Hallo - Guten Tag!
Welcome to the German course. I hope you will enjoy learning the language.
Here are some basics about German and learning the language.
When you learn German you will realize that English and German have a lot of words in common. Irregular verbs in English are also irregular in German and sometimes change even the same way. A good example is:
to drink drankdrunk
trinkentrankgetrunken
Learning a foreign language makes you more aware of your own language. You will notice oddities, which cannot be explained and should simply be accepted, as you do with your mother tongue.
The better you know your own language, the easier it is to learn a foreign language.
It is good to understand why things are the way they are, but a lot of "Whys?" cannot be answered.
I can explain why an article changes, but I cannot explain why there are three different articles. Please don't waste time and energy on these questions. Just accept and take it in.
As you might alreadyknow:
There are three genders (articles) plus the plural in German.
masculine / feminine / neuter / pluralder / die / das / die
I use the different colours to help you to remember the gender. A noun is either: masculine, feminine or neuter. When we learn more, you will see that everything falls back on this, hence you should never learn a noun without its gender and try to learn the plural as well. Unfortunately it is not just adding an "s".
der Name - the namedie Namen - names
die Nummer - the numberdie Nummern- numbers
das Hotel - the hotel die Hotels - hotels
Another point you need to remember is that every noun is spelled with a Capital.
Everybody learns in a different way. Some like to listen to a tape and speak others prefer to read and write. Some develop a feel for the language fairly quickly others learn better by learning tables and rules.
In my experience it is usually a combination of it all. One thing is for certain. When you are able to do some German everyday you will progress really well. And keep it simple, don't try to say everything in one sentence, do not try to translate from English to German. Make use of all the words you have learned first. Very soon you will have a pool of words, which will enable you to vary your speech / written work.
Reading aloud is a very good way of getting your tongue around these new words and gaining a feel for the language.
It is also useful to learn a word in context. In this way you see how it is used within a sentence and quite often you see its gender.
So, now let's get started with greetings in German. Please consult the worksheet.
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