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0:00
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my first video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, we're going to talk about the three classic pitfalls that I see so many German learners fall into. I don't want you to be one of them. So hang on. We're going to talk about these big mistakes that German learners make so that you can make sure you don't make them.
0:24
But before we get into those details, let's look at the series as an overall and ask the question: Is this series for you? Do you need to watch these videos? Well, I have come across so many German learners who have been working with Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Babbel. They're trying to go through a grammar workbook on their own. Maybe they're in a course, have a tutor, what have you. But the story is always the same.
0:48
They get to a point of feeling stuck, a feeling like they're spinning their wheels. They're not making progress anymore. They're seeing all of these changes happening on certain words. It's not being explained. It doesn't make sense. The confusion and the overwhelm grow. And many students at this point give up on learning German altogether. And that's so tragic because it doesn't have to be that way. So this series has been created for you so that there is a structure to your German
1:17
learning so that you can tackle the core concepts of German grammar without which you cannot speak German in a logical fashion. So everything's in a particular order because it builds on itself. And if you watch this whole series, you will be able to learn German efficiently, effectively learning just what matters, when it matters, how it matters, okay? And I really, really am so excited that you're here. Okay, so in this first video, like I said, we're going to talk about the biggest
1:47
mistakes that German learners make so that you can avoid them. And in the second video, I'll talk, then, specifically, what are the solutions? What are the tips and tricks for actually leveraging the advantages that you have as an adult learner of German? Then we're going to get into the actual nitty gritty grammar topics, right? So noun gender: You're going to learn how you can avoid trying unsuccessfully to memorize a random 'der' 'die' 'das' in front of thousands of German nouns.
2:20
Okay, there are shortcuts, there are tips and tricks. I'm going to share them with you. So likewise with noun plurals, it's usually taught that this is also totally random, that you just have to memorize the plural of every single noun in German. Good luck with that. But it turns out there are connections, there are categories. There's a whole system that we can use that takes the guesswork out of German plurals.
2:45
Then we get into a section of this series where three videos get kind of lumped together: the case system, right? So the video on cases, then declensions, also declension patterns. These three videos right here, they're kind of my favorite. And what I'm so excited about with these videos is that you will be enabled to throw out the window the conventional ten plus charts that students usually have to try to work with in order to master this aspect of German grammar.
3:16
And instead, I'm going to show you one chart that will solve this problem for you so that you will be able to actually understand why those changes are happening and be able to make them yourself easily without the ten plus charts. Just one chart. It's possible. All right. Then after that: word order. Again, everything about this series is about patterns. It's about principles. You're going to be connecting the dots on why does German use all of these funky word order
3:44
things that we don't have in English? You're going to finally get it and be able to do it yourself, right? It's one thing to understand. It's another thing to actually be able to do it yourself. And we want both for you. Okay. Then we're going to also talk about personal pronouns. What I love about this is how it actually kind of ties back into the case system. So you're going to be really connecting some fun dots there and I'm excited to share that
4:07
with you. And then finally, my study tips really rather circles around to our first two videos where I'm going to give you concrete action steps that will help you avoid the classic blunders that most German learners make and instead leverage, leverage, leverage your advantages as an adult learner so that you can learn German smarter, not harder. Right? That's what this series is all about. So that said, now let's dig into the specifics of these three classic pitfalls.
4:41
Okay, so the three big mistakes that I see so many German learners making, especially at the beginning of their adventure of learning German, is that they try to learn the way that children learn languages. They assume that German works the same way English does, and they start with vocabulary. So the thing is, as a native English speaker, you probably didn't have reason or maybe opportunity to learn another language as a child.
5:08
So now as an adult you're trying to learn German and it makes all the sense in the world that your gut instinct would be to copy the same process that you used to learn English as your native language as a child. But this is a grave, grave, grave mistake that's going to cost you. It's going to cost you time and effort. And if you're like me, right, you've got work, you've got a family, you don't have a lot of time to spare.
5:34
So learning German as efficiently and effectively as possible sounds mighty attractive. And that is possible. But you need to avoid these mistakes. So what does it look like to try to learn language the way that children do? So as a baby, as a child, we use what's called the instant immersion approach, which has really gained in popularity. But it has a right time and place later on in your German studies. Not at the beginning.
6:04
Not at the beginning, because when we're babies, when we're children, it takes us years to master our native language using the instant immersion approach because we're constantly experimenting. It's trial and error. We're building a linguistic framework from absolute zero. And this is really tedious, painstaking, time consuming. It's the exact opposite of efficient. Okay? And so instead, we're going to talk about in the next video how you as an adult
6:33
actually have very distinct advantages in learning a foreign language and you need to leverage the living daylights out of them. Okay. So that's in the next video. But now firstly, let's talk about the second pitfall. One of the biggest ways that German departs from English is that there are certain words in German that are going to take tiny changes on the ends. And so you've maybe been coming across this and feeling understandably very confused by
7:00
it. So in this sentence, we have these 'e's, 'm' 'n' and this 'n' are examples of these tiny changes. It's called 'declensions' and we're going to talk more about this in an upcoming video in this series. But suffice it to say for now that you cannot speak German if you're not able to make these slight changes yourself to the ends of these various words. It's not going to work. So this is not a one for one vocabulary swap of just learning the words 'the' 'nice' and
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'woman' et cetera, and stringing it all together. Yeah, you put it together, but you also have to make all of these very particular little alterations and there's a whole system for that called 'the case system'. It's a little complicated, but the way that I'm going to teach it to you coming up later in this series is going to be the easiest way you will hear about anywhere. So you don't want to miss out on that.
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But now this second pitfall of assuming that German works the same way that English does ties in directly to the third pitfall, which is very controversial, and that is starting with vocabulary. So since you have to make all of these tiny changes to the ends of certain words in German, that's why it's a pitfall to start learning vocabulary first. Okay, so our third pitfall: starting with vocabulary. You cannot do this because there are too many options.
8:27
It's not just this one for one vocabulary swap. You don't just learn the word for 'the' and the word for 'hungry' and the word for 'bone' and everything else in the sentence. It changes! Okay, so for one example, just one example to prove this point. The word 'die' translates to 'the'.
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But it is one of six words that translate to 'the'. So this doesn't even make sense to our English brains, right? But we have 'die', 'der', 'das', 'den', 'dem', 'des'. All of these words mean 'the' and you have to know when to use which one, right? So vocabulary--one side of the coin, but grammar is the other side of the coin. It's the glue that holds the vocabulary together, right? And if you start learning vocabulary before you're working on the grammar first, you're
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only going to make it so far before you are forced to stop. All right. So in this video, we've talked about how not to be learning German. In the next video we want to talk about the things you should be doing in order to learn German in the best ways possible. If you're not learning like a kid and you're not assuming that German is the same as English and you're not starting with vocabulary, what do you need to do instead?
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The next video is all about how you can leverage being an adult learner of German and make some very particular smart choices that will help you learn German smarter, not harder. So before you click off to the side to watch that next video, please click down below on the 'Subscribe' button so that you know when I come out with new information on this channel. Okay, you've done that. Wonderful. Now I'll see you in that next video.
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Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura, and this is my second video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. If you haven't already watched my first video on the three classic pitfalls that I see German learners fall into all the time, click above and watch that video first before you continue watching this video. In this video, we're going to talk about three ways that you can massively improve how you are learning German. And those three ways are: 1.
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You have to embrace being a white belt. 2. You need to leverage the advantages of being an adult learner of German. 3. You need to build a very specific German grammar foundation. So, when it comes to being a white belt, this is my favorite point because so many German learners miss this and they make things so much harder for themselves. So instead of doing an instant immersion approach and throwing German at yourself from
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all angles and trying to work on all the skills at the same time, you're going to work on listening comprehension, and reading comprehension, and speaking, and writing. Instead of doing that, you need to break everything down into bite sized chunks and start where it's very, very simple, even painfully simple, because as an adult, you want to sound like an adult right away, even when you're speaking a foreign language. But this is a terrible blunder, okay?
11:39
You have to be comfortable being a beginner. That's what I mean by embracing being a white belt. This means, for example, that if someone asks you about your hobbies, right, and you're a beginner German learner, you can't then expect that right away you're going to be able to know the German where you could say, "Well, although I'm hardly a master because I only started playing a few years ago, I really do enjoy a nice game of chess
12:10
from time to time." No, you're going to just be able to say, "I like chess," and that's it. And that's fine. Okay, so we have to break learning German, this whole huge task of learning German, down into its component parts. And you have to start at the beginning being a white belt and not try to jump to being a black belt right from the beginning. There are so many tips related to this concept that I get into more in my video on my top ten study tips.
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But before you might watch that video, let's keep talking about these other three huge ways that you can learn German smarter, not harder. So the second way is: leverage being an adult learner. Okay. And what this looks like, very specifically, is grammar. That sounds so scary to most people because most native English speakers grew up hating English. Right? Maybe you had a really terrible grade school teacher who was trying
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to teach you about pronouns and verbs and all this different stuff and you think you're terrible at it. And it was just an awful experience. But, but, but, but you have to have to have to work with this English grammar framework that you already have successfully built in your mind. Okay? Because, if you can bring that knowledge of English grammar that you use on a daily basis without thinking about it, if you can bring that to your consciousness and
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refresh your memory or maybe learn correctly for the first time the differences between parts of speech and how they all work together in a sentence and all that kind of stuff, then you can go on to learn German grammar in a fraction of the time because you can appropriately compare and contrast the new German grammar with the established framework for English that you already have in your head. This is so crucial that I actually created a course called 'English Grammar for German
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Learners'. At the time that I'm recording this video it's still free, but it has been such a game changer for so many German learners that it'd be totally worth paying for, as well. So you should click below down in the description and click on the link to that 'English Grammar for German Learners' course so that when you're done with this series of videos, you can then go over and get started on that course right away and leverage your advantages as an adult learner of German.
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So then speaking of grammar, that brings us to the third point, which is, you have to build a very specific German grammar foundation. Grammar is also a really huge topic and something that could keep you busy for probably even years. But there is kind of a Pareto principle at play here where there is a small body of grammar that you need to learn that's going to give you the most bang for your buck because it's going to be what you use most of the time.
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And then there's a lot of other grammar stuff that you can save that for way down the road and you're not really going to be missing out on anything. Definitely not at the beginning. So what are some of the topics that I always cover with my students? We talk about German noun gender, plurals, the case system, declensions, declension patterns, verb conjugations, pronouns. I cover all of those topics in upcoming videos in this series.
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Okay. And we're going to start with German noun gender because before you can even dream about starting to learn vocabulary, which is usually the nouns, first, you need to work on noun gender first so that you can utilize the best tips and tricks out there for making sense of German noun gender. Because ,hint, it is not just a random 'der', 'die', 'das' in front of nouns like you have been seeing in the apps or software programs that you've been working with.
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There are patterns, there are principles. It gets way easier. All of those shortcuts are in my next video on German noun gender, which you can click on here on the side. But before you do that, if you haven't yet subscribed, click on that button down below. So, you know, when I come out with a new video, then I'll see you in 'German Noun Gender' next.
16:41
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my third video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, we're going to talk about my top three tips for mastering German noun gender efficiently and effectively. So what is German noun gender? German noun gender is a grammar system that associates one of three genders, masculine, feminine or neuter, with every single noun, from table to tree to piglet.
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So if you've been working with popular apps or software programs that are all about vocabulary building, you have possibly noticed that there is a 'der', 'die', 'das' coming in front of all of the nouns. Conventional wisdom tells us that we have to memorize this 'der', 'die', 'das' in front of all nouns. But newsflash, this is really hard to do because there are thousands of nouns and learning a 'der', 'die', 'das' in front of them when it's just totally random is very difficult to do.
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Now, if you've already been watching some videos here on YouTube, you've already been exposed to this idea that there are noun endings and noun groups that make it much, much easier to learn German noun gender. So my first point, my first tip in this video, is that we need to work with those noun groups and endings. Then secondly, though, and this is also new information, there is a particular way that we can best internalize this information.
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We have to know where to start with this because even though noun endings and noun groups are so much easier to work with than just a random 'der', 'die', 'das' with thousands of nouns, we still need to have some guidance to know where to start with this whole program. That's what we're going to talk about in point two. And then my third point in this video is that there are particular memory aids that can really supercharge your German learning when it comes to nouns specifically.
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So point one, the noun groups and the noun endings. For those of you to whom this is brand new information, we're going to look at some examples. So masculine noun endings include, for example, 'ling', l-i-n-g;
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'ig', i-g; and again 'ich' note the exact same pronunciation there even though the spelling is different, as in 'Fäustling', 'Essig', and 'Teppich'. Right? And these words mean mitten, vinegar and carpet. Okay, so semantically they have absolutely nothing in common, right? But it's just how they're spelled. It's these particular endings that we associate with being masculine. So whenever you come across a noun with 'ling', 'ig', or 'ich', you can know that
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it's going to have a 'der' in front of it. That it's going to be 'der Fäustling', 'der Essig', 'der Teppich'. Okay. And then for additional examples, it would also be 'der Diamant', 'der Motor', 'der Campus'. But the reason why I have these three examples in parentheses is because there are so many noun endings; there are about 45 altogether that are worthwhile to learn, and of those, though, we can subcategorize into the noun endings you want to learn first and
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the additional noun endings that you learn a little later down the road. And the reason why we divide them is because there are noun endings such as 'ling', 'ig', and 'ich' that are ironclad. There are no exceptions to these endings. Okay, so no exceptions. Okay. And then there are the other body of endings such as 'ant', 'or', and 'us' down here with 'Diamant', 'Motor', and 'Campus', where there are a handful of exceptions to
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these endings. And so we save those for a little bit down the road when we also study exception lists that go along with them. Okay. So those are examples of masculine noun endings. We also have ,of course, feminine noun endings and then also neuter noun endings.
20:58
Okay, so we have the same set up here. There are some feminine noun endings, most of them actually, that are pretty ironclad with no exceptions, and those would include the endings 'heit', 'schaft', 'ung', and 'keit'. Okay, so when you come across German nouns with any of these endings, you know that you're going to have to pair a 'die' with them, that it's 'die Krankheit', 'die Freundschaft', 'die Wohnung', 'die Eitelkeit'.
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Okay. The benefit of learning these 45-ish endings altogether is that then when you come across one of the dozens or scores of other nouns that have that exact same ending, you automatically know its gender. It is not random, okay, It is not random. But then we also again have additional endings such as 'ion', 'e', 'a', 'ik', and 'ur', that are generally feminine, but there are some exceptions to them. So we 'learn those a little bit later in the game. We start with the ironclad ones first.
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All right, and then with some neuter examples. We have 'Mädchen', 'Büchlein', 'Etikett' with the e-t-t, 'Fossil' with the i-l. These are also the surefire ones. That's where you start. And then down the road you can learn all of the nouns that end with 'ment', and 'um'. and i-e-r; m-a, right, and the exceptions that go along with them. Okay. So that's the idea of working with German noun endings. Now we also have this concept of German noun groups and this is kind of the opposite idea
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because with the noun endings, like I said earlier, they involve nouns that are semantically unrelated. Okay? The only thing that the nouns will share in common is the ending, right? The ending that is associated with one of the three genders. But with German noun groups now will have all sorts of different endings or a lack of endings. Maybe it's a monosyllable or whatever, but all of the nouns in the group will still be masculine or feminine or neuter because of the common theme, because
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of the category that it belongs to. So, for example, we have masculine groups such as months and seasons or weather elements or currency. So that means that the month of September would be 'der September', right, because it's one of the months of the year and it's in the season of autumn, which is 'der Herbst'.
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So, then we have weather elements such as 'der Wind' or 'der Schnee' for snow, or 'der Regen' for rain, right? And these are all der,der,der. They're all masculine because they are part of this group? Yeah? And then so likewise with the currency, for example, it is 'der Dollar',
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and 'der.Euro'. So that's the concept of groups. So when it comes to feminine groups, some of the options here are to learn trees, fruits and flowers. So we have, for example, 'die Kiefer', which means pine, a pine tree. We have 'die Melone' for melon and we have 'die Rose' for a rose. All right. And then with neuter noun groups, for example, metals, countries, hotels as in 'das Gold', 'das Kanada', (see note in description) and 'das Ritz'.
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Again, because, not how it's spelled or anything other than its semantic meaning that it belongs to one of these categories. So this brings us now to point number two of how can we most effectively internalize this information. And my tip for you is that you don't want to actually go about memorizing this information right from the get go. Instead, you want to have all of the information put together so that you can reference it.
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So that you can actually practice applying the information by just always going back to that reference material. And the benefit of doing it this way is that rather than getting the information just in your short term memory, you're going to truly internalize it in your long term memory because you're putting it in context and practicing it. So you can find these various lists all over the place, but you can also find them on my
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website. You can click the link down in the description, open that up in another tab, and I'm also going to share it with you right now. Okay, so here on my website you can check out the article 'German Noun Gender: Your Essential Guide', right? You can, of course, read the whole thing, but you can also jump ahead, for example, to the noun groups like we were just talking about. And you can see here under the masculine noun groups, right? So many options we were talking about.
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Weather, a little bit ago. So just to check that out. Okay. So for example, 'der Taifun', 'der Wind', 'der Frost', 'der Nebel'. Okay. And then I also have listed various common exceptions to the groups. All right. So then you can check out the feminine groups, the neuter groups. And then you get into the noun forms, aka the noun endings. And those are like some of them we had mentioned earlier in this video, right, with the 'ling', for example.
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And again, you click on it and you can see examples and also common exceptions when that is the case. All right. So by referencing lists like this, one, you take off a lot of pressure from yourself. But again, two, if you reference, reference, reference, and then also drill the material by, say, writing out simple sentences with that new vocabulary word, then this will be internalized very deeply and you'll get to that point then where you don't have to reference the list anymore.
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So the process that I would recommend to you is when you come across a new vocabulary word, come to a place like my website and check, check these lists, check to see, okay, does this have an ending on it that I can associate with being masculine, feminine or neuter? Right? Yes or no. And then if the answer is no, then I would go check to see does this belong to a group that I can associate with being either masculine, feminine or neuter?
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Okay. And most nouns are going to fall into one of those two categories, or even both. Sometimes we have nouns that have both a masculine ending and belong to a masculine group such as Spring. Right? The season of the year that is a masculine group, but the word for spring also happens to have the masculine ending 'ling'; 'der Frühling'.
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Okay, so when you find that new vocabulary word, check both of those places, the endings and the groups to see if it applies. And then you want to really leverage your adult advantage as a German learner and take that extra analysis step and kind of recite to yourself, okay, the noun 'Frühling' is masculine because it has the ending 'ling' and in this instance, also belongs to the noun group for days, months and seasons, right?
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And if you work on it in that way, making those associations, connecting those dots, that's going to be much much more effective and efficient learning that will take the learning of thousands of German nouns and making it a lot simpler. Okay, so now point number three. A couple other memory aids that are really powerful that I super love are to essentially work with your imagination. Make it visual. Very important. You may have noticed in those examples that I was color coding.
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So way back 20 years ago when I first started learning German, I decided that I was going to associate masculine nouns with the color red, and feminine nouns with the color blue; neuter nouns with the color green. Okay, so you can choose whatever colors you want to, but working with color is a really effective memory aid. Our brains hang on to that information better. It's stickier, if you will. Okay, so whatever colors you pick, I encourage you to pick colors for masculine,
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feminine and neuter. And any time you write them down, right, any time that you write down a masculine word, write it down in a red pen or circle it in red, or do something with that color. Imagine it in red. If you're learning 'der Tisch' for table, imagine red tables. Not any other color--red, so that you can build that bridge in your brain between the word table, which is a masculine noun being red so that it sticks better.
30:24
So we can take the same concept of using the visual imagery of colors to the next level. So not only do we associate red with masculine and blue with feminine and green with neuter, now we can also have people that we associate with these different genders. So, for example, I associate the Queen of England with feminine. Okay. And, then, this is my favorite part. You can use a technique called Memory Palace to take a bunch of different feminine nouns and think of them all in blue, okay?
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And associate them with the Queen of England. Let me give you this example. So you have the Queen of England, right? She is wearing a blue blouse (Bluse) that is covered in blue 'Blumen', okay, so flowers. It has this big, ghastly blue 'Schleife' at the top of it. Out of nowhere comes flying this blue 'Eule' with a blue 'Gabel' in his claws. And he pokes her right in the 'Schulter'. Okay. And that is to help you.
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These wacky mental images help you remember: these particular nouns are feminine, they're blue, and they're being associated with the Queen of England. And you can do this for masculine nouns and neuter nouns as well. Okay. So in an upcoming video, I get into even more study tips. You can look forward to that. But in the meantime, continue on to the next video in which I'm going to give you my top tips for learning German noun plurals because--surprise, it is also not random.
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There are principles and patterns that make learning German noun plurals also easier. You can do it better and faster. I'm going to show you how in the next video.
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Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my fourth video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, I'm going to share with you a flow chart that I devised that will help you accurately predict German noun plurals almost 100% of the time. This video stands on its own, so if you haven't had a chance to watch the first three videos in this series, you can get caught up on them later.
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So the thing about German noun plurals is just like noun gender, they're frequently taught as being completely random, just something that you have to memorize with each and every noun. But the truth is there are principles and patterns that we can work with to make it a much more efficient and effective process. Firstly, let's think about what plurals are like in English. As per usual, in English, it's way easier. We really have just one option, which is add an 's'.
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Table becomes tables, flower--flowers, bear--bears, car--cars. In a handful of instances we have to add an extra 'e' first before the 's' or even an 'ies'. Doesn't happen very often. Then when it comes to true outlier plurals in English, we really have very, very few of those. For example, man becoming men, wife--wives, goose--geese,
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mouse--mice and then a handful of nouns that actually don't change in their plural form at all. In contrast to English, German noun plurals are 4 to 9 distinct endings or modifications that we make to German nouns that take into account things such as how the noun is spelled, what gender the noun has in the singular, how many syllables are in the noun, and which syllable is being emphasized. In my system I use six endings. Here they are.
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Now, if you've worked with German plurals a little bit already, you've possibly heard that the 'en' plural is used by 90% of feminine nouns and that the 'e' plural is used by 90% of masculine nouns and 75% of neuter nouns. Then add to that that most of the time if you have an English loanword or a French loanword, it's going to take the 's' plural. This covers a lot of nouns, mathematically speaking. But there's a problem with this system.
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There are so many common everyday nouns that you're going to use all the time that use other plural endings, such as the no change ending, the 'e' and umlaut ending, which is what these two dots are right here. That's the umlaut. And the 'er' and umlaut ending. So, for example, to say family members "Vater', 'Bruder', 'Mutter', 'Schwester', those use the no change ending (see note in description) or also table settings like
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plate (Teller) and bowl (Schüssel), fork (Gabel), knife (Messer), spoon (Löffel)-- those all use this no change ending and you use words like that all the time. And window (Fenster) and pillow (Kissen) and floor (Boden). Right? So common common everyday nouns using this no change ending. And it's the same concept for these other two endings here. That's things like chair (Stuhl) and foot (Fuß) or ball (Ball), so on and so forth. Book (Buch) and light (Licht).
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Words again that you use all the time. So just working with this information here is not going to cut it. But I have a plurals hierarchy flowchart that takes all of these six endings into account and shows you how to accurately predict the correct plural for your noun almost 100% of the time.
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German noun plurals is such a big topic that I actually devote an entire module to it in my German foundations course. What I'm going to share with you here now is the briefest synopsis possible, but you can also click down below in the description on this video and visit my website to read the article that I wrote on German noun plurals, where I go into much greater depth and give you more examples of how to work with this plurals hierarchy flowchart. Okay, but for now, here we go.
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First, the meta overview. Okay. The way to think about this is that we have a train full of all the German nouns in existence, and it's going to go to a total of five stops, right? One, two, three, four and five. At each of these stops, certain nouns are going to get off the train and take the ending indicated by the arrows that point to particular plural endings there in the middle. Okay, so this chart uses four different variables for how German plurals
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are determined like I was talking about earlier. So at train stop number one, it's all about noun endings, which is another way of saying how the noun is spelled. If you have particular endings that are listed here, then your noun is going to get off at train stop number one. In train stop number two, we have gender being a very important factor. Okay? At train stop number three with the English and French loanwords, this is going
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to be about how the word is pronounced, which syllable is being emphasized. Okay, Train stop number four is all about monosyllables. So this is about how many syllables the noun has, and then gender also comes into play. Okay. So now to give you some examples at each of these train stops.
37:55
So train stop number one. You always have to start at one, right? This is hierarchical. So whatever your noun in question is, you have to look at this list of noun endings, which has been color coded, right? With red for masculine nouns, green for neuter nouns, blue for feminine nouns, and then black for endings that can be any gender. Okay. And if your noun has one of these endings, so it ends with 'ant', or it ends
38:23
with 'chen' or it ends with 'sal', it gets off at this train stop and simply takes whatever ending is being indicated by the arrow. If that doesn't apply to your noun, however, it has to keep traveling to train stop number two and we ask a different set of questions to see if the noun has to get off the train at that point. So at train stop number two, we have all feminine nouns getting off here that didn't already get off at train stop number one.
38:53
Okay, so that's going to be polysyllables, monosyllables, all the remaining feminine nouns get off here and they take this 'en' plural. Right? Because, again, 90% of the time, feminine nouns in German take this particular plural. Then we have what I call weak nouns. There are three different categories of these, but the only one that I'll mention now, because it's the most important, is male persons. So again, all male persons that did not get off at train stop number one because of
39:22
having a particular ending are going to get off the train here. These are usually going to be professions of foreign origin such as 'Pilot' becoming 'Piloten' or 'Diplomat' becoming 'Diplomaten'. If that, however, doesn't apply to your noun in question, it has to keep traveling to train stop number three. At train stop number three, we have English and French loan words getting off and taking the 's' plural. And at this point, we have to pay attention to how the word is being emphasized.
39:58
Okay. If it's an English word that gets off here, it has to be emphasized the same way that we say in English. So, for example, 'das Meeting' in German, coming from English, is emphasized the same way that we say 'meeting' in English. We're not saying in German 'meetING', we're saying 'MEETing' just like in English. So it gets off a train stop three and takes the 's'. In contrast, though, the English loan word 'Talent' is being emphasized on that second
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syllable. Not how we say it in English. In English we say 'TALent'. In German you say 'talENT'. And because of this difference, 'Talent' has to keep traveling in our system here. It does not get off at train stop number three. Then with the French loan words at this junction, it's actually the opposite of the English loan words. The French loanwords are all going to be emphasized on the final syllable, such as 'Fasson' will get off here and take an 's', or 'Engagement'.
41:05
Emphasize on that final syllable, gets off here and takes an 's'. All right. So then if train stop number three didn't apply to your noun either, we keep traveling to train stop number four, and at train stop number four we have all the remaining monosyllables get off. So the single syllable nouns such as 'Ball' and 'Tisch' and 'Buch' and 'Licht'. Okay, so now the thing is, if your noun gets off here at train stop number four,
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it's going to be either a masculine monosyllable like 'der Ball' or 'der Tisch' and then it's going to take the 'e' and umlaut plural. Or it's going to be a neuter monosyllable such as 'Buch' and 'Licht'. And it's going to take the 'er' and umlaut plural. So 'Ball', as a masculine monosyllable, will become 'die Bálle. And then 'Tisch', check this out. This is an important point. It's going to still take the 'e', but that umlaut that we're supposed to put on, we're
42:09
forced to leave off simply because 'i's and also 'e's cannot be umlauted in German. So we can't umlaut this 'i', and then that makes the final answer for the plural of 'Tisch' just 'Tische', right? No umlaut. Then, so likewise, with the neuter monosyllables that get off, we put on the 'er', and then we umlaut any time that we can. So we can umlaut the 'u', so we do. But we can't umlaut the 'i', so we don't. And we get 'Bücher' and 'Lichter'.
42:43
All right. So that leaves us with just one final train stop. Train stop number five, the default plural of an 'e'. So the only nouns that are still left on the train at this point basically fall into one of two categories. We have masculine polysyllables that look very, very German, as in, we don't really have any idea what they could possibly mean, such as 'Beruf' and 'Monat'. And then we have neuter polysyllables that are either completely English looking but
43:16
pronounced differently, such as 'TalENT', right? With that emphasis on the final syllable, or they're English-ish looking, such as 'Mikrophon'. So these nouns get off here and they all take this default 'e' plural. Awesome. So when you combine this plurals hierarchy with a handful of exception lists that get paired along with it, you can accurately know the plural form of almost 100% of German nouns. This is an awesome system.
43:51
Again, for more, click down below in the description and visit my website so that you can read up more on this topic. And, then, in the next video, you don't want to miss out on this, we're going to talk about the case system. Why is this important at this point in your German learning? Because when you are building vocabulary, it is not so very useful to drill vocabulary words just on their own. To drill 'der Tisch', 'die Tische', 'die Ball', 'die Bälle'. That's not so great.
44:20
If you, however, practice within context, that's going to stick in your brain. And, by context, I mean writing short, very simple sentences like 'the ball is red' or 'the table is big', 'the tables are big', 'the balls are red', so on and so forth. But you can only do that kind of drilling if you understand the German case system. So again, that's going to be the subject of our next video. I'll see you there.
44:51
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my fifth video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, we are going to talk about the dreaded German case system that causes wailing and gnashing of teeth. If you haven't watched the previous videos in this series, you can catch up on them later. For now, let's tackle this topic together. So the German case system is complicated. It is confusing.
45:18
It involves a lot of terminology that causes our eyes to glaze over: the names of the cases themselves, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive. Then you have to understand what are these cases? How do you use them? When do you use them? What does this have to do with subject nouns, direct object nouns, indirect object nouns. Yikes! So the bad news is, this is hard. And secondly, you have to learn it because you will never be proficient, much less
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fluent in German, if you don't know how to use the case system properly. The good news is I'm going to show you step by step how the case system works so that you can nail it. It is totally possible. Hang in there with me and keep in mind that I have a special course created for you free. It's called 'English Grammar for German Learners'. You can click below in the description to open up a new tab with that link so that you
46:19
can sign up for that free course when you're done watching this video, I go into even greater depth in that free course, but for now, I'm going to give you my best synopsis of the German case system. And in order to do this, I firstly want you to understand why the German case system is so important, why you have to learn it. And to do that, we're going to start by first looking at English because you can leverage this amazing advantage of having a solid linguistic framework in your head
46:55
already. You know, on a subconscious level, how English works, right? The patterns and the principles that underlie the functioning of English. And if we can bring that to the forefront of your consciousness, you will then be able to compare and contrast it with the German system and it will make much, much more sense. So let's look at this English sentence together. The woman sings her little baby a song. The first thing I want you to do is identify the nouns in this sentence.
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The people, places, things and ideas.
47:31
Okay. We have three. We have 'woman', 'baby' and 'song'. Okay, so now I'm going to put these three nouns into three different slots. That's what I call them. And I'm going to color code them, which I'm going to explain in a moment. Okay. So firstly, I'm going to change to the next slide where we have that same sentence and then two variations on that sentence. So it's still all the same nouns. Okay? And now I'm going to put them into these colored slots, color coded slots.
48:09
Okay. So 'the woman' in the first sentence goes into a pink slot, then 'her baby' is going to be in an orange slot and 'a song' is going to be in a yellow slot. Okay, So now the thing that I want you to notice, I'm going to explain this, this is very important, is that every sentence has the same pattern of the pink slot comes first, the orange slot comes next and the yellow slot comes last. So what is inside the slot changes in English, but the colors have to stay in this
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particular order. English has very rigid word order and this is very important because it is the complete opposite of German. So in sentence number one, 'The woman sings her little baby a song.' Great. This sentence makes sense. Sentence number two, when we flip things around, 'Her little baby sings the woman a song.' This still makes sense, but what we're saying is something different. We've moved these chunks of nouns and the words in front of them.
49:22
We've shifted them around and now we're saying something different in English. And now in the third sentence, worst of all, 'A song sings the woman her little baby.' This rearranging doesn't even make sense. Okay, so now with all of this in mind, contrast this with the exact same sentence in German. We have 'die Frau' still pink, 'singt ihrem kleinen Baby' still orange, 'ein Lied' still yellow. Okay. But now when I rearrange these slots, these chunks of words, the nouns plus the
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words coming directly in front of them that have to belong together with them, when I rearrange them in German, the order of our slots changes. Okay. It stayed the same in English and the contents changed, but now in German the slots themselves move around. So 'die Frau' is now over here in sentence number two. Okay. And in number three, 'ihrem kleinen Baby' now is at the beginning; in sentence number three it's at the end. I need to write 'the song' here at the end.
50:46
Now it's at the beginning. Okay, so this is a very, very important difference. And what I want you to know about this is that these three German sentences not only make sense, but they all mean the exact same thing. Okay. So we saw with the English versions that they either change their meaning or else they became completely nonsensical. And we also saw that the color coding stayed in the exact same pattern. Pink, then orange, then yellow.
51:18
In German, in contrast, the colors can switch around. What's staying in them stays the same. Pink is always 'the woman'. Orange is always 'her little baby'. 'A song' is always yellow, but those things, those elements move around in the sentence. German has a flexibility here that English does not have, and WHY German is flexible is the case system. I'll get into the details of that in a moment. But for right now, let's dig in to English a little more deeply and go back to our
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original sentence.
51:58
'The woman sings her little baby a song.' This uses what is called the 'nominative case' and the 'objective case', although you've probably never heard these terms before because as far as English is concerned, this is pretty unimportant. But if we're being technical about it, we could say that 'the woman' is in the nominative case because she is the subject of the sentence. She's the one taking action. The subject noun always goes into the nominative case in English or German or
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whatever language. Okay? And in a standard sentence, it's going to come first. We saw with the English examples, it's always coming first.
52:40
Then next comes the verb, the action that the subject noun is taking.
52:46
And then in English are two remaining nouns, 'baby' and 'song' would just be called object nouns. Object nouns are simply non-subject nouns. Whatever is not the subject of the sentence is automatically an object now, and that's how simple it is in English. So technically, then, 'her little baby' is in the objective case and so is 'a song'. Okay. And that's how simple this is in English. In English, it's all about the actual order of the words and the cases--not so important
53:21
. In German, though, the cases are vital and we have more of them. The objective case is going to split into two cases called the 'accusative case' and the 'dative case'. Let's check it out. 'Die Frau singt ihrem kleinen Baby ein Lied.' Okay, so in this version of our sentence, we have the subject noun still coming first in the nominative case, right? The subject noun always goes into the nominative case. The verb still coming next.
53:54
Then we have still the same two nouns, 'baby' and 'song'. But 'ihrem kleinen Baby' needs to be in the dative case because it's an indirect object noun, and 'ein Lied' needs to go into the accusative case because it is a direct object now. So now this begs the question, how on earth did I know which noun was the direct object and which noun was the indirect object? The subject noun, that's fairly straightforward, right?
54:23
Whatever's taking action in the sentence and in a standard sentence, it's always going to come first. But with any of the remaining nouns in the sentence, how do you know when to use the accusative case and when to use the dative? Okay, so we're going to break this down by looking at the same sentence in English and German simultaneously one step at a time. Here we go. So in English and in German, both the most basic, the simplest sentence
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possible is going to contain just two elements: the subject noun, which goes into the nominative case, and then the action that that subject is taking--the verb. Okay, so we have, for instance, 'the woman'-- that's the subject of the sentence, so it goes into the nominative case. That's the case used specifically and only for the subject noun. And then boom, the action that she's taking. Okay. So this is one sentence pattern that applies to both German and English.
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And the thing to notice here is that in a standard sentence in either English or in German, the subject noun, aka the nominative case is going to come first in the sentence and then be followed by the verb. Okay, so now what if we want to add some additional information? What if we want to say what she's singing?
55:44
Okay, now we can say 'the woman sings a song.' This is now a second pattern where we've added in another case because we've added in another noun, and every noun in German has to go into a case. So I'm going to continue analyzing the English sentence here but through a German lens. Okay, so now 'a song' is going to go into the accusative case because the role it's playing in this sentence is that it is the direct object. The direct object is being directly acted upon by the subject.
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The subject is singing what? She's singing a song. The song is being sung by the woman. It's being directly acted upon. It is passive while the subject is active in this sentence. Okay, so now what happens if we want to add more information yet?
56:41
Okay. If we want to add in that additional element of 'her little baby', we're adding in who the song is being sung to or who is being impacted by the song. Who is being given the song, if you will. Okay. That is going to go into the dative case because it is the indirect object. And here, arrows can really help us out. So if we have 'the woman', the subject noun in the nominative case connected to the verb,
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connected to the action that she's taking, then we go directly from that verb to 'the song' that is being acted upon. Okay? And from 'the song' we move backwards to the dative case, to this indirect object that gets inserted in between the nominative and the accusative cases. So the reason why we have this language of direct object and indirect object is because of how it works with these arrows, right? The subject noun, 'the woman' goes directly through the verb, to 'the song', but it only
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gets to 'her little baby' indirectly from 'the song'. Or, in other words, a different way to look at it would be that we couldn't just have the nominative case, the verb, and then the dative case. We couldn't say 'the woman sings her little baby'; that doesn't make sense. We're missing something there. We've skipped over the direct object, which we're not allowed to do in this kind of sentence setup. So we have the first pattern; now I'm going to analyze the German one.
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So we'll do this again, essentially. Okay. So first sentence we can have simply 'the woman sings' and then stop. Right? That is a sentence unto itself. That's our first pattern. Or we can move on to the next pattern by adding in the accusative case. Right? So then the principle here is that after your subject noun is taken care of, after that nominative case is identified, which I will repeat in a standard English and German sentence, will be the first noun in the sentence.
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Then the second noun that can be added, and have the sentence still make sense, is going to be a direct object in the accusative case. This as a default, of course, we're speaking about general principles here. So then after you have a direct object added to the sentence, if you add more information yet, it is going to be who is being impacted, and that is the indirect object which we have to put in the dative case.
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So I know that this is complicated still, you've probably not worked with this kind of vocab in a long time, or if you did, at any point, it probably wasn't a positive experience. And you need to keep in mind that this requires more practice. I know this, and this is exactly why I created my free 'English Grammar for German Learners' course, which again you can click down below in the description to open up a
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new tab with that link so you can register for that free course and practice, practice, practice more sentences such as these, where you're identifying: Where is the subject noun? Where is the direct object? Where is the indirect object? Right? And practice using these three different cases: the nominative, the accusative and the dative. So all of this has been information on what the cases are and when you need to use them
1:00:23
based on the role that the noun is playing in the sentence and these particular orders. But how does this relate to the German sentences that we looked at at the very beginning, where we looked at 'the woman sings her baby a song,' but also the scrambled version. So let's check that out one more time.
1:00:44
So again, in German we have 'die Frau', (the woman), that is always remaining the subject of the sentence, even when it moves to different spots in the sentence, a different order. And 'the song' is always the direct object, always in the accusative case, even though its position in the sentence is changing and 'her little baby' is always the indirect object in the dative case, even when its position in the sentence changes.
1:01:21
So what is it that allows us to mix around the cases here without changing the meaning of our sentence? That is, dat ta dat taaah, what are called declensions. And they are these slightly different endings on the words coming in front of the nouns. So declensions are inherent in the case system. You cannot use the case system unless you can appropriately use the declensions; unless you can appropriately, slightly change the tail ends of the words coming in front of
1:02:03
nouns and going into these different slots, going into these different cases. There are three elements that impact exactly how we use the case system. And I'm going to tell you more about them in the next video because you have to be able to make these slightly different changes yourself in order to use the case system in German. So you need to know what the three elements are that impact how you change these
1:02:29
words. Make sure that you click below on the subscribe button so that you can know when I come out with new information. And again, if you haven't already done this, below in the description, click on that link that will open up in a new tab so that you can register, for free, for my 'English Grammar for German Learners' course where I go into more detail on these topics. All right, now I will see you in the next video.
1:02:54
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura, and this is my sixth video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. This video is on declensions, which is a continuation of the previous video on the case system. So if you haven't already watched that video, you really should do that first. However, if you haven't seen the even earlier videos, don't worry about that. You can catch up on those later.
1:03:21
If you have already watched the video on the case system, then you're at the right place. This is the next video to watch. Here we go. At the end of the previous video, we were looking at these tiny little changes that were happening in German sentences. And that's where we want to start again now. So check it out. In a sentence such as 'Der große Mann heißt Tom' (The tall man is named Tom, or is called
1:03:46
Tom) we have, for example, this 'r' and this 'e' are examples of these tiny little changes called declensions. And in the next sentence where we say, 'I know a rich man' (Ich kenne einen reichen Mann) we have this 'n' and this 'n'are also declensions. And in our final example: 'Ich gab jenem armen, frierenden Mann eine jacke,' we have declensions here with this 'm', some more 'n's and then this 'e' is also a declension.
1:04:19
So now the thing about declensions and how they relate to the case system, is that it is these slight little changes, these single letters at the ends of very particular words in German that communicate the case to us so that we know who is who and what is what in a sentence. So to directly continue what we were talking about in that previous video on the case system, if I analyze these sentences, we have 'der große Mann' is in the nominative case. It's the subject of the sentence.
1:04:52
And these particular declensions of the 'r' and the 'e' are part of how I knew that. And in the next sentence, the 'ich' is the subject, and then our rich man, 'a rich man' is now the direct object of this sentence. And that's communicated by these two 'n's on 'einen reichen Mann'. And then in the final sentence, we have 'ich' again in the nominative case as a subject of the sentence. Now that 'poor freezing man' is the indirect object which goes into the dative case.
1:05:31
And then 'eine Jacke' is the accusative case because it's the direct object. Whoa! So again, the whole concept here is that in order to use the case system in German, in order to communicate who is who and what is what (What's the subject noun? What's the direct object? What's the indirect object?) and, therefore, nominative, accusative and dative, we have to use the declensions. And the thing about declensions is that we are usually taught declensions by using ten or more different charts.
1:06:09
Wohoa! And so this is really, really overwhelming. Everything gets spelled out for you and you'll have this whole chart for: this is how you say 'the' in all of the different ways in German, and this is how you say 'a' in all the different ways in German. And these are the declensions that you need to put on adjectives such as 'groß' or 'reich' or 'arm frierend'. You have all of these different charts and there's strong endings and weak endings and mixed endings. It is so confusing!
1:06:40
If you have actually tried looking into the case system and declensions before watching this video, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But, the good news is, there is an easier way to work with the case system, to work with declensions. Check out this table.
1:06:57
This is my 'All-in-One Declensions Chart. We have five declensions, we have 'r's, we have 'e's, we have 's's, we have 'n's, we have 'm's. And then every once in a while we have no declension at all, which I'll symbolize with this dash. Okay, so this whole chart is made up of these single letters of declensions. And again, these declensions have to go on to the ends of the words coming in front of nouns so that we know: Which noun is the subject? Which noun is the direct object?
1:07:37
Which noun is the indirect object? Therefore, what case it's in. Right? All the cases are listed here on the sides, just like we have all of the genders here across the top. So we're taking into account the gender of the noun. That's why it's so important to know the 'der, die, das' coming in front of German nouns. Then we have the case, right? We have to know that too. We have to know the role that the noun is playing and then we can refer to the
1:08:03
'All-in-One Declensions Chart' to give us the declension combinations that we need at one of these 16 intersections of this chart. So why would you want to work with this chart? Right? This looks complicated. This looks like a lot of work. Well, you need to realize what the alternative to this is. The alternative to working with this one chart is working with ten or more different charts. That's the conventional way to learn the German case system and learn declensions
1:08:32
. They're charts that look like these.
1:08:36
So this is a chart of specifically all the ways to say the word 'the' in German. Okay. Every single one of these words means 'the'. It's just a matter of if it comes in front of a feminine noun or neuter noun or whatever gender noun, or if it's in the nominative case or the accusative case or whatever case. But this is how you say 'the', right? And the thing about these charts, (So you have to imagine a chart like this, but now multiplied by ten, if not more),
1:09:06
These charts are complicated and confusing to work with and they're crutches, right? That will never help you truly speak German proficiently, much less fluently, because they're spelling everything out for you. They're saying, okay, here's the chart for saying 'the' then here's this other chart for saying 'a'. Here's this chart for strong endings on adjectives and weak endings on adjectives and mixed endings on adjectives.
1:09:33
It's a lot of stuff to keep track of, but they're spelling it all out for you. And instead, you can learn just the declensions themselves. So check this out: 'r', 'n', 'm', 's'. These are the declensions for masculine nouns in the four different cases. Remember that: 'r', 'n', 'm', 's'. You see them here at the end of these four different ways of saying the word 'the' in German. Then, look at the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart' again and you see 'r', 'n' 'm' 's'.
1:10:05
Okay, so the only one declensions chart gives you just the declensions themselves. And I will teach you in this video and in the next one, (you have to hang in there with me), how you can know which of these declensions to put onto which words and when so that you can nail declensions 100% of the time. Okay, this is totally possible. You can do this. So now, that said, keep in mind before we continue that the case system
1:10:33
and declensions, this is such a huge topic, that in my German foundations course we spend three weeks talking about this, right? This is one short little video where I'm giving you the the briefest synopsis possible of how declensions work in German. But normally we study this for three weeks. It's a full 50% of the entire German Foundations course because this is such a big, important topic. Okay. So that said, let's look now at those three examples that we had right at the
1:11:06
beginning, but now through this lens of the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart'. All right, so we have 'der groß Mann heißt Tom' yet again. Reminder, 'der große Mann', this is in the nominative case because it's the subject of the sentence. We know that 'Mann' is a masculine noun, it would be 'der Mann' because it's referring to a male person. So that means in the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart', the intersection that we have to be at is where masculine intersects with the nominative.
1:11:38
So that's going to be right here. And you can see that then reflected in the declensions on the words coming in front of 'Mann'. There's the 'r' and there's the 'e'. All right. So now, second example, 'Ich kenne einen reichen Mann.' (I know a rich man.) We have: nominative case is the 'ich', followed by the verb, then we default like we talked about in the previous video to using the accusative case for the next noun.
1:12:16
Okay. We still have a masculine noun because we're still working with 'Mann'. Okay, so we're still going to be in this masculine column, but now we're in the accusative case. So we've just shifted to a new section in the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart'. Now we are right here and we can see the declensions: 'n', 'n', and 'n'. Cool. All right. Third example is 'Ich gab jenem armen, frierenden Mann eine Jacke.' All right.
1:12:47
If we analyze this sentence, we still have our nominative case first, right? In the standard sentence, the nominative case containing that subject noun is going to be first, followed by its verb. Now, what is it that I'm giving? I'm giving a jacket ('eine Jacke'). That makes that the direct object. Okay. And to whom am I giving it? To 'the poor, freezing man'. That makes that the indirect object and indirect objects have to go into the dative
1:13:17
case. So now, in terms of our chart, right, we still have a masculine noun, but now we're in the dative case. That puts us at THIS intersection of the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart', and we see that in the declensions, right? The 'm' is right here and then we have two 'n's at the end of 'armen' and 'frierenden'.
1:13:40
So this is all well and good, but you still need some more information. You need to know how to do this for yourself. And the way to do this for yourself is you need one more element. You need to learn about what I call 'declension patterns'. Declension patterns are how you know which declension from a given intersection to put onto which word. There are patterns for this. You're not going to hear about this anywhere else.
1:14:09
In the description below, click to open up a link in a new tab where you can download a free pdf printable of the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart', the four declension patterns which you're going to learn about next and a cheat sheet on how to use these resources correctly. Then finally, if you haven't already, click to subscribe to my channel so you know when I come out with new videos. All right, next I'll see you there.
1:14:36
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura, and this is my seventh video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In the previous two videos we have talked about the case system and declensions. If you haven't already watched videos five and six, you really should watch those two first before continuing with this video on declension patterns. But, just so you know, if you haven't watched videos one through four, you can catch up on those later.
1:15:05
All right. So declension patterns--this is the final piece to the puzzle that we have to have in order to pick out the correct declensions and put them on the right words 100% of the time. We're going to start by looking at an example right away.
1:15:23
Okay, so in this incomplete sentence, we have three nouns. We can easily identify them because they are all capitalized. We have the noun 'Mann', which is a masculine noun because it's referring to a male person. Then we have the word 'Frau', which is a feminine word because it's referring to a female person. And then finally the word 'Baby', which is neuter because it is referring to a young or small person or animal. Those are always neuter nouns in German.
1:15:56
So we have these three nouns, and coming in front of them we have words with a dash, a blank after them. And that's where we need to put in declensions. That's where we need to indicate who is who in this sentence. We're talking about a man, a woman, a baby, and someone is giving someone else to someone else. So this poses a problem in German.
1:16:23
This sentence can mean three distinctly different things depending upon which declensions we use, right? So depending upon how we change these words coming in front of the nouns, right? This 'dies' which means 'this' and this letter 'd', which is the start of the word 'the', and 'jen', which is the way we say 'that' in German. How we end these words, what declensions we put on here make the difference between
1:16:56
saying 'this man gave that baby to the woman' or 'the woman gave that baby to this man' or 'the woman gave this baby or this man to that baby'. It's confusing, right? So what do we want to say here? The declensions have to help us convey the meaning that we want. So let's say we decide on the meaning 'this man gave the woman that baby'. That's what we want to communicate. So now in English, this is done precisely by the order of the words, right?
1:17:30
We know who is the subject, who's doing the giving, we know whom is being given. We know to whom that other person is being given. All because of the order of the words in English. It's the man who's giving the woman the baby. This is clear to us. But in German, as we just demonstrated in the previous slide, not so much. It's not about the order of the words. The order of the words can stay the same, but dependent upon the declensions can mean something very, very different.
1:18:00
So let's talk about the process here. How do we figure out which declensions we need to put on these words? Well, it's the same process with the conventional route and the very alternative route that I'm going to teach you. But first, the commonalities. We have the same starting point. The very first thing we have to do is identify the gender of the nouns in question, which we actually already did. I'm going to recircle them, just so we're on the same page.
1:18:30
But we have a masculine noun here in 'Mann' and then a feminine noun 'Frau' and then a neuter noun with 'Baby'. Okay, so that's step one. Step two is harder because it is not a constant. The gender of a noun in German is constant. 'Mann' is always going to be masculine and 'Frau' is always going to be feminine and 'Baby' is always going to be neuter. The gender of nouns doesn't change, but the role that they're playing in a given sentence does change.
1:19:03
That's the 'case' of the noun like we've been talking about in these past few videos. So we need to figure out which case these three nouns need to go into. So, to kind of recap what you've been learning so far, if we are assuming a standard sentence structure and this is a standard sentence, then the very first noun 'Mann' is the subject of the sentence, and the subject of the sentence always goes into the nominative case. So this needs to be a nominative case slot, as I say.
1:19:36
Then this is followed by the verb, which is the action that this man is taking. All right? So he gave and then we ask the question, what or whom did he give? And the answer to that question is going to be the direct object, which has to go into the accusative case. So the person who was given is 'that baby', and so that's the direct object in this sentence. It goes into the accusative case. So now ,next question, to whom was 'that baby' given by 'this man'?
1:20:13
And the answer to that question is 'the woman'. So 'the woman' is going to go into the dative case because her role in this particular sentence is that of the indirect object. Whoa. Okay, So again, reminder, this is hard stuff, and I'm giving you the shortest story possible here on the case system, declensions, and now declension patterns coming up in just a few minutes more. So you're going to have to practice this. You're going to have to practice this a lot.
1:20:44
Hopefully the concepts are making sense. But in order for you to really have all of this information internalized and truly be able to use it, you're going to have to practice, practice, practice. All right. But in any case, we have 'Mann', masculine noun in the nominative case; 'Frau', feminine noun in the dative case; 'Baby', neuter noun in the accusative case. So we've completed our first two steps of identifying the gender of the noun, which
1:21:10
again is constant, and identifying the case of the noun which changes from sentence to sentence; changes dependent upon the context. We have both of those elements figured out. So now what? Well, in the conventional way of learning German, what you would now do is you would turn to very specific charts that give you the way of saying 'this', right? All of the different possible ways of saying 'this'. And then you'd have to go to another chart for all of the possible ways of saying 'the'.
1:21:47
And then you'd go to another chart for all the possible ways of saying 'that', and you'd have to pick out the correct version. Let me show you a chart and it'll make a little more sense. So the conventional way, traditional way, is that you turn to a chart like this. This is a chart for all of the ways of saying 'the' in German, okay? And in our sentence we needed to say 'the woman' which is a feminine noun in the dative
1:22:13
case. So you'd have to find the right spot in this chart, which is right here because it's a feminine noun. It's in the dative case. That's where these two intersect. And so the word is 'der'. And so then you would know to plug in 'der' in front of 'Frau' in order to say that particular necessary form of 'the'. But again, now you'd have to go to another chart and find the correct way of saying 'this' so that you can say 'this man', and you'd go to another chart to find the correct
1:22:45
way to say 'that', so you can say 'that baby'. Right? You'd have to work with a minimum of ten charts. Okay? Like this, with 16 different spots. Ten charts, 16 different spots at a minimum, if not more, in order to do this the conventional way.
1:23:07
But I think using the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart' that I've demonstrated to you in the past videos, this is the better way. This is the smarter way to do declensions in German. And that's because the declensions, only, are provided to you here, and then you are going to still follow the same process of, you have to know the gender of your noun, because that's this component up here. You have to know the case of your noun, right? So this is still the same.
1:23:35
But now when you locate the correct intersection that you need, you only have to do this using one chart, not ten or more. Right? So you still need to find the right intersection, but just on one chart. And then from here, you have to now take the declension that's being listed and put it onto the word yourself. So the thing is, at face value, the conventional way of working with the charts where all of the words are spelled out for you, you have all of your 'the's are
1:24:06
complete, and your 'a's are complete, and your 'that's and your 'this' and the 'some's and the 'few's and the 'many's and the whatever. All of those charts are done for you. The problem is, imagine yourself now, you're in Germany or Austria, Switzerland. You're talking in German, right? You want to say something like, 'this man gave the woman that baby' and you say, wait a second, hold on. And you start leafing through ten or more different charts to try to figure out the
1:24:34
right way to say those different words. Not going to be a very nice experience, right, for you or anyone trying to talk with you. And so the problem with those charts, they seem easy, right? But don't go the easy way because it's deceptive. It's deceptive because it's actually a crutch. It will keep you from becoming truly proficient, much less fluent in German. But if you can work with one chart and be empowered to know which declensions to put on
1:25:04
which words when; when you know how to do that for yourself, now THAT'S the way to fluency. Because with just one chart, with all the declensions that you're ever going to need to learn, this is actually memorizable right? You can actually internalize this chart and get to the point where you don't have to look at it anymore. A lot harder to do if you're doing ten or more charts of the exact same size. Okay. So,hoping that you are now convinced that you should work with the 'All-in-One
1:25:34
Declensions Chart', we need to talk about this final element of the declension pattern because, as has been established in the previous videos, we have the genders going across the chart, the cases going down the sides of the chart. So the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart' gives us the information for these first two points. But when you find the intersection that you need, you still have multiple options listed. There are multiple declensions there.
1:26:03
And so there's still a decision that needs to be made. You still need to know which declension to use and which word to put it onto, and that is a matter of our declension pattern being used. So there are four total patterns that are ever used in German. So again, this is simple, short enough material that it can ultimately be memorized without a problem. And here are those four declension patterns. Okay. So pattern number one: this is the only one that we're going to be working with
1:26:37
in this video because, again, this is a huge topic. The case system, declensions, how you use them, we need weeks to talk about this in depth, which is exactly what I do in my German Foundations course. And you can also know that down in the description below you can click on the provided link that will open up in a new tab so that you can read the article that I've written on declensions on my website and you can dig in more deeply with that as well.
1:27:05
And there'll be lots of additional examples. But in this video, we're going to keep things as simple and short as possible by talking about just the very first declension pattern. This very first declension pattern is the standard pattern. It is the default pattern. This is the pattern that you are always going to use unless you meet very specific requirements that force you to use pattern two, 3 or 4, which can all be viewed as as deviant from our standard default pattern number one.
1:27:43
Okay. So there are two things that we need to notice here. Firstly, you need to notice that the symbols that we have at the top of this graphic are the exact same symbols in the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart'. That's how these connect. Okay, So check that out.
1:28:02
Right. We have those same big black flags here throughout the chart; the same white flags all throughout the chart. And then these three instances where we have that symbol of the no flag, that we just saw with the declension pattern. So that's the first point. Then looking at the declension patterns again, the second thing that we have to establish in order to use this properly is: what on earth is a determiner? And maybe some of you need to be reminded what an adjective is, too.
1:28:34
So let's look at that. So determiners. These are words that answer the question 'which one' or 'how many'? So words such as 'the', 'a', 'some', 'few', 'many', 'my', so on and so forth. Those are determiners, right? So it's kind of, you have to imagine that when you're saying a determiner, you can either be pointing to some specific thing, you know, 'this apple', 'that apple', 'my apple', whatever, or you're counting something, right? 'Both apples', 'a few apples', 'many apples'.
1:29:12
So you're either pointing to something or you're counting something. Those are determiners. They're answering the question 'which one' or 'how many'? Great. All right. So then adjectives, the other type of words that need to take declensions are words that describe nouns in some way. Is the apple red? Is it mushy? Is it freshly picked? Those are adjectives. So determiners and adjectives are the two types of words that come in front of nouns in
1:29:42
a slot and need to take declensions in order to clearly indicate what that noun is doing in the sentence in relation to the other nouns in that sentence. Okay. So now, in light of all of this information, let's look again at our sentence that we want to say 'This man gave the woman that baby.' So in this sentence, we have the determiner, which means 'this'. The determiner that means 'the'.
1:30:16
Okay. And then the determiner that means 'that'. Okay. But unlike those conventional charts that put the declensions on for you and you have to find the right one, you know, after you find the right page of your ten plus pages of charts. Okay. We now are going to take what we can call the root forms of these determiners and then plug the declension on ourselves. Very empowering. All right. So how are we going to do that?
1:30:51
Let's look at our process step by step, and then we're going to do it. All right. So again, firstly, you have to identify the gender of the noun. This is something you're going to have to do no matter what method you use. Right? Secondly, and more difficultly, you need to determine the case of the noun. Okay. It's doing the slots in the sentence. Then, whatever chart you're using, either you have to go find the right chart and then find
1:31:20
the right space or just use the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart' and then find the correct intersection that you need where you're taking into account the gender of the noun and the case of the noun.
1:31:30
Then, with my method, you need to look at the words you have in the slot along with the noun. Right? So we have 'this man' and 'the woman' and 'that baby'. Those are the words that are coming in the slots along with those nouns. Okay. And we have just talked about how these are types of so called 'determiners'. Okay? So now with that information, we need to identify the declension pattern. And there's more to this step, which again we get into in depth in my course and you can
1:32:05
read more about it on my website. But for right now, we're just automatically using our standard default declension pattern number one and not even examining the possibility of it being two, 3 or 4. So we're just going to jump right to that point. But you would have to learn how to identify which declension pattern you're using and then plug in the declensions. Okay, So now we're going to do that with that sentence.
1:32:31
So just for good measure, because practice makes perfect, if we go through step one, again, identify the gender of our nouns, we have a masculine noun referring to a male person, a feminine noun, referring to a female person and a neuter noun referring to a young person. Okay, then the subject of our sentence, which has to go into the nominative case is 'this man'. Nominative case, which I color code pink. Then he's giving 'that baby'. Okay, so baby is going to go into the accusative case.
1:33:07
And to whom is he giving the baby? He's giving it to 'the woman'. So she needs to go into the dative case in this particular sentence. Okay, So now next step, we have to identify the intersections that we need to use here. So starting again from the beginning.
1:33:26
We have a masculine noun in the nominative case, which puts us at this intersection right there. Then for our "Frau' in the dative case, we're going to be right here. That's where the feminine column intersects with the dative row. And then for our baby, we have a neuter noun and it needs to be in the accusative case. So that puts us right here in the chart. These are the three intersections that we're going to need to use. All right. Now we look again at our sentence.
1:34:02
What elements are we using here? Do we have determiners? Do we have adjectives? What's happening in each of these slots? We've already said that the words we have here are determiners. We're answering the question which one or how many? 'This man', 'the woman', 'that baby', where we could imagine ourselves pointing to all of these people. Okay, these are determiners. So our pattern, number one, our standard default automatic pattern says what? Put the strong declension onto the determiner.
1:34:32
Okay, so what does this look like, then, in our sentence? Okay. The strong declension listed at the masculine nominative section is this 'r'. Okay. So that's going to need to go down here. All right. The strong declension listed in the feminine dative also happens to be an 'r', okay, so that's going to go over here onto that determiner and then the strong declension in the neuter accusative is listed as an 's', so that's going to need to
1:35:03
go over here. So if we write this in, then, we have one more special little thing we need to do. But it's not that hard. I think you can handle it. You have the declension, that's great, but that would be very hard to pronounce. So in order to make this pronounceable, we need to put in what I call the 'filler e' or the glue. Okay, so the 'e', the 'filler e' glues the determiner together with the declension that it has to have. Same thing over here.
1:35:30
We put in a filler 'e' and then the declension. Put in the filler 'e' and then the declension. And that gives us the result of 'Dieser Mann gab der Frau jenes Baby.' And now we are saying very specifically, 'This man gave the woman that baby.' And we know exactly who is who and whom is being given and to whom that person is being given, et cetera. The declensions are what tell us that. Because remember, like we were talking about in previous videos, we can shuffle these
1:36:04
slots around in German, right? Without changing the meaning. So that's why knowing how to work with declensions is so very, very essential. All right. So one final thing. We're going to up the ante here and take this same sentence, but insert adjectives so you can practice that element as well.
1:36:33
Okay, so now in our sentence, everything is exactly the same. We've simply added in adjectives. So if I go through this a little faster this time, okay, we have our gender of the nouns, okay? Have to know that.
1:36:50
We have to know what case all the nouns are in, right? We have to know what role they're playing. But again, all of this is the same that we just did. It's not new. It's the same.
1:37:03
And then dative case for our woman and accusative case for our baby. So we're at the exact same intersections in the all in one declensions chart, right? That also has not changed. Okay. So I'm just going to circle them again here and here and here. We're still working with standard default declension pattern number one. So we're still going to put the exact same strong declensions onto all of the same determiners, right? This is also the same. So the 'r' comes down, put on the filler 'e'.
1:37:39
Beautiful. Okay. And then we have an 'er' here and an 'es' here. Right? Just taking that from the chart. Strong declension, strong declension, strong declension. But now we also have these adjectives. They need declensions, too. Determiners and adjectives have to take declensions. Our declension pattern number one specifies, put the strong declension on the determiner, and IF you have an adjective or if you have 20 adjectives, they are going to take the weak declension. Right?
1:38:07
The weak declension is then listed second at every intersection in the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart'. So firstly, we have an 'e' that needs to get put on. Then we have an 'n', so that's going to need a filler 'e' and then we have, again, another 'e'. So now we're saying still the same sentence in terms of who is who giving whom to whom. Right? We've just added in some additional flavor to the sentence with the
1:38:32
adjectives to now say 'This old man gave the nice woman that bawling baby.' (Dieser alte Mann gaber netten Frau jener heulende Baby.) Okay, so very, very well done with this hefty topic. Again, reminder, click below in the description to open up a new tab with a link to the pdf, downloadable materials of the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart', the four declension patterns, a cheat sheet on how to use them. This is free for you, and then you can also visit my website, read the article that I've
1:39:12
written on declensions and there would be several other related articles you can really read up on this for quite some time on my website and dig in deeply. Okay. And then what else? If you haven't already subscribed, make sure you click on that button so that you know when I come out with new information. All right. And then finally, now you just need to decide which video you're going to watch next. The next video in this series is going to be on pronouns, which traditionally
1:39:40
are also rather confusing, but we're going to see how they actually relate to the case system, to the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart'. That's going to make them easier to learn, easier to know how to use them. Okay, so that's the next video. Or if you haven't seen this series from the beginning, this is a good time to go ahead and start it from the beginning. Even watching these videos on the case system and declensions and declension patterns again, because there's so much information here.
1:40:07
Okay. So whichever route you choose, I will see you in that next video. Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my eighth video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. If you haven't watched the previous videos in this series, don't worry about it. You can catch up on them later. In this video, we're going to talk about German personal pronouns. This is a real sticking point for English speakers trying to learn German.
1:40:36
This is going to get tough. I'm going to give you the shortest, best synopsis that I can, but know that this is going to require some extra work on your part. So because of this, if you have not yet already signed up for my free 'English Grammar for German Learners' course, please click on that in the description down below. Open that link up in a new tab. Register today for free. I go into this topic of personal pronouns and so much more in that free course.
1:41:04
You get so many more examples; opportunities to practice. You don't want to miss out on that course. Okay, so for now, what is it that you need to know about German personal pronouns? Well, firstly, they're going to start off by lining up so perfectly, so cleanly with English personal pronouns, but then they're going to diverge. And you really need to understand that divergence. So we're going to be talking about that, but we're getting ahead of ourselves because we
1:41:32
haven't even yet defined, what on earth are personal pronouns? To make that point, let's look at some English sentences.
1:41:41
Okay. In these sentences, 'My cousin's best friend's mother owns an expensive yacht.' 'My cousin's best friend's mother took us on a week long voyage in the Caribbean.' 'I really like my cousin's best friend's mother.' We would never say these three sentences in succession like this, right? This is long. This is cumbersome. Who wants to say 'my cousin's best friend's mother' three sentences in a row? Right? This is not how language works.
1:42:10
What we would do instead is use a personal pronoun to replace this phrase, 'my cousin's best friend's mother'. Pronouns, personal pronouns, are these short, simple little words that are used to replace names, nouns, or entire noun phrases. So if we had to replace 'my cousin's best friend's mother', we would replace it with the pronoun 'she'. 'She' owns an expensive yacht. And so, likewise here. 'She' took us on a week long voyage in the Caribbean. This is pronouns at work.
1:42:49
We use these all the time in English and in German, which is why you really need to know how to use them. So now this same phrase, 'my cousin's best friend's mother' is also used in this third sentence. It's right here. But would we replace this with 'she'? No, we wouldn't say. I really like 'she'. That sounds terrible. What would we say instead?
1:43:14
'Her'. I really like 'her'. Okay, so this is also a personal pronoun, but it's different at the same time because it's in what's called a different 'case'. And if you haven't already watched my fifth video in this series on the case system, you might want to get caught up on that very soon. Okay. So we have, in English, two different cases that are called the nominative and the objective case. The nominative case is what we are using with these pronouns, 'she'.
1:43:49
Those are nominative case pronouns. We're going to look at a table in just a second. And this 'her', also a pronoun, is in the objective case. This is an objective case pronoun. I'm color coding these cases differently. Right? Pink for nominative and green for objective to help you make this distinction. So we have two cases of pronouns in English, but we have three of them in German. So we're going to continue looking at how pronouns work in English for a moment so that
1:44:21
we can directly compare and contrast it to how it's the same or different in German. Here we go. Okay, so this table is for English nominative pronouns, and there's some additional terminology that we need to try to get comfortable with when we're talking about pronouns. And that is what is called the first person, second person, third person, and then singular and plural. Okay, So how this works is that we're very egocentric. We start with ourselves. We start with I.
1:44:59
So in our little imaginative scenario here, I am the first person in the equation. So, first person. Okay, I'm talking directly to you. So now you have entered the scene as the second person. Okay, then you and I are talking about someone else. And when we're talking about someone else, that someone else is going to be the third person. Right now we're in a little triangle in our scenario. Okay? And then from there, it's just a matter of if I'm talking just about 'myself',
1:45:33
(I'm one person in the first person), or if it's a 'we'. Okay, that's the plural column. If I'm talking to you and there's just one of you or there's 20 of you, is the difference between the singular and plural. And then so likewise, if I and you are talking about a third person, but there are multiple third people, then it's the plural over here. It's they. This is how it works. And this is going to work the exact same way in German.
1:45:59
Okay. So we would never, for example, refer to ourselves by name, right? We're not the Queen of England, so we wouldn't say Laura speaks German, right? We would replace our own names with the pronoun I, right? The nominative pronoun 'I' because I am the subject of this sentence, to say 'I speak German'. Okay, then we have the same phrase again, 'my cousin's best friend's mother'.
1:46:27
Again, nominative case because it's the subject noun, but we can replace this with the pronoun 'I' and 'you' are talking about 'my cousin's best friend's mother', so that's the third person. It's a female. We're just talking about one of them. So we would again replace her with 'she'.
1:46:49
So in all of this, you subconsciously know how this works in English, right? You use pronouns all the time. You don't have to analyze it. It just happens, right? That's how it works when you're a native speaker. Okay. But if we take the time and we bring your understanding of English personal pronouns to the forefront of your consciousness, right, so that you can actually analyze what's happening here, it's going to make it so much easier for understanding pronouns in German.
1:47:18
So, let's look at this exact same sentence, but now in German using German nominative pronouns. Okay, so German nominative pronouns are still going to use this same terminology of first person, second person, third person, singular, plural. All of that's the same, right? So figuring out which German nominative pronoun you need to use is going to line up perfectly, cleanly, with English. Okay, so if you know that you need to say 'I', well then it's going to be 'ich'.
1:47:53
If you know you need to say 'she', then it's going to be 'sie', right? It's the exact same spot in the table, between the nominative cases in both of these languages. So you would say now 'Ich spreche Deutsch.' (I speak German.) And 'Die Mutter der besten Freundin von meiner Kusine spricht Deutsch', right? Very long phrase. We really want to replace that with a pronoun. Make it simple and sweet, right? Is now going to be replaced with 'sie' third person, singular and female.
1:48:26
Okay, so then let me take a quick moment here to mention that there are some additional nuance topics when it comes to personal pronouns that do need to be talked about, but we're not going to cover them in this video. So things such as the 'formal' versus 'informal', 'you', all of these multiple instances of 'sie' happening, but they have different meanings. Okay. Some other topics with personal pronouns.
1:48:54
When I have videos put out for them, I will insert links here above my head so you can click on them. But in the meantime you can look in the description down below and I'll have links to various articles on my website where I cover personal pronouns in great depth and get into these other side points, like all of the 'sie's and the formal versus informal. So you can read up on that more later. Okay. So now, moving on.
1:49:26
In English, as referenced earlier, we have just two types of pronouns. The nominative, which we just looked at, and what are called objective pronouns, because in English we essentially use just two cases, the nominative and the objective. You either have a subject noun which always goes into the nominative case, or if you have an additional noun in your sentence that is not the subject, it is an object noun by default, because that's the only other option.
1:49:55
So in English, these two sentences, we have nominative pronouns coming first, right? The subject of the sentence followed by verbs, followed by verbs. Okay, so now all remaining nouns in an English sentence are going to be objective nouns. Okay, so 'my next door neighbor', this is an objective noun. When it occurs here again, it's still an objective noun. We also have an additional objective noun, 'a cake'. This is how it works in English.
1:50:24
This is simpler than than how it works in German, as you will see in a moment. So if we want to replace this noun phrase, 'my next door neighbor' in English, we want a pronoun here, we can no longer use the nominative pronouns, right? We can't say 'I like HE' or 'I like SHE.' That does not work, because whatever case a noun or a name or a noun phrase is in, it needs to be replaced with a pronoun in that same case.
1:50:57
So we can say 'I like HIM,' (I like my next door neighbor.) Or we could say 'her', we're going to make it a 'him' for now though, right? So this is still the third person. All of this terminology is still the same. First person, second person, third person, singular and plural. That's staying the same in all of these tables. So I really like my next door neighbor. I'm telling you this directly. We're talking about him.
1:51:19
And so that's the pronoun that we have to use to replace the noun phrase, 'my next door neighbor'. It would still be 'him' right here.
1:51:29
And if we wanted to, we could refer to the cake as 'it'. We could replace it with a pronoun, too. When we know what we're talking about, that's when we use pronouns. When it's already clear from the context who or what we're talking about, then as we continue talking about those same things, we use pronouns because it's faster. So now, this is how it works in English. But again, new layer of difficulty that comes into play with German pronouns.
1:52:02
So these English objective pronouns: 'me', 'you', 'him', 'her', 'it', 'us', 'you' again, 'them'. This gets split into two different cases in German, which I color code yellow for the accusative case, and then orange for the dative case. Okay. So the thing about this is, these accusative pronouns of 'mich', 'dich', 'ihn' 'sie' 'es' 'uns' 'euch' 'sie, these all mean 'me', 'you', 'him', 'her', 'it' 'us' 'you' 'them'.
1:52:41
But, so do the dative pronouns. Okay, so you can say 'mir', 'dir', 'ihm', 'ihr', 'ihm', 'uns', 'euch', 'ihnen'. And these are also going to in English translate to 'me', 'you', and 'her', 'it', 'us', 'you', 'them'. Right. So again, this concept of the English objective case gets split into two different options in German and you have to know which one you need to use when. And this is all about the case system, declensions, the topics of videos five, six, even getting into seven.
1:53:20
You can catch up on those videos later if you haven't watched them. But for now, stick with me here. We're going to look at some examples.
1:53:28
Okay, so here we have our same two sentences in English of 'I like my next door neighbor,' 'I bake my next door neighbor a cake every week,' just translated to German so that we can work on replacing these nouns with German pronouns. So how is this going to work? Let's do a slot analysis. So we have 'ich' is a nominative pronoun, so it goes into the nominative case. It's the subject of the sentence. 'I' am the subject of the sentence and what am 'I' doing?
1:53:57
I like. I like someone or something. Who or what do I like? I like my next door neighbor. Accusative case. All right. And as a principle here that you can keep in mind, in German, in a standard sentence after you've identified your subject noun, which in a standard sentence comes first, then if you have a second noun in the sentence, it defaults to being a direct object noun and direct object nouns always go into the accusative case.
1:54:30
So now if we want to replace 'my next door neighbor', right, my male next door neighbor with a pronoun, we have to match up the cases. It's in the accusative case, 'meinen Nachbarn', and so now we need to use an accusative pronoun. It's still first, second, third person. I am telling you, I like my next door neighbor. So that's third person. It's a male next door neighbor.
1:55:00
And that's 'ihn'. Okay. The word 'ihn'. Great. So now we saw that in English, in that second sentence, 'I bake my next door neighbor a cake every week,' we would still say 'him' in English, right? It doesn't change. But, in German, this is now different because the role that 'my next door neighbor' is playing in this second sentence is different. He's no longer the direct object. He's the indirect object. And that's going to change the pronoun.
1:55:31
So in the second sentence, we still have the phrase 'my next door neighbor'. In a standard sentence we start with a subject noun. The subject noun 'ich' always goes into the nominative case. 'Ich' is a nominative pronoun. What action am I taking? I'm baking. So the verb comes next. Now we ask this question. What am I baking? And the answer to that question is the direct object. I am baking 'einen Kuchen'. The direct object always goes into the accusative case.
1:56:05
So if we were to replace 'Kuchen' with a pronoun, we would use an accusative pronoun. Okay, so now my next door neighbor, he is the recipient of this cake. He is the person to whom I am giving this cake. And that means that in this sentence he's playing the role of the indirect object.
1:56:26
An indirect objects go into the dative case in German. So we're going to have to use a dative pronoun in order to replace 'my neighbor' here. So dative pronouns--we are talking about the third person, right? We still have first, second and third person in the dative, just like with the nominative and the accusative. And I'm talking to you about how I bake a cake for my neighbor every week, right? So we're talking about 'him' and that's why it's the third person and then
1:56:58
it's just the one neighbor. So it's singular, not plural. And he's a male. So we need to use the 'him' here, not her. So here 'meinem Nachbarn' is going to be replaced with 'ihm'. So notice, this is a difference of just one letter, right? Over on the accusative side, it's 'ihn' with an 'n', and now it's 'ihm' with an 'm'. This is difficult. This is going to require some practice in order to internalize all the different personal pronouns in German.
1:57:32
But this is now a perfect opportunity if you have not already clicked below in the description and opened up a new tab to sign up for my 'English Grammar for German Learners' course, do that now so you can learn more about personal pronouns and so many other essential grammar topics through English first, so that the German is easier to understand. And remember you can also click in the description below to read articles on my
1:58:00
website on the topic of personal pronouns and various other nuances that I haven't had a chance to get into in this video. But before you leave, if you haven't yet subscribed to my channel, click on that button below so you know when I come out with new information. Now you have a choice before you. You can either continue to the next video and learn about word order in German. Or if you haven't watched the series from the beginning, this might be a good time to
1:58:25
start from the very first video. Either way, I'll see you next.
1:58:32
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And this is my ninth video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, we're going to talk about German word order. How are sentences correctly structured in German? There are patterns that work and patterns that don't. And as you will discover, there are some word order patterns that German uses that we do not have equivalents for in English.
1:58:59
It's super important to understand these German patterns because one, you're going to come across them all the time, and two, if you don't understand what's really happening in the sentence and you just interpret the sentence through an English lens, you will misunderstand what is being said. And dependent upon the context, dependent upon how high the stakes are, this could have catastrophic results. So in this video, which does stand alone, by the way, if you haven't watched the other
1:59:27
videos in this series, don't worry about it. You can catch up on those later. In this video, I'm going to introduce to you the standard sentence structure used in German. And then the top way that we make some particular tweaks that we don't have in English to then create a second, very commonly used sentence structure in German. As usual, we're going to start by looking at some English sentences first in order to set the stage for this topic.
1:59:54
Here we go. In video five in this series, which, by the way, if you need some extra practice with the concepts of nominative, accusative, dative cases, click the link above my head and watch that video perhaps first and then come back to this one. In that video, number five in this series, we saw these sentences. The woman sings. The woman sings a song. The woman sings her little baby a song. And if we do what I call a slot analysis of these sentences, this is what we're working
2:00:25
with. The subject of the sentence is 'the woman'. And the subject always has to go into the nominative case. This is the same in English and in German. Okay. Then after you have the subject noun identified and correctly put into the nominative case, notice that it's always the verb that comes next. There's going to be more on this important principle shortly.
2:00:50
After that, while we could just stop at sentence number one, this is still a complete sentence. We have a subject, we have a verb . Done. We can add additional information if we want to. And that brings us to option number two, where now we're answering the question: what is the woman singing? And the answer is, she is singing a song. And this 'what'-- a song, is the direct object in this sentence. And direct objects have to go into the accusative case.
2:01:19
In the third sentence here, we still have 'a song' playing the role of the direct object. So still in the accusative case. But now we've also added in the additional element of 'to whom' is the song being sung by the woman and that 'to whom' is 'her little baby', which makes it the indirect object in this sentence, and indirect objects always go into the dative case. So like we talked about in video five, that gives us three basic sentence patterns.
2:01:53
In each one of these, we have the subject coming first, the nominative case, followed by the verb, which we can say is in position two in the sentence. And then if we add the accusative, that comes next, or if we add the dative that has to be inserted in between, now, the nominative case and the accusative case.
2:02:14
So there are two rules that I want you to understand about these three basic sentence patterns. The first rule is that the nominative and the verb have to be next to each other. And you can see that here, right? In these instances, the nominative is always first and the verb is always next. So they are right next to each other. The second rule is that the verb always has to be in the second position in the sentence.
2:02:43
And notice, this is so important, that the verb is not necessarily the second word in the sentence, because the nominative case, that nominative slot could contain many, many words in it. Right? The subject of the sentence might be the 'kind rich man that I just met yesterday'. That would all be in the nominative case. All of those words comprise the subject of the sentence. And then after that, in position two would come the verb.
2:03:13
Okay, these exact same patterns function exactly the same way in German. We have 'die Frau', who is the subject of the sentence each time. The woman.
2:03:27
Nominative coming first. Then we have our verb right next to it. Right next to it, right next to it. And in all of these instances, the verb is in position two, right? Or it is the second element in the sentence coming after the nominative case, which in this instance is comprised of two words 'die' and 'Frau'. Then, just like in English, if we want to add additional information in sentence two, then we answer the question: what is being sung? And the answer is 'ein Lied'--a song.
2:04:02
And that is playing the role of the direct object in the sentence. And direct objects always go into the accusative case. Great. And so then in the third sentence, we have the same thing. We still have 'ein Lied', still the direct object, still in the accusative case, but now we've added that third element of to whom the song is being sung or who is the recipient of the song or being benefited by the song. Those are all ways to think about the dative case here.
2:04:29
And so 'ihrem kleinen Baby' goes into the dative case. It is the indirect object in this sentence.
2:04:37
Okay, so now the question is what happens in English if we move these slots around in the sentence? What if we change the order and it's no longer nominative, verb, dative, accusative, like in our standard sentence? Does that work in English?
2:04:56
So the first sentence, right, is the standard sentence. We've been working with nominative, followed by the verb, which is in the second position. So the nominative and the verb are right next to each other. Those are our two rules. And then we have the indirect object in the dative case and the direct object in the accusative. Great. Okay, so we're going to put a check mark by this. That's our original sentence. That's the meaning we still want to convey in sentence two and sentence three.
2:05:25
In sentence two, we say 'her little baby sings the woman a song', right? We still have all the same elements. They've just traded places. And this sentence still makes sense, I guess. But it doesn't mean the same thing as sentence number one. So we're going to give that a question mark. Okay, then what about sentence three? 'A song sings the woman her baby.' Huh? This doesn't even make sense in English. This straight up doesn't work.
2:05:53
The reason why we cannot shuffle these elements around in an English sentence is because the cases themselves are fixed in English. The first noun in a standard sentence in English is always going to be the subject of the sentence, always taking the action with that verb coming next. And then if we have two additional nouns in this kind of setup, it's always going to be the next one that will be the dative case, and then the third one, that will be the accusative case.
2:06:29
So the cases themselves have to stay in the same order. And if you change the contents of the slot, you change the meaning of the entire sentence in English. But in German, this is completely different.
2:06:48
Okay, so here are the exact same translations of those three sentences. But now in German, check it out. Our standard sentence, with the nominative case first, 'die Frau' subject of the sentence. What is she doing? She's singing. The verb is in second position. That's rule number two. The subject noun and the verb are right next to each other. That's our rule number one. Then what is she singing? She's singing a song. So that goes into the accusative case as the direct object.
2:07:18
To whom is she singing? She's singing to her little baby. The indirect object goes into the dative case. Okay, so now look at it this way. If that's our first sentence, we've got our check mark. That's what we want. Now we have 'ihrem kleinen Baby' coming first in the sentence, still followed by the verb in position two. That's our second rule. And now on the other side of that verb, the nominative case that we're still fulfilling
2:07:47
rule number one of the verb and the nominative being next to each other. And then after that, 'the song'.
2:07:56
And then in the third sentence, now we're leading off with 'the song' still followed by the verb in the second position and then followed by the nominative case so that the subject noun and the verb are still right next to each other. And then after that, the indirect object in the dative case. The thing is, all three of these sentences mean the exact same thing. Okay. And how is that possible? That is possible because of the declensions on the words coming in front of the nouns in
2:08:32
each of these slots. So the declension here and the declensions here and here, the lack of declension here, they are all the same in all three of these sentences. And that is why in German we can move the elements around in the sentence. We can change the word order without changing the meaning. In English, we saw how the cases themselves stayed the same. It was always the pink, pink, pink for the nominative case and then orange, orange,
2:09:06
orange for the dative case and yellow, yellow, yellow for the accusative case. But here the cases themselves moved, right? In sentence number one, the dative case is the second one. Here it's the first one. Here it's the third one. And the same thing with the pink and the yellow. They all changed position. But because of those declensions, we still know who is who and what is what. And this is so crucial in German. If you haven't already watched the video in this series in which I talk about
2:09:36
declensions, that's video six. You might want to watch that after this video for some additional information on that specific topic.
2:09:44
Okay. So with those German examples fresh in our head where we're mixing all of the slots around in the sentence, let's analyze what it is we were looking at. Okay, so we still have these three basic sentence patterns with the nominative first and the verb in the second position and then the accusative or the dative cases being optionally added after that, just depending upon what you want to say. We can take these three basic patterns and we can combine them into one principle that
2:10:14
looks like this.
2:10:17
This is the standard sentence structure in German. So this is standard word order in German where we have the nominative coming first, the very first element in the sentence. It has to be next to the verb, right? And the verb also has to be the second element in the sentence. So this standard sentence structure, standard word order in German, fulfills both of those rules that we were looking at earlier. And now, coming after the verb, we have options.
2:10:48
It could be an accusative case, whether that's a direct object or it's a prepositional phrase in the accusative case . It could be a dative case, whether it's an indirect object or it's a dative prepositional phrase. It could be an adverb. It could be multiple adverbs. We can also have multiple accusative cases or dative cases. But all of those elements all come next after the verb in what we can call position number three in the sentence.
2:11:16
And this is important because, like we were just seeing with those German sentences where the case is moved around to different slots, starting from this standard sentence pattern, we can now create a new sentence pattern called a transposed sentence pattern.
2:11:36
So what's happening here? Our verb is still in the second position. The nominative, however, moved from being the very first element in the standard sentence to now being here right after the verb. So it's still next to the verb, but it's on the other side of the verb now. And with all of these elements that are in what we'll call position three, we can take one of them at a time and put it at the beginning of the sentence; transpose it to the beginning of the sentence.
2:12:09
Why does German do this? German does this to emphasize that element. In English, when we emphasize something, we do it with our voices. We do it with our intonation to say, I'm flying to Germany TOMORROW. Not next week, not in a month. I'm going there tomorrow. Right. But in German you would put the tomorrow at the beginning of the sentence and then keep your voice pretty much the same in order to convey the same thing. Or I'm flying with MY WHOLE FAMILY to Germany.
2:12:38
Right? We use our voice in English to say that. But in German, again, they would take the 'with my family' and put that at the beginning of the sentence and then keep their voice pretty much the same, but still emphasize it like that. And in English, we can't do that. We can't say. 'With my family, I am flying to Germany tomorrow,' unless you want to sound very pretentious or possibly a little bit like Yoda. So let's look at how this 'Transposed Sentence Pattern' works in German, although
2:13:07
again, we do not have an appropriate equivalent in English.
2:13:14
So speaking of flying to Germany, here's that very sentence. If we do a slot analysis of this, this is a standard sentence. 'I', nominative pronoun, subject of the sentence, put into the nominative case, comes first in the sentence. It is followed by the verb. So they're right next to each other. That's rule number one and the verb is in position two, which is rule number two. After that, all the rest of this information here is all number three; position number
2:13:47
three or all the third elements in the sentence. We can further analyze these elements as being an adverb right here. And then we have two dative cases because we have two dative prepositions. Okay? When I have a video put out on prepositional phrases, I'll put a link here above my head for it. So again, translated in English. 'I am flying to Germany with my family tomorrow,' and if we wanted to emphasize one of those aspects, we would use our voice.
2:14:23
I'm flying to GERMANY with my family tomorrow. I'm flying to Germany WITH MY FAMILY tomorrow. I'm flying to Germany with my family TOMORROW. Right? We use our voice to accomplish that emphasis. But in German, we're going to see how, instead, we transpose the element we want to emphasize. So one more time, analyze our standard sentence here. Nominative, verb, and then in position number three, we have an adverb and two dative case slots.
2:15:02
All right, great. So now the first change that we can make, these are in an arbitrary order, by the way. But we can take this adverb, 'morgan', which means 'tomorrow', and we can emphasize that by transposing it to the front of the sentence. So now 'morgan' is the first element in the sentence, still followed by that verb. And then on the other side of the verb, the nominative case, because it has to be next to
2:15:30
the verb. And then after that, we take the rest of the elements that were from position three and still include them in the same order that they originally occurred in. We just moved 'morgan' but everything else in the third position of the sentence stays in the same order that it was. All right. So now we can transpose ANOTHER element from position three. We can take 'nach Deutschland'. We can put THAT now at the front of the sentence. That's what we're emphasizing.
2:15:59
We still have the verb coming next in the second position. It's still followed by the subject, the nominative case after that. And now we have the remaining contents of that third position in the sentence. We have our adverb and then we have the other dative slot, 'mit meiner Familie'. Then finally, we can transpose 'mit meiner Familie' to the front of the sentence, keeping the verb in the second position and then following it now with the nominative
2:16:31
case so that the subject noun and the verb are still next to each other. We're still following both of our rules. And then we have the remaining elements from the third position in the sentence that are still there. So the thing to note about this is that however many elements you have in the third position of the sentence, we have one, two, three, you have the same number of variations on the sentence that you can create in German.
2:17:02
You have three different ways that you can transpose the elements from the third position in the sentence to have three additional options. Right? One, two, three. If we had ten elements in position three, we could create ten different sentences where one at a time we're transposing them to the front of the sentence in order to emphasize them. Okay, so I know this is a really, really big topic, but again, so crucial because Germans use transposed word order all the time.
2:17:36
So you really need to know what is going on with this. So if you want some additional practice, click in the description below. Open up the link in a new tab to my free 'English Grammar for German Learners' course where you can get lots of additional practice doing similar slot analysis of where's the subject noun? Where's the direct object? Where's the indirect object? Is this an adverb? What's happening? Okay, do that.
2:17:59
And then also below in the description you can open up a tab to read an article on my website where I've written about German word order. What are the sentence structures used in German? I've written on this at length, getting into even more patterns than what I talked about here in this video and then in this series, in videos five and six, you can watch those videos, if you haven't already, to learn more about how I introduced the case system and the concept of declensions.
2:18:29
And now at this point, you need to choose. Do you want to continue the series watching video ten where I give you my best study tips, or would you like to take this opportunity to start this series from the beginning? Either way, I will see you in that video next.
2:18:46
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura and this is my final video in a ten part series on how to learn German smarter, not harder. In this video, I want to share with you my top study tips that, if followed, can help you become fluent in German. But before we talk about the do's and don'ts, let's first discuss, what does it mean to 'be fluent' in a foreign language? Well, let's start with what it doesn't mean.
2:19:13
For one thing, it does not mean that you have to have a massive vocabulary. Language is like an iceberg. The bulk of it is underneath the surface of the water. Those are the words that we understand, but we don't actually use ourselves. And then above the water, the tip of the iceberg, those are the words that we actually use. So now with that in mind, think about this. In order to be fluent in German, you have to have a vocabulary size that's just a third of
2:19:43
that of a native German speaker. So your iceberg is only going to be a third of the size of a native German's, and yet you're still going to be fluent. That's awesome news. We're going to talk more about the details in a second. The second point, though, on what fluency is not is that it is not a matter of 1 to 1 English to German translations. In fact, translating is one of our don'ts that we're going to talk about a little bit later on in this video.
2:20:12
Finally, being fluent in a foreign language such as German does not mean that you're going to be equally comfortable in all situations. Think about it this way. You're still going to be the same person whether you're speaking German or you're speaking English. So whatever situations or scenarios you don't feel very comfortable in, in English, you're not going to feel comfortable in those same situations in German either. More on that in just a second. So this is what fluency is not.
2:20:40
Now let's talk about what fluency is.
2:20:45
Well, for one thing, we could perhaps rephrase this to 'fluid flexibility' so we can be more specific about what we're really talking about. When you're fluent in German as a foreign language, you need to have, yes, an essential core base vocabulary that you feel really comfortable with. And since you feel really comfortable with it, you're going to be able to be creative and flexible, working with what you've got to fill in whatever gaps you may continue to have forever.
2:21:19
I'm fluent in German, and yet my vocabulary size is definitely not that of a native speaker's. But because I have a basic vocabulary that I feel really comfortable with, I can navigate through any situation still very fluidly, very comfortably, and convey the meaning that I want to have, even if I'm using a slightly different word than maybe the precise word I would choose in English. Or if I have to use a few extra words to describe what I'm talking about, because I
2:21:49
don't know that exact vocabulary word that I'm going for. For example, imagine that I don't know the word for 'pipes' in German, but I want to talk about the plumbing in my house. And so I say, 'Yeah, you know, those long, round, hard things all throughout the house that water flows through.' And then the German I'm talking to says, 'Pipes'. Yes Pipes. That's what I'm talking about. Now, I've actually just learned a new word in a real life context that I'll hopefully be able to hang on to.
2:22:20
But even in lieu of knowing the word for 'pipes', I could still quickly, easily, fluidly, comfortably describe what I was talking about. And that totally works. If you pay attention to how you speak in English, you'll find that you frequently do the same thing even in your native language. We don't know all the words that exist in English, and there are many circumstances where you could argue that there's the perfect word that if only it could come to
2:22:47
mind, that would be what would fit in this given scenario. But you frequently will just use the other words that you have access to in the moment and still paint the picture that you want to get across, even if it's not exactly precise as it could be. Another example that I use to bring this home is with a word such as 'magnanimous', right? Magnanimous is a beautiful word, and it means something really specific, and in
2:23:15
certain contexts it could be THE word that you really want to use in English or in German. But for some reason it doesn't come to mind. Or maybe in German you just don't know that word at all. But that's okay because you know other words that still get at the same idea: generous and giving and thoughtful and kind and whatever, and you still build the picture of someone who is magnanimous. Okay. So then finally, what fluency is, is it is building selective skills that you
2:23:46
hone because of their relevancy to you. So for example, in English, I can't listen to songs on the radio and understand 100% of the lyrics for whatever reason. I just have a hard time with that. I'll say, 'What are they talking about?' And, so clearly, I can't then have the expectation that I'll be able to listen to German pop songs on the radio and be able to understand 100% of them. If you can't do something in English, you're probably not going to be able to do it in
2:24:17
German. But the thing is, if you stay focused on not only what you're good at, but what is important to you and what you like, it doesn't matter if you don't understand it. Like, for another example in English, I don't enjoy watching news reports. I understand news reports in English, but I don't like watching news reports in English. In German, just like in English, there tends to be some very specific vocabulary that gets used in news reports.
2:24:45
And I don't know all of that vocabulary, but that doesn't bother me because I don't want to be watching news reports in German anyway. So that's not vocabulary that I'm going to concern myself with because that's not relevant to my life. So you have to really, really think about what are the goals that you have for using German. They have to line up with who you already are as a person, what you're good at, what's important to you, et cetera.
2:25:12
So once you have all that figured out, the key to becoming fluent in German is that you need to go through the process of what I call 'building a German brain'. What does this look like?
2:25:27
So you already have a framework in your head for English. We need to build a second, separate framework for German so that you have two brains inside your head that you can ultimately switch back and forth between, just like turning a light on and off. And to do this, you have to properly internalize information, not just short term memorize things, say with flashcards, it has to be really incorporated to who you are.
2:25:56
You need to learn things correctly so that you don't have to learn them more than once. You need to have better retention, better recall. You need to do everything about learning German in the most efficient and effective ways possible. Right? Learn German the smart way, so it doesn't take forever and it doesn't feel impossible in the process. So all of the do's and don'ts that I'm going to teach you now are going to be about
2:26:22
increasing your confidence and your comfort level, helping you learn things the smartest way possible so that you can build this German brain that you can then be totally tapped into whenever you need to use German and bypass the English all together. So there are three big don'ts that get in the way of building a German brain that keep you from ever attaining proficiency, much less fluency in German. The first one is speaking too soon.
2:26:54
This is basically what's preached by everyone else, is that you have to start speaking right away, right away, in order to get comfortable in German. And I, too, recommend that you start speaking right away, but using a very different process, very different methodology that I call 'scripted speech', and we're going to talk about that in a moment. The second big don't is translating, Don't translate. We want to bypass English as much as possible and connect ideas or concepts
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directly to German. More on this in just a second. Finally, the third big don't is don't do random, right? So in previous videos in this series we talked about how to learn noun gender, the smart way, how to learn declensions, the smart way, word order, the smart way. That's all about patterns, principles, rules, connections, associations. That's what our brains like. Our brains can hang on to that kind of contextualized information. There's deeper meaning behind it. It's not just isolated.
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It's all fit together like pieces to a puzzle. That's what our brains like. And you have to learn this way if you really, really want to become fluent in German. So there's one big meta solution to these three don'ts, and that is learning in context.
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When you contextualize information, making connections, associations, fitting things together like puzzle pieces, that means that you're working with grammar patterns and principles and rules. That means that you're working with what I call 'living vocabulary'. More on that in a second. And then finally, this concept I already mentioned of scripted speech versus creating your own utterances too soon. So we're going to break down each of these three categories, starting with the grammar.
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So when you learn grammar in context, this is things such as, say, with noun gender. Instead of following the conventional wisdom of memorizing a random 'der', 'die', 'das' in front of every noun because there are thousands of them, keep in mind; when you instead work with noun endings and noun groups and attach, associate gender with those, you know that 'heit' is feminine and 'ig' and 'ling', those are masculine and 'ment' and 'ma', that's neuter, so on and so forth.
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And groups, right, that you have alcoholic beverages are masculine and so on and so forth. When you learn like that, when you understand a deeper meaning, a deeper cause to why a noun is masculine or feminine or neuter. Because there's a reason, right? There's a reason. It's either because it belongs to a noun group or it has a noun ending almost all the time. There will be a reason for it. It's not random.
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And when you show your brain the logic, the rhyme to it, all our brains hang on to that. We like that. Okay, so that's the smarter way to learn. It's efficient, it's effective. The same thing applies to declensions. Forget about the ten plus charts that the conventional wisdom would have you use that don't show you how all of the dots connect, right? It keeps it all isolated and mysterious. And you have to rely on those charts.
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You're so dependent on them because you don't understand how they work. If, instead, you use the 'All-in-One Declensions Chart' and the declension patterns graphic, you understand what's happening. You can connect the dots. You're empowered to manipulate declensions yourself and know when and where and how to use the correct ones. And the same thing with word order, right? So just patterns, patterns, patterns, principles, rules. That's going to work for you. That's the smarter way to learn.
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That is contextualized learning as concerns grammar. So now this concept of living vocabulary: I am not a fan of flashcards for multiple reasons. One-- flashcards are usually a translation exercise, right? You have the German on one side of the card and the English on the other. We don't want to do that. We want to bypass English whenever possible. Think about it like this. It's like a triangle.
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The goal is to learn German. Okay. Whatever that German word is that you're trying to work on, you have two options, two pathways for getting there. You can either connect directly from the concept, which is what you want to do.
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Or you can do it the long, hard way by going from the concept to English, which then you're translating into German. And we don't want to do it this way. So the thing about it is, without realizing it on a subconscious level, you think in images and in feelings in English, right? So words come out of our mouth, but we don't think the words in our head first. We think in pictures, we think in sensations. And then we have words that are directly associated with those images, with those
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feelings or sensations. You want to do that same thing in German. And it's totally possible. You just have to be intentional about it. And some of the ways that you can go about making this direct connection from the concept to German is like this when you're working with concrete vocabulary. Okay, so say furniture around the house-- go and touch the furniture, sit on the furniture, crawl underneath the furniture, somehow interact with the furniture while you're drilling that vocabulary.
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That makes it become so much more alive, real, pertinent, than just working with flashcards. Right? And then even better yet, if instead of just sitting on the couch and saying in German, 'die Couch', 'die Couch', 'die Couch', if you can say a simple sentence and contextualize even more and say 'die Couch ist blau', 'die Couch ist weiß', 'die Couch ist klein', right? And use an adjective to describe the couch each time. That's really, really contextualized. That's super awesome.
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That's putting in a whole setup that you can actually use, right? Because you're never (well, I shouldn't say never, but you're rarely, right) going to use a noun like that in pure isolation. It's not like you're a five year old who's going to go around the room just pointing to everything that you know how to say and in German be saying 'ceiling', 'wall', 'floor'. No, you need to say something more than that.
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You need to say, 'Man, this floor is hard,' or 'I like the color of these walls,' or 'the ceiling is so tall,' or 'the window is so big,' or whatever, you're going to say something else. So if you practice in that kind of context and you make it real by using your body, right, by touching the pillow while you're talking about how soft it is and sitting on the couch while you're talking about how it's new and it's large and whatever, that's going to stick in your brain better.
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It's contextualized. Finally, then, making something visual whenever you can't actually, in real life, be touching or manipulating the vocabulary that you're working with. And this can include verbs and stuff, to act them out; like you're just doing charades with yourself. That's powerful usage of your body to learn something. When you can't do that, you need to then use your imagination. Okay? You need to think in images.
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So say you can't learn 'table' by going around and touching the table and whatever. You conjure up the image of a table in your head. And while you're holding on to that image, you associate it directly to, then, the target German for that, which is 'der Tisch'. So now on top of that, we can layer on additional imagery, additional associations that help it stick in our brains, all the better, so that again, we can learn right; learn once. And that is, for example, color coding.
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I color code red for masculine nouns, blue for feminine, green for neuter. So you can conjure up an image of a red table. Right? It's red. It's not blue. It's not green. It's not some sort of other color. It's red. And that helps your brain remember that 'Tisch' is a masculine noun. Okay? You can take this one step further and use wacky associations like Superman. You associate Superman with all masculine nouns.
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So now I'm seeing Superman totally clothed in red, and he's hefting the table around, and then he's breaking off the legs of the table and he's pounding on the table, stomping on the table, breaking the table, whatever. Make it this weird little video in your head with all of these associations. And that's going to help you remember not only the word itself, 'Tisch', 'Tisch', 'Tisch', while you're seeing this happen in your head, but it will help you remember the
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gender. So this is powerful, living vocabulary, not just isolated words on flashcards. Then finally, this big don't of don't speak too soon. Like I was starting to say before, students are frequently recommended to start talking right away. But there are so many problems with this approach. One, you don't understand grammar principles. Yes, you're going to make grammar mistakes left and right. Two, you just started learning, so you don't really have any vocabulary on which to draw,
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which makes it rather hard to talk about anything. Then, thirdly, the sounds of German are brand new to you, so you're probably going to mispronounce things. The inflection won't be very good, your accent might be terrible, and the whole thing will be halting. You're just going to be stumbling over your tongue, which means you're not going to feel comfortable. You're not going to feel confident, and you're going to then be not
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only solidifying, potentially, all of these grammar mistakes or vocabulary that you're using incorrectly, but you're also going to be confirming in yourself, 'Wow, I'm not good at this. I'm not good at speaking German. I'm never going to learn this. I feel so uncomfortable. I don't have self confidence.' Et cetera. This sets you up for failure, creating your own German too soon. So instead, what you need to do is work with scripted speech so that, yes, you still start
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speaking right away, which is important, but in a very, very particular fashion. So what this looks like is, one, you start with German that's already been created for you, right? It's scripted. This is German songs, German movies, German books, righ?. You ingest all the authentic German that you can find, but you also have to interact with it. You have to work with it, print off those lyrics to that song you really like and sing along with it.
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Right? Read a book in German if you like reading and have the audio book at the same time, listening to it and reading the book aloud yourself. And what this does when you work with scripted speech is that you build up comfort, right? Your body gets used to making these new sounds, which then builds confidence, right? It feeds confidence. And you're going to be matching your pronunciation and your inflection to what you're hearing from a fluent German speaker.
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And then you're also going to be always using correct German and great vocabulary because, again, it's been created for you; it's been scripted for you. You don't have to come up with that stuff yourself. And then, after a while of doing this, you have learned some grammar principles, you've built up some vocabulary, you're feeling comfortable making these German sounds. You get to the point, of course, of creating your own German utterances.
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But if you wait and reach that step a little bit further down the road and start just with the scripted speech, this is so powerful. This is how you can build an authentic accent. Your pronunciation can be great, your inflection, et cetera. And you won't be solidifying all of these grammar mistakes or incorrect vocabulary or what have you. This is the smart way to start speaking German. So there you have it.
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Those are my top study tips for how you can become proficient or even fluent in German if you avoid the three big don'ts of: Don't speak too soon. Don't translate. And don't do random. And instead, you build a German brain that stands on its own, right? And you're not translating, but instead you're connecting directly to the concept. You're using scripted speech. You're working with patterns and principles and associations and connections all over the place. You contextualize the learning.
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Make it real. Make it tangible. Make it a puzzle. Find the rhyme and reason, the logic behind everything that you learn in German, and your brain will hang on to that gladly. Okay, so if you are ready to take your German learning to the next level and be on the path to success, on the path to fluency, the next thing you need to do is you need to analyze English. You need to feel comfortable with what you already know so you can apply it to German. This is the smart way.
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So if you have not already, click in the description below, open up that link in a new tab. Register for my free course 'English Grammar for German Learners'. If you have not done this already and you still don't feel like doing it right now, then hang in there. I'm going to give you a bonus 11th video in which I will walk you through, in greater detail, what that course contains, what you're going to learn, how you're going to
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learn it, why it matters because that is the next step, my friends, to learning German smarter, not harder.
2:40:54
Hello, I'm Laura Bennett with German with Laura. And in this video I want to talk with you about how you can leverage being an adult learner of German by starting with what you already know, which is English. You see, so many students stop learning German. They hit a wall when they start noticing all these tiny changes happening on the ends of certain words and they have no idea what is going on. They try looking into it and they're learning about declensions and adjectives and
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pronouns and nominative case and accusative case. All of this vocabulary gets so overwhelming and a lot of people just give up at this point. But the secret to understanding German grammar as efficiently and effectively as possible is starting with English first. So I created a free course just to solve this problem: 'English Grammar for German Learners'. You can click on that link in the description down below. Sign up for this free course today. So is this course really for you?
2:41:56
Well, if it's been a long time since you've been in English class or if you can't currently dissect and label the different parts of a sentence; if you can't give me a ready definition of pronoun and preposition and nominative case, then yes, this course is exactly for you. In 'English Grammar for German Learners', we cover lots of material.
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All of these different parts of speech from nouns to verbs, the prepositions and pronouns, I go into in depth, all for the purpose of, one, refreshing you on what you already know, right? So just helping you with the terminology because that's the tricky part. But then on top of it, and this is so crucial in 'English Grammar for German Learners', I take grammar concepts that are essential in German and I teach them to you first in the context of English.
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So they're not relevant to English and you've never heard of them before. They'll involve things such as determiners and case, which you see here on this list. Because again, if you can understand how the grammar works in English, then you can transfer that understanding to German and connect the dots so much faster. So I want to show you very briefly just a sample of what 'English Grammar for German Learners' is really like.
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And we're going to analyze just a few aspects of this sentence: The daredevil teenager explores a deep, dark cave. Okay, so the very first thing that we want to do is identify the nouns. Where are the nouns in this sentence?
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We have two of them. Teenager and cave. How do we know that? Well, that's in the definition of noun, right? So a noun is a person, place, thing or idea. So 'teenager' is a person.
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And 'cave' is a place. So those are our two nouns in this sentence.
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All right, great. So now, next thing.
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We need to identify what are called determiners. So again, this is a totally new concept. We have determiners in English, but we're not accustomed to calling them determiners because they're just not that important of words in English. Okay, so determiners are little words such as 'the', 'a', 'this', 'that', 'my', 'your', 'some' 'all', 'both', 'a few', et cetera. Et cetera. Determiners answer the question: Which one or how many?
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Okay, so in this sentence, we have the determiner 'the' telling us which teenager we're talking about and 'a' telling us which cave we're talking about or how many caves. It's just 'a' cave, not a hundred caves. All right, so these are determiners. And this is important to understand, because determiners, in German, are one of the two types of words that are going to habitually take these tiny little changes called
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declensions. So you have to know what determiners are in German so you can make those changes yourself and/or understand them when you see them. So now, the next step is to find the adjectives in the sentence, and adjectives also take declensions in German. So this is why it's so important to know what they are. Okay, so adjectives describe a feature or quality of the noun. They add additional richness and flavor to the sentence. So here, we're not just talking about 'the teenager'.
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We're talking about 'the DAREDEVIL teenager' . That's adding information about the teenager . That makes it an adjective. The cave, right? It's not just 'a cave'. It's 'a DEEP and a DARK cave'. So those are adjectives. Great. Next step.
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Now we need to do something called 'drawing in the slots'. What on earth are slots? So again, I'm sure you never learned this in fifth grade English class because you didn't need to. But it's going to be absolutely crucial to understanding German grammar. So every noun in a sentence has to go into a slot, and along with it, it brings along with it the determiner and any adjectives into the slot with it. So 'the daredevil teenager', this is a chunk that all has to go together in one slot.
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Okay, so it's going to look like this. Great. So then 'cave' brings along with it the determiner 'a', and the two adjectives, 'deep' and 'dark', and they get coupled together in a slot. All right, next step. We need to talk about what role are the nouns playing in the sentence relative to each other? What are their relationships to each other? 'The teenager' is what is called the subject noun because it's taking action in the sentence. The teenager is the one doing the exploring.
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Okay, so 'S' for subject. All right. And then in English, all remaining nouns are called object nouns. We have just the one slot for the subject noun or nouns. And then after the verb right here, all other nouns are going to be object nouns. So this gets a little more complicated in German, but having this starting point in English is very essential. So now that we know this, we're going to take our final step in analyzing these slots.
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And that is that we have to 'label the cases'. Okay. So again, this is a concept that's not super relevant to English, but it makes a world of difference in German. So the subject noun is always going to go into what is called the nominative case. And I color code this with pink. So the nominative case is 'the daredevil teenager'. It's not just the noun, it's all of the other words that go together in the slot, 'the' and 'daredevil'.
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Because again, it is 'the' and 'daredevil' that are going to take changes; going to take the declensions. And those changes are going to be impacted by which case the noun is in. So our subject noun 'teenager' is in the nominative case and that's going to be reflected in the precise changes that are made to the word 'the' and 'daredevil' coming in front of it. So now 'cave' as an object noun is going to go into what in English is called the
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objective case. But again, you've possibly never learned this before because it wasn't very important in English, but in German it matters. Okay, so same thing, now the determiner 'a' and the adjectives 'deep' and 'dark' are all going to take declensions that would reflect this different role that 'cave' is playing in the sentence; that it is an object noun. Okay, so if any of this felt overwhelming, that's totally understandable.
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That's why there's an entire course on this information and more. Click below in the description. Start 'English Grammar for German Learners' today, and I will see you there.
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