This week's German Learning Tip of the Week video is a closer look at Nena's song "In meinem Leben". This song is a sentimental look back at the things that Nena has done in her life. It uses the present perfect tense with a bunch of different verbs. It shows you how to use the tense and is a great tune.
The video I uploaded today covers a lot of the song, but I thought I would take an even closer look here. Let's start with the first verse.
In meinem Leben Bin ich oft geflogen Bin ich tief gefallen Und manchmal auch ertrunken Ich hab gewonnen Und ich hab verloren Und ich bin gestorben Und wieder neu geboren Ich hab gegeben Und ich hab genommen Wir haben uns gefunden Wir sind so weit gekommen Ich bin mir nah Und immer wieder fremd Das hat was von allein sein Und das mich keiner kennt
In this verse, she starts with a prepositional phrase, which pushes the subject of the sentence, "ich", to the other side of the conjugated form of "haben" or "sein". This allows her to start each line with a form of "haben" or "sein" and end each line with a past participle. This is great for German learners, because it allows you to follow along very easily. You can clearly see that the "bin" at the beginning of the second line is connected to the "geflogen" at the end of that same line.
If you follow the same logic for the following lines you can start to make a list of verbs and past participles and whether they use "haben" or "sein". I took the liberty of creating that list for you so you can follow along with the song and know what each verb means and what past participle it takes. I put them in the same order that they appear in the song.
fliegen - to fly: Ich bin geflogen.
fallen - to fall: Ich bin gefallen.
ertrinken - to drown: Ich bin ertrunken.
gewinnen - to win: Ich habe gewonnen.
verlieren - to lose: Ich habe verloren.
sterben - to die: Ich bin gestorben.
geben - to give: Ich habe gegeben.
nehmen - to take: Ich habe genommen.
finden - to find: Wir haben gefunden.
kommen - to come: Wir sind gekommen.
In the next several verses we get several more verbs. Here is a list of those as they appear in the present perfect tense.
weinen - to cry: Ich habe geweint.
lachen - to laugh: Ich habe gelacht.
trinken - to drink: Ich habe getrunken.
rauchen - to smoke: Ich habe geraucht.
aufbrauchen - to use up: Ich habe meine Kräfte aufgebraucht.
lügen - to lie: Ich habe gelogen.
betrügen - to cheat: Ich habe dich und mich betrugen.
sinken - to sink: Ich bin gesunken.
With the verbs in this song we can actually learn something else in addition to the present perfect. We can learn the opposites of several popular verbs: fliegen - fallen; gewinnen - verlieren; geben - nehmen; and weinen - lachen.
All in all, this is a great song, not just because it has a great tune, but because it is a built in mini lesson and you can learn German from it simply by enjoying a great love song.
What's next?
Next week I will upload my first of several conjugation videos. I will be conjugating the top 10 most used verbs in the German language in the present tense.
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