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Why the little words are the thing people notice
Of everything in this course, the modal particles are the most disproportionate: they carry no information and they do more for how German you sound than any amount of vocabulary. There are two reasons worth understanding. The first is that German without them is not neutral, it is curt. A learner who has mastered the grammar and omits the particles produces sentences that are correct and land wrong — Komm her instead of Komm mal her, Wo warst du instead of Wo warst du denn, Das ist so instead of Das ist eben so. Each of those is a small unintended brusqueness, and a whole conversation of them reads as cold or demanding. This is the single commonest reason advanced learners are perceived as unfriendly in German when they are nothing of the kind. The particles are not decoration; they are where politeness lives in spoken German, in the way that please and would you mind carry it in English. The second is that they are almost impossible to fake and therefore function as a marker. Because they cannot be translated, they cannot be produced by translating — they have to be absorbed from hearing them, and a speaker who uses them naturally is audibly someone who has spent time listening rather than studying. Germans generally cannot explain them either, which is why asking a friend what doch means in a particular sentence tends to produce a pause and then an example rather than a definition. Lena's answer is about as good as the explanation gets. One regional note. halt and eben divide the country roughly in half: halt is southern German, Austrian and Swiss, eben is northern and neutral. halt has been moving north for decades and younger speakers everywhere use it, so it is not a shibboleth, but if you want one word that does the job everywhere without marking you, use eben. The Berlin wa and the southern gell in lesson 93 are more strongly regional than either. A practical suggestion for acquiring them, since studying the list does not work. Collect fixed phrases rather than rules, and use the five that do the most: Sag mal for opening a question, Komm doch mal vorbei for an invitation, Das ist eben so for accepting something you cannot change, Das wird schon for reassurance, and denn in every friendly question you ask a stranger. Those five will carry you a long way, and the rest will arrive by imitation — which, forty lessons into hearing them in every dialogue in this course, has already started.