I'm not sure that phraseology is the right word for this so I'll try to describe it. I've been learning German for a while, my vocabulary has expanded a lot, and my grammar is slowly getting better. My latest plateau is just learning how to get my head around what things mean in common conversation. Many sentences can be translated word for word between the languages and make sense, others can be translated word for word and make sense after the grammar has been adjusted. The really difficult thing is that some sentences, after being translated, still sound like gibberish to me to the point that I don't have any idea what is meant even when I know every word. This seems to just be differences in how the languages are used.
For a really simple example, you learn that if you want to say 'please' you say 'bitte.' Which is fine until you say 'danke schöne' and someone replies with 'bitte schöne' rather than 'Du bist willkommen' or something to that effect. Not a great example but I hope the point is clear. I've come across entire sentences where the word usage is so different that I can't figure out what they mean until I put it in a translator and it inexplicably spits out a translation that makes sense relative to the scenario, but not relative to the words constructing the sentence.
This is frustrating as it's turned into a bit of a roadblock for me that I'm not really sure how to overcome. The obvious thing is to just practice a lot but the difficulty is that I don't know how to get my head around the reasoning so it's difficult to actually learn it. Memorizing 'bitte schöne' means 'thank you' and not 'lovely please' is easy enough but for less commonly used expressions it's more complicated.
So I'm here asking if other people have had this problem and if you've come up with a clever way to learn these differences. I had a lot of success with vocab and grammar just watching TV and movies with subtitles but with these types of sentences I tend to get lost by the time I figure out what was meant. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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