In this ‘German for Beginners’ grammar lesson video series, the German language will be DEMYSTIFIED. Principles & patterns will be uncovered! Grammar will actually make sense!
My full library of articles can be found under grammar topics at:
FREE course ‘Unlocking German Grammar’: https://free.germanwithlaura.com/grammar
( UPDATED VERSION of ‘English Grammar for German Learners’)
1. Check in and make sure you’re not spinning your wheels by being stuck in the 3 common traps German learners fall into.
2. Do a mindset shift to ensure that you’re on track to learn German as efficiently and effectively as possible.
3. Systematically tackle the most essential German grammar topics.
4. Learn about concrete, practical tips for how to continue learning German smarter, not harder!
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JUMP AROUND:
0:00:00 – 3 Classic Pitfalls
0:10:06 – 3 Key Solutions
0:16:41 – Noun Gender*
0:32:09 – Noun Plurals**
0:44:50 – Case System
1:02:53 – Declensions
1:14:36 – Declension Patterns
1:40:12 – Personal Pronouns
1:58:32 – Word Order
2:18:46 – Study Tips
2:40:52 – [BONUS] English Grammar for German Learners
So many German learners make the mistake of trying the ‘instant immersion approach’, which includes a focus on vocabulary and completely ignoring German grammar.
These same students ultimately discover that you can have all the vocabulary in the world, but without the grammar to ‘glue’ it all together, it’s relatively worthless.
Your ADVANTAGE as an adult learner of German is that you can ANALYZE grammar structures, which means you can understand how German works (it’s often quite different from English) in a FRACTION of the time you’d otherwise spend.
The Pareto principle applied to German grammar means that there are 20% of the grammar topics that do 80% of the work for you! This is where you need to start. The ESSENTIALS. The FOUNDATION.
In every aspect of how you learn German, you need to work with PRINCIPLES & PATTERNS (our brains love this approach! it works!). If you understand the WHYs, the HOWs become a whole lot easier!
This video series (all spliced together for your convenience!) takes you from the very beginning of how are you approaching German through the CORE grammar topics you MUST understand to a set of tips that will empower you to continue studying German as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Get ready to JUMPSTART your German learning! It’s time to LEARN GERMAN SMARTER, NOT HARDER.
I’ll show you how!
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IMPORTANT NOTES:
* (NOUN GENDER) Around the 24-minute mark, I reference countries being a neuter noun group. There ARE exceptions! A handful of countries are masculine (e.g. der Irak). A few are feminine (e.g. die Schweiz). A few are plural (e.g. die USA). But the DEFAULT is neuter and this is important in any instance in which you might use a determiner or adjective before the country’s name (e.g. In dem französischsprachigen Kanada ist das Gericht “Poutine” sehr beliebt”).
** (NOUN PLURAL) Around the 35-minute mark, I give 2 sets of examples of common nouns that take the ‘no change’ plural, but several of nouns I chose to highlight were poor examples because *after* ‘getting off the train’ at ‘train stop #1’ (with my system that you’ll learn in this video), these nouns are further shunted to short, easy exception lists (but I don’t specify this in the video).
Firstly, ‘Vater’, ‘Mutter’, ‘Bruder’, and ‘Boden’ do indeed take the no-change plural ending, as I say –BUT they also belong on a list of 24 nouns that additionally take an umlaut in the plural (Väter, Mütter, Brüder, Böden).
Finally, all feminine nouns ending with -el and -er (there are none that end with -en) ALSO get off the train at train stop #1 and take the ‘no change’ ending as the first step … but, then you learn (just not in this video!) that this particular body of nouns also has to add an ‘n’ (Gabel becomes Gabeln, Schüssel becomes Schüsseln, Schwester becomes Schwestern).
So, sorry! My apologies for not using clear-cut examples and/or not clarifying the essential nuances of the examples I did use. But hopefully it all makes sense to you now. And REMEMBER: smarter learning is always about learning the rule first, exceptions later. 🙂
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