AMD 4 Antonina Chekhovskaya

Right now I am learning a lot of music in German and studying some grammar in class really helps me with memorizing. The articles are not just syllables in my head but I know what they mean. I have been training my brain to think of English when I am studying German, because for other languages that I have been learning, I always refer to Ukrainian and it works. For German it doesn't because there is nothing similar to cognates or in terms of accent. German can be tied to English in many ways. It helps me predict what the word means because German and English share so many cognates or close sounding words and also helps me with pronunciation. I specifically have to think of English while speaking German to produce the right consonance, because if I think of Italian or Ukrainian, none of the consonance will be plosive, d's and t's will all be dental, and I end up sounding not very German. :) Also, for vowels, I have a hard time with schwas, because there is no pure vowel to refer to and it's very hard for me to form something in between.. So it's a process... I have to remember to refer to English when doing anything in German.