A lot of language is highly repetitive, especially in everyday communication. Many phrases are commonly repeated and as you start understanding more, especially if you are in a German language environment, you will pick them up gradually. In the beginning of your language learning journey, phrases with which you can express comprehension problems can be very useful, for instance …
In 1977, the German linguist Hans Glinz conducted a study in which he extracted the most common 25 verbs from a text corpus of 100 000 words (from: Granzow-Emden, M., Deutsche Grammatik verstehen und unterrichten, Tübingen, 2019.)
The list he came up with contained the following verbs:
Adjectives modifying nouns
Let’s look at some examples of adjective-noun combinations and find out how they change.
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German possessive articles change according to who something belongs to (to me or to you, to us or to them etc.), and the contextual grammatical features of the nouns they precede. This could be: grammatical gender, their number (singular, plural or mass noun) and their sentence functions (subject or object). Let’s find out which grammar feature leads to which changes.
Here the very basics of first encounters: How to introduce yourself, and, depending on the situation, first questions to get to know each other further. As in all cultures, what is okay to ask and what might be too personal varies. Asking where someone lives, when they came to Germany, where they work, what they like doing, or what kind of things they generally like will most likely be okay for all.
An important aspect to consider when learning a language is that every word has its own specific grammatical ‘behavior’. Instead of learning general rules of grammar, look at the grammatical behavior of lexical elements in context, and don’t spend too much time trying to memorize words individually outside a context of use. Learning word lists rarely results in being able to use them. It mainly results in passive knowledge of word recognition. Instead, look at how words ‘behave’ in contexts of use. How do they fit in structurally? With which other words do they most commonly co-occur?
We will start with looking at very basic but not uncommon structures.
When it comes to speaking and writing about the past, German and English are different from one another, so be careful when translating. Look at the little dialogue below.
And other common questions and phrases for talking about:
Das Wochenende
It’s Friday afternoon, the work week ends, and people start heading home into the weekend. A common phrase you will now hear throughout companies and work places in Germany is: