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Better German Podcast with Susi

Susanne Schilk-Blümel
Since 09/2023 40 episodes

Episode 40 Colors

2025-07-17 26 min Susanne Schilk-Blümel

Description & Show Notes

In this episode of Better German teaches listeners the German words for basic colors. She shares updates about her teaching, new online courses, and the free Better German community. Susi provides a clear, repeat-after-me pronunciation guide for a range of color words, tips for memorizing and practicing vocabulary, and practical exercises to help learners integrate these new words into everyday use. Bonus resources, including a handy printable PDF with color vocabulary, are available in the Better German community which is completely free to sign up. 

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Summary
In this episode of Better German, host Susi Blumel returns to teach listeners the German words for basic colors. She shares updates about her teaching, new online courses, and the free Better German community. Susi provides a clear, repeat-after-me pronunciation guide for a range of color words, tips for memorizing and practicing vocabulary, and practical exercises to help learners integrate these new words into everyday use. Bonus resources, including a handy printable PDF with color vocabulary, are available in the Better German community.

Introduction
Welcome back to the Better German Podcast! In today’s episode, host Susi Blumel brings you a fresh, interactive lesson all about colors in German. Susi shares some behind-the-scenes updates about the podcast, exciting plans for upcoming courses, and tips on how you can make your German learning journey even more effective—right from your own home. Get ready to practice German color vocabulary, learn helpful pronunciation tips, and discover practical ways to master new words through sentences and repetition. Whether you’re a total beginner or looking to brush up on the basics, this episode is packed with simple, clear explanations and plenty of encouragement to help you learn German better, one color at a time.

Key Topics 🔎- Learning Colors Making Sentences in German
• Why podcast episodes have been irregular—and what’s changing going forward
• Behind-the-scenes updates: new assistant, new teachers, new courses launching in September
• Why podcasts alone aren’t enough—and how to use them effectively for real learning
• The power of making your own sentences (not just listening!) to learn vocab deeply
• Overcoming the “I don’t know what to say” block when generating sentences
• Interactive vs. passive learning—and how to stay engaged even without a teacher
• Learn essential German color vocabulary (with pronunciation tips and regional variations)
• Practice ideas:
▫️ Repeating words out loud
▫️ Using “Das ist...” and simple full sentences
▫️ Partner Q&A: “Ist das Buch grün?” – “Ja, das Buch ist grün.”
• Bonus: Get the free worksheet in the Better German community
• Final word: Join the community, leave a review, and let’s learn together!

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Transcript

Welcome to the Better German podcast. I am Susi Blümel, a German teacher and founder of Better German. This podcast helps to learn German in a simple and clear way. With useful words, clear sentence structures, pronunciation, and real life topics from daily life and culture. You'll also get tips for learning German and understanding how the language actually works. And when you're ready, we have a free community and courses to support you even more. Hello, I am so glad to be back, seriously. I don't know when you are going to hear this episode. I started the podcast a while ago, and then there was a break, and then I was like, yes, now I'm restarting, and then some other things happened that I didn't foresee, but now I'm back. I'm recording a whole bunch of episodes now and things are set up much better. A lot has changed. I've done a lot behind the scenes that I'm going to tell you about a little bit also, but first this episode is going to be about colors. So this is a kind of basic episode. We've done a lot of other things, so this is one of the actual teaching episodes again. So let me talk to you a little bit. By the way, it's summer, but it's actually cooler now in Vienna, so I don't have my AC running and I'm like, okay, I'm going to use this opportunity to record a couple of things because the recording is not as nice when I have the AC running, to be honest. So I'm taking this as an opportunity, so I have to sincerely apologize if you are a regular listener. I want to sincerely apologize that I've made you wait for such a long time for new episodes, and I really, really don't want to do that anymore because I keep thinking of my podcast and I really, really enjoy doing it. So I will continue to do that. However, so you have a little bit more of an understanding what's been going on, it's not that I was just lazy, and it's not honestly that just other things happen in my life. I've been working a lot on how, where is the journey going to be of better German. Because as you may know, maybe if you've been following my podcast, I really want to have a complete solution, so I want to be able to really help any German learner pretty much anywhere. So in the long run, there is a lot more to do what I have to do here. But, the next step that I've been working on, first of all, I have an assistant and she's helping a lot in making, finishing episodes and promotion and so on, and that is freeing me up a little bit. I'm also training another teacher and there is a second one coming and, this is big drum roll because we will have courses starting in September. So, I've had group German learning for a while but this was a little different. And now we will have actual a level one course, for example, a beginner's course. And this is going to be up to, I don't know, maybe 15 people. It's going to be relatively small Grünups online. And, we are all going to go through the same thing. And this is, going to be perfect because you'll get all the explanations you need from me, but all my students also get enough practice and guided practice, and they will know exactly what to do. So this is something the podcast obviously cannot fully provide. I've had a student the other day, actually that was in a free lesson as part of the better German community, which also exists, by the way. There is the better German community and it's completely free now, and, she said, she's been listening to the episode, to the episodes, to the podcast, but it's not, what was the word she was using? I forgot the word she was using, but basically she was like, "okay, I mean, I'm only listening." And yes, that is true. So first of all, when you're listening to the podcast, I highly recommend to you if you want to get more out of it, you can do it two ways or three ways. You can, first of all, use it to refresh and stuff. You can also use it to get to know me. And if you decide, "Oh yeah, I think I like the way she's teaching, I'm going to do a course," then obviously you're more than welcome. Or you can actually use it a lot by yourself, but you still have to do the actual exercises. And obviously I cannot sit you together with another student and tell you, "Okay, now make another sentence." And, if I hear that you're pronouncing it, maybe not 100%, then make you repeat it again. So obviously that is something that I cannot do on a podcast. However, you technically can do that by yourself. Probably I have a little more experience, but you can totally do that by yourself, and I'm always going to give you some hints how you can practice these words for yourself. So because this is going to be the big difference. For example, I think the one sentence that probably helps my students the most, if I was going to pick one sentence that I say and I say a lot that helps my students the most, it's probably the sentence, "make another sentence" because when we are learning new words and learning new words is like a big part of learning a language and it should never be any different. No matter the level, you should always make it a point that you have to learn new words. I mean, okay, if you want to learn German to just get around when you're doing a holiday in a German speaking country, or you meet somebody who speaks German somewhere and you just want to be able to converse with him and order food and say things like where you're coming from and, and stuff like that, then you will probably be very, very fine with learning 3000 words and honestly, you need some grammar of course, because otherwise there's a lot of things that you will be missing missing in the sense of not understanding and other people will not understand you maybe, but it's also not, it's limited. But if you want to actually learn a language and really be able to have some meaningful conversations or live in a German speaking country or, read books and really get them, we have a lot of great literature in German, then you need to always focus on learning more words, not just grammar. I just wanted to point it out. So, when you are learning new words, however you are learning them, I mean you, when you're learning them with me, we clear what it means. We go through the list. We do a lot of repetition until you have the pronunciation and then actually, then starts the real work. Now you understand it. Maybe you will, you might remember it when you hear it, but in order, at least for a while, but in order to really understand the word and really be able to use the word, people also sometimes use the thing like retaining the word, you have to practice this word. Now, and the way how we do this is by making sentences mostly. Sometimes we have sentence patterns and we practice it with that, particularly when you're a beginner. But when you're a little bit more advanced, I'll have a Word List and then it's super simple. It's just like, okay, we have these twenty words or whatever, and now we're going to use them in sentences. You can even do that in your own language when you learn a new word in your own language. But, you have to make sentences until you can easily use that word, and that is harder sometimes than you think. It is even harder, of course, if you're doing a foreign language. It in a foreign language. But even if it's in your own language, this could be hard. And then people are telling me, my students are telling me- that's a sentence I hear a lot, "I don't have so much imagination." Well, good news is it has nothing to do with your imagination. It's a natural thing if you have a new word and you don't know that word yet and that meaning is not familiar to you, it could be hard, even without the fact that it's a foreign language. So, I usually, my student will make a sentence and then he's like, "Can we go to the next word?" And I will say, no, "Please make another sentence," "Mach noch einen Satz," in German, and that probably is the most helpful thing I said because I can tell you also another story from a lady that I have. Actually, I was teaching her son. I was teaching her sons English, and also I was tutoring them on some other subjects and her English was not good. In the beginning, she would not talk to me at all because she didn't speak English actually. And then she told me, okay, I have relatives that I meet for the first time and they will come here and they speak English. Can you give, actually her son was translating that to me and he's like, can you give me some lessons so I can talk to them? And I'm like, I'm not a miracle worker. I cannot make her speak English in two lessons. But anyway, I mean, I'm not going to send somebody away because of that, particularly because she was a student or a customer. Anyway, so what we did for a couple of hours, we just did some very, basically the beginning of my Level one course in English, it's similar to one German and, all we were doing at the end, was making some very basic sentences with basic words like "family" that seemed appropriate in this case. And it didn't matter that her sentences weren't perfect, but they were English sentences. She had learned some, but she just didn't dare speaking and that happens a lot. And that alone can make it go away. But, I'm telling you- ah!- I know what the word now was that my student was using, that the podcast is not interactive. And I'm telling you to some degree, the interactiveness is not only helpful because, how you learn these words, whatever words they are, is you make up the sentence, not necessarily me prompting you to it or, something like that. I mean, very often when we practice Sentence Patterns, but that's about Sentence Pattern. That's about the correctness of sentences. We do question and answers, but when you learn new words, it's like you think of what to do with the word and that is how you learn, and that is super effective. And it is a little hard. It's not really hard. It means like you're sitting there and you are thinking, and maybe you have to think for. Half a minute until you can come up with a sentence. Also, don't make it too complicated necessarily. Can be easy sentences. Okay, so that was a little bit of a long discourse. Let's actually start getting into the subject of the episode and we're doing colors. How are we going to do that, I think it's the easiest way. You can, by the way, let me know in the comments or send me a message, if you find this new way, how, I'm going to do the Word List, a little better. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say the English word, you can repeat the English word because it still helps you. It could help you to, to remember the German word better if you have the English word ahead of it. And then I'm going to say the German word, and I want you to repeat every word I say. Yes, so by the way, if you're interested, there is a, I'm not going to call it a worksheet, that's too much. It's just a PDF. It's just a PDF with the English words and the German words, and the colors actually. So you can see that and you can get that. It's part of the, it's in the, free community. It's completely free, and you'll find it there and you'll actually find even more color resources in there and other resources. You find everything about the podcast in there and a lot of other things. So I'm going to link it also, but it's also very easy. You can go to better german.info/community. So if you haven't signed up, just do that and then find the worksheet or the PDF right there. So, I'm going to say the English word and then the German word, and I'm going to just say the German word twice, and I want you to repeat everything I say. Colors, Farben, Farben blue Blau Blau Green grün grün. Now, sometimes, German speaking people will not actually say Grün, but maybe more like grün, so the R doesn't necessarily get rolled. Like rrrr, but we probably will just say it once, like r, like grün. red rot, rot, yellow gelb, gelb. Brown, brown, brown, Orange, orange. Now orange is actually technically the French way of saying it, and most people in Austria will say that. Maybe you could also hear something like orange. I don't want to make you repeat it because I don't think it's nice, but anyway. Just so you know, orange is also something you could hear. White, weiß, weiß, Black. Schwarz, schwarz. That could be a little tricky for you maybe. So I'm going to say it again and you repeat it. schwarz. Also, sometimes Austrian and German, like German speaking people, we will, in this case, just not say the R. There is an R in this letter. You spell it, the whole word black is spelled S-C-H-W-A-R-Z. So there's an r at the very end, or the, second to last word. And very often we'll just leave it out. Not really leave it out, but basically make the, a, the letter before longer. So that would be schwaz. So the really proper way of saying it would be schwaRz and the, not bad way of saying it, but the usual way you will hear many people say it, particularly a little more down in the south of Germany and in Austria will be schwarz, schwaRz, or schwarz. You pick one. Grey grau, grau Purple, or violet. There's different ways of saying that. So, the one word and that is more for a, a color that goes is kind of dark and it goes more into the blue is violett violett and another way of saying it, and it could also be used for stuff that is more going into the pink direction. lila, lila. Next word. Pink rosa, rosa. And now, funny thing. So if you have a hot pink, so like an intensive pink that goes kind of like in towards the red, think maybe in more intensive than Barbie, like magenta, we call that in German, pink. But that's really just for the super intensive stuff. Not kind of like the typical girl baby color pink. That would be Rosa. So hot pink, pink, pink. And then I'm giving you one more. And that's Turquoise. türkis, türkis. All right, so the PDF actually has more colors, so go to better German info slash community. And there you find this and all other resources for the podcast cast in a separate section. You find it on the left if you, if you have the, the app it's on, probably on the bottom, on the resources. And then there is even, yeah, on the bottom, on the resources. And the first section of resources is the German podcast resources. So you can find that there. And, actually, but it's not in the podcast resources. I'm actually going to add that to the podcast resource section. I have more worksheets about colors. I'm going to link those there too. So, because I once had an English student of mine, and he was an interior architect, interior designer in German, we call it, Innenarchitekt. And he wanted to know things more. He wanted to know, what's ivory and what's egg shell, and stuff like that. So I actually made a list and I'm going to link that there if that's something you're interested in. So the one thing that I did promise to you is I'm going to, tell you how you can practice this. First of all, if you are a beginner, and this is the first time you're actually hearing colors, I would suggest to you to go back to the section where we start the colors and listen and repeat again. If you don't have any direct feedback on how you're saying something, the way how you can handle that is you just do it more often because you will get it right eventually. Even the, funny letters, like the ooh and the sounds that are probably not familiar to you, depending on your native language, you will get them right eventually, but, you kind of can replace the fact that you don't have a feedback with, okay, I'm just going to say it more often. Just keep trying it. That's how kids learn it eventually. They just keep saying it and then eventually they get it right and they're not always corrected. You know when when you have a kid and it starts saying a word for the first time, you're usually very happy that you figure out what he wants to say, even if it's not correct, and eventually by saying it again and again, they get it correct. And that's the same for you. However, that being said, of course you do learn it faster if you have direct feedback. So if you want that, you could, come either to one of the free lessons that we offer every now and then in the better German community, or sign up for a course. But how you can practice these other than the pronunciation, just keep saying it and that will be fine. And then you can do very easy things. You can just point to things and say the color. That's the easiest version. If you want to take it a little further, what you do is you can say, "Das ist." That means, "that is." You can say, "Das is Rot" and point to something red or even touch it, and then, "das ist grun" and "das ist  weiß." But, I highly suggest to you to actually look and point at the color, because otherwise you really just practice the pronunciation. So, point at the thing or show, touch it and say "Das ist" and then the color. And then if you have a few more words, you can also use it. You can actually use a lot of the words that we learned early in the podcast or any other words that you know, and you say that word and the color. If you want to say the table is white, "Der Tisch ist weiß." "Das Fenster is schwarz," the window is black. That's what it is, "das Fenster ist schwarz," or "das Buch is grün," the book is green. So this is a perfect way of, practicing that. And I'm going to give you one last tip on how you can practice this particular one. If you have a second person to do that with, you can ask questions. You can say, "Is the book green?" And then, "Yes, the book is green" or "No, the book isn't green," so that would be, "ist das Buch grün?" "Ja, das Buch ist grün." So, one person asks the other one answers. So these are some ideas on how you can practice that. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I am going to hear you. No, not, I'm going to hear you. I would love to hear from you. So if there is any feedback, you can always write to me. If you like the podcast, then I would very much appreciate if you give it a five star review and if you want to write something in addition, then go ahead. That would make my day and, hope you tune in soon and see you later.

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