Which German nouns take an e or umlaut & e in the plural?

This page contains affiliate links to Amazon. It means I’ll get a few pence if you buy anything – at no extra cost to you. When my students come across German gender for the first time, and they’re learning whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, they often despair. Then after a while they … Read more

Improve your German in September 2024

Welcome to another month of the German Action for Happiness Calendars. As before, you can if you wish also print out a PDF version. And if you want or need to, you can see it here in English, where you also find further foreign languages. Use the following sentences as a German reading and translation exercise and … Read more

The Feynman technique for German learners

The following text about the Feynman technique has been taken from https://sketchplanations.com/feynman-learning-technique (Thanks Jono) Further down you can read my thoughts. Richard Feynman was one of the great scientists of the 20th century, making significant contributions to physics and other related fields. Part of what made him stand out was his gift for teaching. He … Read more

The gender of German compound nouns

I have written about compound nouns before in posts like Lost German compound nouns found after long search, Handschuhe – Gloves or Are you a ‘Muffel’? but I wrote them to show you the variety of compound nouns. In this blog post I’m going to answer the question: How do you determine the gender of … Read more

Improve your German in August 2024

Welcome to another month of the German Action for Happiness Calendars. As before, you can if you wish also print out a PDF version. And if you want or need to, you can see it here in English, where you also find further foreign languages. Use the following sentences as a German reading and translation exercise and … Read more

How to use ‘ich will’ and ‘ich werde’ when talking about the future in German

Whenever students want to talk about the future, they often get wollen and werden mixed up. It’s understandable, because ‘ich will’ sounds like ‘I will’. But it’s a false friend, because ‘ich will’ means ‘I want’. When asked, for example, “Was wirst du morgen machen?” (What will you do tomorrow?) students told me “Ich will … Read more

How to use the German word WILLKOMMEN

A while ago I was asked when (or how) to use willkommen with bei, in, zu, auf or an. I answered and then did a little research to see if there was more. The result is this blog post. Willkommen & dative prepositions: Willkommen as an adjective. If it’s used an an adjective and comes … Read more

Exploring the German verb BRECHEN and its variations

This page contains affiliate links to Amazon. It means I’ll get a few pence if you buy anything – at no extra cost to you. The verb brechen means to break. It gets conjugated as follows (watch out, it’s an irregular verb, so the 2nd and 3rd form singular is different): The perfect tense goes with ‘haben’ … Read more

Three German words that can make strange translations

As German learners start to learn more and more vocabulary, they learn that ‘questions’ are ‘Fragen’ and the verb ‘to ask’ is ‘fragen’. So when they want to say ‘asking questions’ they say ‘Fragen fragen’. That’s not how we say it in German (although if you said it, people would understand you). Asking questions in … Read more

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