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Sprechen leicht gemacht is the title of a prominent section of the book I’ve been trying to sell you on a few of these blog posts, namely German: A Self-Teaching Guide (Second Edition).  If you do not own this book yet, please click the link that precedes this sentence and buy it.  Or just click the link, we might get some kind of commission anyway.  Ok, back to the point of this post….why bring up the phrase Sprechen leicht gemacht?  Because when dealing with a foreign language, it’s anything but!!!

For those who have not looked it up yet, a translation of this phrase is “speaking made easy.”  What you are about to read is a complaint that will parallel similar complaints you might hear your mind producing when encountering a foreign language…  But you will see how to ameliorate your mental anguish and learn a heck of a lot from even a simple section heading in a foreign language book.

The rant commences:  What’s with sprechen meaning “speaking”?  I know the phrase “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” but how can sprechen be both a conjugated form of “to speak” as well as the noun for the concept “speaking.”  And what is with this word order…gemacht must mean “made” since it’s the only word with an “m” in it (it never hurts to force logic when one is lacking it)….

And now we witness how useful a simple chapter heading can be if one embraces and absorbs this craziness.  Ok, so sprechen can serve more than one function.  This makes things easy to remember.  And this crazy word order…  Embrace how this phrase feels, with the verb lingering at the end.  Say it a few hundred times while visualizing the meaning of each word and observe how the brain feels different with the change in word order.  There you have it…meditating on a simple chapter title can begin to alter the brain so that eventually you might experience, in the German language, Sprechen leicht gemacht.

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