German

This page largely serves as a reference for my own learning.

Resources

• Deutsche Welle - State-Owned public broadcaster providing free resources for learning German including tests, videos, and practice exercises.
• Wikipedia - Helpful breakdowns and tables of German grammar, good reference material.
• Duolingo - Free language learning app for levels A1–B1, mostly good for learning vocabulary and sentence structure.
• Goethe-Institut - The German language learning institute. Provides some free resources, online placement test, and paid-for courses as well as being the gold-standard for German language certificates.
• Textbooks: Menschen by Hueber is used in Goethe-Institut courses. I also used PONS A1-B2 Der große Sprachkurs and PONS A1-C1 Praxis-Grammatik.
• r/German wiki has a large list of other resources for different categories including an Ultimate Link List for every level.
• Goethe A1 Wordlist
• Goethe A2 Wordlist
• Goethe B1 Wordlist

CEFR Levels

* days are defined as 4 hours of study per day.

Source: Goethe-Institut

If you want to settle permanently in Germany, a minimum of B1 level German is highly recommended, even though you can get permanent residency with only A1 or A2 depending on your path. Many workplaces which operate primarily using German expect at least level B2 German. If you want to accelerate obtaining citizenship, C1 is required.

Learning a language appears to be the same as learning any other skill. At first it requires some memorization and fumbling around, but you get better as you build a muscle memory through practice. The difference is mostly that there’s just a lot to learn.

• Practicing reading aids with understanding the contents of texts faster.
• Practicing listening aids with differentiating the sounds specific to the language and understanding the words people are saying and how they are saying them.
• Practicing writing aids with organizing your thoughts in the language and expressing them coherently.
• Practicing speaking aids with proper pronunciation and building an active vocabulary of words so that you can respond spontaneously without having to think for a while beforehand or without translating on the fly (which is exhausting and distracting).

It is feasible to become almost fluent in a language in less than a year by totally immersing yourself in it while reverting back to your native language as little as possible. Transportation engineer and YouTuber Build the Lanes did this with Dutch over 9 months so that he could get a job in the Netherlands.

Basics

German is constructed like an archaic English (which makes sense because English used to be a lot “more Germanic” but lost a lot of those constructs as it glommed other languages).

All nouns in German are capitalized, not just proper nouns.

German contains all the same letters as English, plus ä, ö, ü, and ß which can also be written as ae, oe, ue, and ss.

ä is pronounced like “eh”, ö is pronounced like the i in “girl”, and ü is hard for English speakers to pronounce consistently, also äu and eu are both pronounced like “oy”.

German Grammar Cheatsheet

I don’t have a source for this, other than finding it linked on the r/German wiki, but this is a very useful all-in-one grammar cheatsheet:

Grammatical Cases & Genders

There are three grammatical genders in German: masculine, feminine, and neutral (maskulin, feminin, neuter). A noun’s gender is indicated by its definite article: der, die, or das respectively. For example, das Auto (the car) is a noun with neutral gender, whereas der Himmel (the sky) is a noun with masculine gender.

Although you can sometimes get away with using the wrong gender, other times it can completely change the meaning of what you want to say due to two identical nouns differing only in their gender. It is also very important for communicating grammatical cases which is critical to sentence structure.

There are four grammatical cases in German: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, and Genitive (Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ, Genitiv). Genitive is not used as frequently in modern casual German, but is still encountered regularly, especially in official or formal communication.

English no longer has grammatical genders and has largely lost its grammatical cases, so these concepts can take a while for a native English speaker to master.

The Grammatical Gender of Nouns

It is often recommended to learn all nouns as a pair of noun and its associated gender (and possibly also with the plural since those can be irregular). However, recognizing patterns can be helpful in determining which gender a noun has when you forget, or if you encounter a word you’ve never learned before. Eventually you develop a feeling of what sounds right with certain words.

Below is a table of word endings and other patterns that can be helpful to know when trying to figure out what gender a word should have. There are many exceptions that I haven’t detailed, but these patterns hold most of the time:

Further, male human beings and animals are largely masculine, female human beings and animals are largely feminine, and young human beings and animals are largely neutral.

Also, seasons, months, and days of the week are masculine; numbers are feminine; and letters, fractions, musical notes, names of companies (that don’t already have an article in their name), cafés, cinemas, hotels, and restaurants, are neutral.

In addition to the exceptions, some words may have different grammatical genders than what you might expect either because it is a new word and the “correct” gender has not yet been decided, or because of differences in regional dialects.

Grammatical Cases

German uses grammatical cases to indicate subjects and objects in a sentence instead of using words like to or constructs like ‘s to indicate possession. For example “He gave the apple to me” is “Er hat mir den Apfel gegeben” (literally “He has to me the apple given”). In this case the indirect object, me, is replaced by the dative pronoun mir, and the direct object the apple is replaced by the accusative form den Apfel (der Apfel in the nominative case).

Here is a helpful guide to determine what grammatical case applies to what part of a sentence:

Take the following example sentence: “Die Frau gibt dem Pferd den Apfel des Mannes” (The woman is giving the horse the man’s apple/The woman is giving the apple of the man to the horse).

• Die Frau (the woman) is in the nominative case as she is the one performing the action
• den Pferd (the horse) is in the dative case as it is the one receiving the object being acted upon (das Pferd in the nominative)
• den Apfel (the apple) is in the accusative case because it is the object being acted upon (der Apfel in the nominative)
• des Mannes (man’s/of the man) is in the genitive case to indicate the apple belongs to the man (der Mann in the nominative)

You may have noticed not only the changing of the article based on grammatical case, but also the fact that a suffix was added to “der Mann” when in the genitive case: it became “des Mannes”. Both the article of a noun, adjectives that describe a noun, and the noun itself can change depending on the grammatical case.

Articles, Cases, and Declensions

Here is a summary table of article and adjective endings by grammatical case. The first item in the list is with the definite article (“the”), the second with the indefinite article (“a”) and the third is without an article (e.g. when a menu says “Fresh Salad!”), called “Strong declension”. Since you can’t have an indefinite plural article, that has been replaced with the negative (“none”/"no”) in the plural column:

A number of patterns appear that can aid memorization:

• All adjective endings are the same in the nominative case (except plural) when using definite articles.
• In the accusative case, only the masculine gender needs to be declined differently, otherwise it’s the same as in the nominative case.
• In the dative and genitive cases, both masculine and neutral are declined the same
• Feminine declination is the same in both the dative and genitive cases, and in the genitive case the plural is declined the same as the feminine.

Additionally, personal and adjectival pronouns are declined the same as without an article. For example, in “Dieses Pferd ist schön” (This horse is pretty), Dies- is the root for “this” and is declined according to the gender of the noun it applies to, hence when talking about a horse (das Pferd) it gets the ending -es to make dieses.

Similarly in “Gibt mir deinen Bleistift” (Give me your pencil), dein- is the root for the possessive pronoun “your” and thus, since the pencil (der Bleistift) is in the accusative case in this sentence, the article is declined in the typical way seen above—by adding -en to make deinen.

Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Note that the genitive case for personal pronouns is considered archaic in modern spoken German, but remains in some old expressions (this is similar to English, which also retains a few expressions using grammatical cases archaic to it) and is often used in written works.

Unlike in English, nouns in German are referred to using their grammatical gender. So while we might always use “it” to refer to everything from an apple to a horse, in German these would be referred to as in the following sentence: “Der Apfel ist lecker. Er ist rot.” (literally: “The apple is tasty. He is red.”). Additionally, even humans can be referred to using the neutral es (it) such as with “Das Kind” (“the child”) in: “Das Kind schreit. Ich hasse es.” (literally: “The child is screaming. I hate it.” (it being the child, not the way one might say “I hate it” in English to refer to a general situation)).

Indefinite Pronoun

The indefinite pronoun man in German is equivalent to the English one or, since that has become kind of archaic, the general you.

Reflexive Pronouns

These are used when a subject and object are the same. Many verbs in German must be constructed reflexively, such as in “Ich ziehe mich an” (“I am getting dressed” or, literally, “I am dressing myself”):

Interrogative Pronouns

Examples:

“Wem gehört das?” - “Who does that belong to?” (Literally: “To whom belongs that”?)

“Wessen Buch ist das” - “Whose book is that?”

“Was war das? Was war was?” - “What was that? What was what?”

Relative/Demonstrative Pronouns

Examples:

“Der Mann, welcher das Buch liest, ist mein Vater” - The man who is reading the book is my father. This is equivalent to “Der Mann, der das Buch liest, ist mein Vater”. The form with welch- (which) is used more in literary or formal contexts where the regular definitely article of the object is used in casual conversation.

“Den siehe ich” - I see that (emphasis on that).

[TODO] Prepositions

German in 3 Months

[TODO] Verbs

Wikipedia

[TODO] Conjugation

Wikipedia

[TODO] Plurals

DW

[TODO] Sentence Structure

Wikipedia

[TODO] Modal Particles

Wikipedia

Slang

Here’s a list of common slang with English equivalents: