Das ist doch unhöflich [Deutsch--Warum nicht?]

The 5th podcast in this series is titled “Das ist doch unhöflich” (that is impolite).

It’s a pretty easy to follow podcast, not much in terms of grammar or anything, but you certainly get the sense of the spoken language, which is why I really like this series.

Here’s some vocabulary. There’s not much regarding grammar. It’s mostly just illustrating the verb sein ‘to be’ in the present tense.

Vocabulary
Ja : yes
Nein : no
Danke : Thank you.
erstaunt : astonished
warum : why
junger Mann : young man
der Witzbold : the joker
der Kobold : the elf
wohl : well (discourse particle)
müde : tired
doch : (1) used for emphasis, (2) used to make an assumption about someone.

examples:
(1) Das ist doch unhöflich! : That is impolite!
(2) Sie sind doch der Portier, oder? — You must be the porter.

sagen : to say
Gute Nacht : Good night.
also : well

example
Also–du bist unhöflich : Well, you are impolite.

If you listen to the podcast, you’ll notice that there were quite a few discourse particles used (also, doch, wohl). What do I mean by discourse particles? Here’s Wikipedia’s entry for this term:

In linguistics, a discourse particle is a lexeme or particle which has no direct semantic meaning in the context of a sentence, having rather a pragmatic function: it serves to indicate the speaker’s attitude, or to structure their relationship to other participants in a conversation.

These are something that I really need to get a better hang on since Germans use them a lot. More on this topic some other time…