do: the person is in the dative (mir), the body part is the subject, and it takes der rather than mein, because German does not need a possessive when it is obvious whose head it is.

That last habit is worth noticing across the whole group. Germans say die Hand, das Auge, where English says my hand, my eye.

krank is ill, and when you are, you go to the Arzt, the doctor. Ich muss zum Arzt is I have to go to the doctor's.

And one for balance

lachen is to laugh. Put it next to Angst and krank and the list stops reading like a medical history. Feelings are the part of a language people most want to use and least often drill, and this session is where you get to do both.