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When the calendar turns to the holiday season, it's time to talk about holiday greetings! This year Christmas and Hanukkah even take place at the same time. So here you've got all the holiday greetings you need for this week & next!

But wait! It's still Advent--it isn't even the Christmas season yet!

Advent! - die Vorweihnachtszeit

In the US we fever and shop and practically race our way to Christmas and Advent is often left up to the church calendar. However in Germany it's also cultural--Ad…

Besides books and reading, it's safe to say the board games are an important German cultural element. Games are so important to Germans that there is a Verein (club) that reviews games every year known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year).

German board games are awesome and some of them are now cult games of epic proportions. You might have seen Catan spread out on the coffee table in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. (Das war echt toll zu sehen.)

Here are a few games you could get to …

When you're buying a Christmas gift for someone who is studying German, you may not know exactly what they need. With one small piece of information, that is which level of German they are at, you can do some quality gift buying right here.

Be sneaky! Look on your German learner's book for one of these combinations: A1, A2, B1, B2, or C1. There might be a "+" after it or the book might show a range of levels, for example A2-B1. Sometimes the letter/number combination is on a blue square with th…

Liebe Leserin, lieber Leser,

This is a safe place. This is a safe place for you. This is a safe place for you and me to be together.

Here at GermanWithNicole I have purposefully created a safe place for people to explore the German language, Germanic culture, thoughts about elements of our lives that vary from culture to culture. The main goal of this work is education and cultural understanding. At the heart of everything is compassion.

Here there are visitors from all over the world every d…

Suchen Sie einen neuen Job?

Brauchen Sie neue Kunden?

Wollen Sie jemandem helfen, eine ganz neue Karriere anzufangen?

Dann brauchen Sie Vitamin "B".

"B" für Beziehung

Everybody knows you need vitamins, preferrably from fruits and vegetables, or from vitamin tablets. There are real B vitamins in Germany, like Vitamin B12, however they also have this special vitamin known as "Beziehung"...relationship.

This gets at the heart of all networking and elbow-rubbing and shmoozing that goes on al…

I have a confession to make:  my first German teacher was so bad, I blocked him from my memory.

For years now I've been working on this website, cultivating each page and making everything as genuine and transparent as possible. And then it hit me:  I have indeed had another German teacher (a professor, actually), from whom I learned exactly 3 words of German in 2 semesters at college:

ein Glas Limonade

Yep, das war alles.

So it's no wonder I'd blocked it all out. It was just that bad.

In German there are a few words that express something so specific, so perfect, that we really need them in English. Like Gemütlichkeit! We don't have a word or a specific concept just like that to describe feeling "comfortable, happy, and content" in English, and we also don't have the slang use of Schmerzensgeld that the Germans have--and sometimes we really need it.

The dictionary definition of Schmerzensgeld is "money for pain and suffering." As in the legal term, if you are wrongfully inju…

As a little gift to you for Hanukkah this year, here are some printable flashcards on Judaism and Hannukah auf Deutsch!

What's fascinating about many vocabulary words for Judaism and Hanukkah in German is how strikingly similar they are to the English words. "Kosher" is simply spelled "Koscher," for example, and simply reflects the German spelling ("sch") as opposed to the English ("sh").

Here are the flashcards for general terms on "Das Judentum in Deutschland." (Judaism in Germany) This PDF …

1. Experience the opposite of urban sprawl:

Germany is about the size of the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin together and they have a population of around 82 million people. To contrast, in the US we have about 300 million on a huuuge plot of land, so it’s much more densely populated. Germany is growing in diversity, so you will likely run into folks of many different backgrounds.

2. Speak with your hands and feet.

Most Germans, in particular in big cities like Hamburg, Bremen, Stuttgart, M…

There isn't much of a secret to language learning because it's all about working with the language as much as possible over a length of time. However I can give you tips on how I learned to speak German fluently (and I mean--I could say anything I wanted or needed to say) within about 6 months. Konjunktiv II? Kein Thema. Polite discourse? Absolut! Telling someone off? That, too.

Don't get me wrong--learning German in 6 months was really tough. I started at an A2 level (the second-lowest level) …