This post offers further practice for the German perfect form that we use to talk about the past. It is pattern (grammar) oriented and an addition to the post How to speak about the past – Die Vergangenheit
When it comes to the German verb WERDEN, you will realize that translation to English as an aid to comprehension and learning reaches its limits. In the end, German is not English translated (and vice versa).
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.
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.