First of all to the dictionary problem of Josh: Most dictionaries, if appropriate, will give you the most common translation first, when it’s an “allday word”, so by objects you can be pretty sure the first word is the right one. For example look for the german word for “the light” (sunlight, light from a lamp) and you will probably find at least 3 different words, maybe: Licht, hell, leicht (blond, duenn, gering…), first of all if it’s german you probably know [nouns are ALWAYS written with a capital letter] so you could be a smart ass and just pick the one with the capital letter or you could try my advice and pic the first one. Because “Licht” will stand there with a hint to the article (das) and since you were looking for THE light, you can replace the english “the” with the german “das” and you know ‘that’s what i’m talking about’; in 90% of all cases that will work.

When I learned English in fifth grade, I had to find an appropriate english word for “Verstand” in the sentence

Er verlor seinen Verstand.
(today I know: “He lost his sanity.”; “He lost his mind.”)

the dictionary gave me various options; for example:

“intellect”; “mind”; “sanity”; “sense”; “brain”

As someone new to the language I had no idea what is what, so first of all I looked what the medical term is (usually a lil med. stands before medical terms), it showed me “brain”. So I looked up the word brain and found out ‘oh brain is more the organ itself then the thing that sits in it’, so I crossed it off of my list.

Then I looked closer to the words that were left and found out that there are similarities to the german language! We have the word “intellect” too (der Intellekt) what brought me to the conclusion that it can’t be the right one for my sentence, since it’s not too likely that some looses his ability to be clever (at least when the sentence not indicate any accident or illness).

So I had 3 words left: sense, mind and sanity.

I decided to look up the first one of the leftover list (sense) and it told me that sense is more the perception of something, the feeling - made sense (haha) to me so i crossed it off the list.

So I continued looking up sanity & mind and found both appropriate for the sentence.

That I finally decided to chose sanity over mind was simply cause of the sample sentences the dictionary gave me.
It told me by mind: “She’s out of her mind!” and “Never mind” what sounded kinda rude to me, sanity instead had a clear psychological background and since no other information were given in the sentence, I decided to pick the psychological one.

I know all of this sounds like a lot of work but it was a 5 minutes thing (I’m probably just bad in describing something faster ^^)

Maybe that helped someone.

PS: I’m currently learning spanish and after learning english and french, I realized spanish is way easier than I thought, simply because so much words resemble english, german and french (and in general european languages) so ou guys have good chances to manage german, since english and german are out of the same language family

Stay tuned and study well

KittyIsEverywhere

PSS: I apologize in advance for any horrible english-language mistakes >^.^

Zug is the transportation type of train (among other things); Schleppe is the train on a wedding gown.