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Welcome to my third blog post based on our ‘Ask Angelika’ shows with practical or useful sentences you might hear or use yourself in certain scenarios.
Today we’re ordering coffee and cake in a café.
Hallo, ich möchte bestellen.
Hello, I’d like to order.
When nobody comes to take your order and you want to call somebody, don’t use ‘Herr Ober’ or ‘Fräulein’. Both are old-fashioned and frowned upon, especially ‘Fräulein’. Instead, just use a friendly ‘hallo’.
„Was kann ich Ihnen bringen?“
What can I get you?
Literally, what can I bring you?
Ich möchte …
I would like …
Depending on the conversation you might not need to start your sentence with ‘Ich möchte’ and you could just say what you’d like to order. Just like in English, if a waiter asked ‘What can I get you?’ you migh just say ‘a coffee please’. But if you want or need to say a whole sentence, then an easy way is ‘Ich möchte …’
einen Kaffee bitte.
a coffee, please.
eine Tasse Kaffee, bitte.
a cup of coffee, please
ein Kännchen Kaffee, bitte.
a pot of coffee, please.
Whether you started with ‘Ich möchte’ or not, whatever it is you want needs to be in the accusative case. So, if you want to say ‘a’ followed by a masculine noun it’s ‘einen’. If it’s followed by a feminine noun, it’s ‘eine’ and if it’s followed by a neuter noun, it’s ‘ein’.
Hence: Ich möchte einen Kaffee/ eine Tasse Kaffee/ ein Kännchen Kaffee. The same also applies to Tee or any other drink you wish to order. If you need help or a refresher with German gender, check out my online course German gender #1 – German nouns and der, die & das or German grammar – the four cases if you need more help with the German cases.
einen Tee/ eine Tasse Tee/ ein Kännchen Tee.
a tea/ cup of tea/ pot of tea.
einen Kaffee mit/ ohne Milch und Zucker.
a coffee with/ without milk and sugar.
„Und zu essen?“
And to eat?
Ein Stück Kuchen.
A piece of cake.
Apfelkuchen/ Pflaumenkuchen/ Erdbeerkuchen
Apple cake/ plum cake/ strawberry cake
Käsekuchen/ Streuselkuchen/ Marmorkuchen
cheese cake/ crumb cake/ marble cake
Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte
Blackforest gateau
mit Sahne
with cream
„Kommt sofort“
Coming up.
I wish this was real as I really fancy a lovely piece of cake now 😊
Here’s the video where Steven gets to practise saying and translating the sentences:
What can you do with these sentences to remember them?
You can bookmark this post or make a vocabulary list with them. You can do that with any paper or electronic notebook. Or you could buy my notebook which I designed specially for German vocab learners. It has space for vocabulary lists and sentences. You can even choose one of two colours ☺
