The German Alphabet

German uses the same 26 letters as English, with four extra characters: ä, ö, ü, and ß.

The first three are alternate pronunciations or “shifts” of the vowels a, o and u. The ¨ mark is called an "umlaut"
(rhymes with "zoom out"). They can appear capitalized too -- Ä, Ö, Ü -- but you won't see that too often, because
they don't occur at the beginning of many common words.

The ß (“sharp S”) is not a real letter, just a ligature for (or stylized way of writing) a double lowercase s. We’ll
discuss a little later when to write ss and when to use ß – we have to cover the vowels first – but if you’re ever in
doubt, write ss. It’s more acceptable to replace a ß with a double s than the other way around. There is no
difference in how they’re pronounced. In Switzerland the ß is not used at all.

If you’re using a keyboard without these symbols, you can type ae, oe and ue instead of ä, ö and ü, and of course ss
instead of ß. Or click here for our full guide to typing German characters on non-German keyboards.

Pronunciation: Consonants
Many German consonants have the same pronunciation as they do in English. These are the main exceptions:

 B at the end of a syllable is softened (“devoiced”) to more of a P sound; similarily, D and G at the end of a
syllable sound like T and K, respectively

 J is pronounced like the English “Y” (so “jung” has the same initial sound as its English cognate “young”)

 In the combinations “kn,” “pf,” and "ps," both letters are pronounced. This is not as hard as it sounds,
although it takes some getting used to. You may already know the kn sound from the Yiddish word "knish."
In the case of pf (as in Pferd, a horse) and ps (as in Psychologie), just get ready to say a p, with your lips
closed, and say the second letter instead, letting it force them open a bit.

 V is like the English (and German) “F” in words of Germanic origin (so “Vater” has the same initial sound
as “father”), but in words of foreign origin it's usually pronounced like the English V / German W (below)

 W is very similar to the English “V” (and our W sound doesn’t exist in German)

 Z is pronounced like “ts”

 Qu is pronounced like “kv” (as opposed to the “kw” sound in English). We have this in the Yiddish
word "kvetch" (to complain) in English, which comes from the German quetschen (to crush or squeeze).

 a single S is usually pronounced like an English Z, with a few exceptions:

 Before another consonant, it’s a normal soft ("voiceless") S as in English (so "Skulptur" has the
same initial sound as the English "Sculpture")

 Sp- and St- at the beginning of a syllable are pronounced Shp- and Sht- (ex. "Spaten," a
spade/shovel)

 To differentiate it from “sechs” (the number six), the S in “Sex” is soft

 (and a double S or ß is soft just like in English, e.g. “assassin”)

The above sounds are relatively easy to pronounce, as long as you can remember the rules. For most English
speakers, the most difficult sounds in German are R and CH. They come in multiple varieties:

 R at the end of a word or syllable: this is not always given in textbooks or dictionary pronunciations, but
most native speakers pronounce a terminal r very weakly; it’s more of an "uh" sound that sometimes draws
out the preceding vowel. For example, derusually sounds more like day-uh. This is a particular problem for
 North Americans: if you ask a German (or anyone really) to imitate a standard American accent, the first
thing they’ll do is lean on those terminal Rs. Irish accents have pretty strong Rs too.

 R at the beginning of a word or syllable, as in rot (red), is pronounced at the back of the throat with a bit
of a scratch, although in parts of southern Germany (notably Franconia) it can also be rolled in the manner
of a Spanish R.

 Hard CH: A ch is pronounced “hard” when it comes after a, o, u or au, as in auch (also), doch (but), or
the exclamation ach! It sounds like a harsh or throaty "kh", as in the beginning of the Yiddish word
"chutzpah" (when it is correctly pronounced!)

 Soft CH: A “ch” after any other vowel (as in the pronouns ich and dich), or at the beginning of a few words
(China, Chemie) is pronounced “softly.” Many foreign speakers, and even some young native speakers,
pronounce this as an English sh sound (as in "shy"); this is understandable but incorrect. The correct
pronunciation is very close to the sound of a cat hissing, with the corners of your mouth pulled apart and the
air being pressed out laterally between the top of your tongue and the roof of your mouth

 Greek CH: There is a third, less common "ch" sound that is identical to a K. We have this one in English
too. It comes from the Greek letter chi (χ) and appears most often in Greek-derived words
(Chaos, Charakter), but it also appears in a few Germanic words, like the aforementioned sechs (the
number six)

 Foreign CH: There are many loan words in German that keep their original CH sounds, e.g. from French
(Chef, Chauffeur), English (Cheeseburger, Chips) or Spanish (Chile, Chihuahua)

There are some other minor differences in the pronunciation of consonants, but they’re really too subtle to be
learned this way, and they’re not as important for being understood. If you can remember everything above (even
if you’re not perfect on the R and CH sounds), you’ll be well ahead of most foreign speakers.

Pronunciation: Vowels
These are eight standard German vowels – the same five as in English plus the three umlaut vowels ä, ö and ü –
and they each have a “long” and a “short” variant. These terms refer first to how long the sound is held or drawn
out, but there are sometimes also differences in the sound itself between the long and short variants of a
vowel. Short vowels in German are very short and clipped compared to English, and long vowels are held a bit
longer.

In general, a vowel is long when followed by a single consonant and short when followed by a
combination of consonants. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they mainly involve unstressed
syllables and short grammatical words (e.g. in, das, von). The following table gives some examples of these
sounds and how to pronounce them.

Also keep in mind that most German syllables that begin with a vowel are led off by a glottal stop. An example of a
glottal stop is the break in the middle of “uh-oh” – or, for British readers, the way Cockney speakers swallow their
Ts. This is what makes German speech sound choppier than English and makes native Germans sound so
distinctive when speaking English – just ask any German with a noticeable accent to read the words “each other”
and notice how they put a stop between the words where no native English speaker would).

LONG S HORT

Same sound as the long

Similar to the "a" in the English
a version, just a bit shorter,
“father.”
like the vowel in "mop."

ä Like the sound in the British Same sound but shorter,

 pronunciation of "hair." No direct
equivalent in American English, but
imagine saying "aaah" at the doctor's,
with a tongue depressor pushing your
tongue down.
Like the long A in English ("day") but
"flatter," without the same rounding
e
into an eee sound at the end. Keep the
corners of your mouth pulled far apart.
Rather like the “ee” sound in English
(“team”, ”meet”), but the tip of the
i
tongue is actually positioned a little
higher in German.
Like the O in "no" without the w sound
o
at the end.
Similar to the English vowel sound in
"worst" or "worry," but even closer to
the sound in French words like “bleu" or
ö rounded lips, though the
"coeur." Your lips should be tense and
rounded, with a hole the size and shape
of a small olive.
Rather like the English “oo” sound, as in
“tube” and “moon,” but the lip
u
rounding has more tension in German,
like when blowing out a candle.
For those who speak French, this is
pronounced just like French u (as in
“tu”). Your lips should be very tense,
ü long ü: The tongue tip and
with the lower lip retracted and the air
coming out downwards as if you're
blowing into a flute.
perhaps verging closer to a
short "e" (below) but still a
distinct sound.
The short e is identical to
that in English (though
perhaps a tad shorter), so
German “nett” is just like
English “net”, “denn” like
“den,” etc.
Very close to the English
short i, so German and
English “in” and “Mist”
sound alike, except that the
German vowel is slightly
shorter.
Like the sound in “clots” in
British English, or
“bought” in American
English if spoken quickly.
Akin to the long version,
short ö is like short e with
rounding is more slight and
not as tense.
This is just like a clipped
version of the English
short u in words like “put”
and “should” (NOT “but”!).
This vowel is the result of
many English speakers’
attempts to pronounce
lips are more relaxed (and
its duration is much less, of
course).
In some instances, vowels are marked as long by being doubled, like in Staat (state), or by adding an h after a
vowel, like in Stahl (steel).

The other basic vowels sounds are as follows:

 y appears as a vowel in some words of Greek origin, and it’s pronounced like a long ü. One common
example is “typisch” (typical).

 e appearing at the end of a word, as in bitte (please), is an unstressed “uh” like a terminal –a in English
(manna, mania) though the tongue is in a more neutral (central) position in the mouth – like the second “e”
in “celebration” when spoken quickly.

 ie is pronounced like a German long i, except at the end of some nouns where it can be an unstressed
“-yeh” sound (e.g. Familie)

 au is pronounced like the English ow in cow

 äu and eu are pronounced like the English oy in toy

 ei, ey, and ai (as well as the ay in Bayern, the word for Bavaria) are all pronounced like an English long i
(“fight”)

Now, let's come back to the question of when to use ss and when to use ß. The rules for this have changed in
recent years, but the current practice is to use ss after short vowels, and ßafter long vowels and diphthongs (vowel
combinations). This may sound circular, since we just said that the length of a vowel is determined by the number
of letters after it -- but in practice, you're usually either trying to spell a word that you've heard (in which case you
should recognize whether the vowel is long or short) or you're trying to pronounce a word that you've seen (in
which case you'll already know whether it's ss or ß).

A little more about umlauts

Many books define ä, ö and ü as full-fledged letters, but they aren’t quite; for example, they're not in the alphabet
song that German children learn, and they don’t have their own sections in a dictionary. And they are closely
related to their non-umlaut counterparts: most words with an ä are derived from “root” forms with an a.

The original purpose of a Germanic umlaut was to shift from a "back vowel" to a "front vowel" (these terms refer
to the position of the tongue in the mouth) to make a derivative form of a word easier to pronounce, usually
because it was adding another syllable. For example, alt(old) --> älter (older). But they now appear in many
words where this process is no longer apparent – usually because the extra syllable has been dropped (as in many
noun plurals) or because the root form has fallen out of use. It can also happen because they’re being used to
approximate a foreign pronunciation (militär), or for more complex reasons (e.g. für comes from vor, but even
native speakers don’t usually think of them as related).

You certainly don’t need to think about this every time you read or hear an umlaut vowel, but it’s useful to have it
in the back of your mind when learning vocabulary. The more you can visualize the umlaut forms of a word as
“shifted” rather than as a whole separate word, the easier it will be to remember them.

Loan Words in German

There are a growing number of foreign words in German, and they sometimes break the pronunciation rules in
the previous two sections. Most of them are from English or French – but even if you know the correct French or
English pronunciation, that doesn’t tell you whether German will adapt it entirely or convert it to a more German
pronunciation.

However, once you have a sense of how native German words sound, you’ll start to get a good feel for it. Generally
if there’s a way to pronounce the foreign word according to the German rules above, that’s what happens. The
words that keep the foreign pronunciation are usually ones like “das Baby” or “das Croissant,” with letters (like
the terminal “y” or the “oi”) that wouldn’t have any clear pronunciation in German. To be sure, there are
exceptions, but it’s a good general rule. There are also some words that fall in between – for example, die
Creme(cream) is pronounced with a long German e in the middle rather than the short è in French, but many
speakers leave the second e silent as in French, rather than pronouncing it as you would in German.

Also, remember that loan words often narrow their meanings. For example, we use angst with a more specific
meaning than it has in German and entourage or milieu with a narrower connotation than they have in French.
A sombrero is a more specific style of hat in the US than in Mexico, and a taco is a more specific dish. Similarly, in
German, das Notebook refers only to a laptop computer, not to a paper notebook, and der Star is a celebrity, not a
star in the sky. There are also a few English words in German that are purely German coinages, like das
Handy for a cell phone, der Beamer for a video projector, and der Oldtimer for a vintage car.

Capitalization & Punctuation

 As you may have noticed by now, all nouns are capitalized in German, wherever they appear in a sentence.
This is a nearly unique feature in a contemporary language, and it’s helpful in parsing sentences when there
are words you don’t know. We used to do it in English, as you can see in old documents like the U.S.
Constitution.

 Sie (the formal "you") is always capitalized. This also applies to the related forms Ihnenand Ihr, although
not to the reflexive pronoun sich.

 Unlike the English I, the first-person singular pronoun ich is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence

 Unlike in English, adjectives describing nationality, ethnicity and religion (the American car) are not
capitalized in German (das amerikanische Auto) unless they’re part of a proper noun (Deutsche Bank)

 As in the rest of continental Europe, decimal points and commas are reversed in writing numbers (e.g. a
coffee might cost 1,50€ while a car costs 15.000€)

 Typically the format for German quotation marks is „___“ (rather than “___”), with the opening quote
mark upside down and both of them curling outwards (see our "non-German keyboards" section for
how to type these)

 French chevron-style quotation marks («___») are also sometimes used, although German tends to
invert them (»___«)

 German never uses the “Oxford comma” at the end of a list

 Unlike in English, a comma can link two independent clauses in German

 du and its related forms (dich/dir/euch) used to be capitalized like Sie, and some people still capitalize
them, especially in correspondence. This is certainly not wrong, but's no longer standard, and you don't
need to do it unless you want to.

Sentence Structure & Word Order

A simple main clause in German can be written with the same word order as English:

Ich gab dem Jungen einen Ball.

I gave the boy a ball.

However, unlike in English, the word order in a main clause can also be rearranged to emphasize something other than the
subject by putting it first – so long as the conjugated verb remains in the second position:

Einen Ball gab ich dem Jungen.

I gave the boy a ball. (as opposed to giving him something else)
 Dem Jungen gab ich einen Ball.
I gave the boy a ball. (as opposed to giving it to someone else)

With a compound verb (consisting of a main verb and a helping verb), English usually keeps the two parts together. In
German the conjugated verb must be in the second position, while the other verb almost always goes at the end of the
phrase:

Ich werde das Buch bald lesen.

I will read the book soon.

In a subordinate clause, the verbs all go at the end of the phrase. If there’s more than one, the conjugated verb comes last:

Ich trinke, weil du mich verlassen hast.

I’m drinking because you left me.

This is also true of any other dependent clauses, like relative or infinitive constructions:

Da ist der Mann, den wir suchen!

There’s the man who(m) we’re looking for!

Ich finde es schwer, über mich selbst zu reden.

I find it hard to talk about myself.

However, with a few common conjunctions (and/or/but), the standard main-clause word order is kept in both clauses:

Die Sonne scheint und die Vögel singen.

The sun is shining and the birds are singing.

These are called ‘coordinating conjunctions,’ and the ones that introduce a subordinate clause (like because) are called
‘subordinating conjunctions.’ When we cover all the German conjunctions in VII.2, we’ll present them in these two groups.
So don’t worry if you’re not exactly clear on what a subordinate clause is – you’ll just learn to tell from the conjunction
whether the verb goes at the end or not.

In questions, the conjugated verb is again in the second position:

Was hast du gemacht? Warum sagst du das?

What have you done? Why do you say that?
In an imperative statement (a direct order), the conjugated verb comes first, just like in English:

Gib mir das!

Sei still!
Give me that!
Be quiet!

Gender & Plurals

German nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter. When a noun is given out of context (as in a vocabulary list),
these are usually distinguished by including the nominative article: der(masculine), die (feminine)
or das (neuter). (We'll get to what "nominative" means in the next section.)

When a noun refers to a person, the gender usually corresponds to the biological gender, but for other nouns
there’s rarely much logic to it:

der Vater die Mutter das Pferd der Tisch die Feder
the father the mother the horse the table the feather
The plural article is "die" for all three, and for declension purposes you can think of it as a fourth gender. There
are six ways that German nouns form the plural, and three of them can also add an umlaut, for a total of nine
forms:

SI NGULAR PLURAL

no ending das Messer (knife) die Messer

(with umlaut) der Mantel (coat) die Mäntel

added E der Schuh (shoe) die Schuhe

die Wurst
(with umlaut) die Würste
(sausage)

die Ampel (traffic

light) die Ampeln
added (E)N
der Hase die Hasen
(hare/jackrabbit)

added ER das Lied (song) die Lieder

(with umlaut) der Wald (forest) die Wälder

added S das Büro (office)

die Büros
(usually foreign der Kolibri
die Kolibris
words) (hummingbird)

irregular das Datum

die Daten
(usually Latin words) (calendar date)
Remember, an umlaut is just a shift in the vowel sound, which can also happen in English plurals
(goose / geese, mouse / mice). There are a few other echoes of the above forms in English (e.g. ox->oxen) but for
the most part our irregular plurals come from other languages.

If this is your first introduction to German, you may be about ready to give up at this point. So here is something
that’s not said often enough: very few foreigners, even those who achieve fluency, are able to
memorize the genders and plurals of every noun they learn. Even some native speakers occasionally get
them wrong. You’ll remember as much as you can, but the most important thing is not to expect perfection from
yourself, and to be willing to just guess if you’re talking in German and can’t remember the gender or plural
form of a word. Even if you get it wrong, you will probably still be understood. The wrong article or plural ending
may sound silly, but there are very few cases where it actually changes the meaning of a word. Don’t let stress
over genders and plurals stop you from communicating.

Case
There are four “cases” in German, which correspond to four different roles a noun can play in a sentence. The first
three are fairly straightforward: the nominative case refers to the subject of a sentence, the accusative case refers
to the direct object, and the dative case refers to the indirect object.

Der Schüler gab dem Lehrer seinen Bericht

The student gave the teacher his report.
NOM DAT ACC

The final case is the genitive, which expresses possession or belonging and corresponds to the English ‘s. It looks
a little different in German than in English, with the possessor and possessed in the reverse order:

Der Hund meines Bruders bringt ihm die Zeitung.

NOM GEN DAT ACC

My brother’s dog brings him the newspaper.

GEN NOM DAT ACC

You can use the English-style genitive “s” in German, but only with names – and without the apostrophe. Unless
a name ends in “s,” in which case you use the apostrophe without the additional s. (In English we do that with
plural nouns, but that doesn’t come up in German since this form of the genitive is only for names).

Dieters Hund bringt ihm

die Zeitung. Hans' Hund ist zu alt dafur.
Dieter's dog brings him Hans's dog is too old for that.
the newspaper.
OK, full disclosure: an increasing number of Germans use the English-style apostrophe (“Dieter’s Hund”) and in
the ’90s it was even approved as an alternative form by Duden, the German dictionary publisher. But to say that
some Germans disagree with this “reform” is putting it mildly. Play it safe and leave the apostrophe out. And this
has nothing to do with the erroneous use of the apostrophe with a plural s (“the dog’s are barking”) which is just
as incorrect in German as it is in English.

Certain prepositions can make it hard to identify cases. For example, in “the deer ran throughthe forest,” is the
forest a direct or indirect object? Fortunately it doesn’t matter, because every ambiguous preposition in German
is associated with a specific case for the following noun. You’ll learn these when we cover prepositions in Section
VI.

Declension Tables
Now that we’ve covered gender, plurals and case, here’s how they all fit together:

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative der Mann die Frau das Kind die Kinder

(subject)

Accusative
(direct den Mann die Frau das Kind die Kinder
object)

Dative
(indirect dem Mann der Frau dem Kind den Kindern
object)

Genitive
des Mannes der Frau des Kindes der Kinder
(possession)
Again, notice that the noun itself rarely changes – it only picks up an ending in three places. Most of the changes
take place in the article. The highlighted letters are the signal or “hard” endings; in addition to der/die/das, they
apply as above to the following definite articles:

 dieser / diese / dieses (“this/that, these/those”)

 solcher / solche / solches (“such”)

 welcher / welche / welches (“which”)

And here are two more, but they sound poetic or fancy in modern German and are not used as often:

 jener / jene / jenes (“that, those”)

 mancher / manche / manches (“many a”)

You may be wondering how “that” and “those” can be rare words in any language. The short answer is that you
can use “dies-“ for both this/these and that/those, as we’ve indicated above. The full answer is a little more
complicated. Our this/that distinction in English – what linguists call the proximal/distal distinction – is not
handled the same way in all languages, and German just doesn’t have it to the same degree.

Even “dies-” is less common than “this” in English; it’s most often used when distinguishing among a group of
similar items, not just in referring to anything nearby. For example, if you’re helping someone pick out a dress,
you’d say Ich mag dieses Kleid (“I like this one [as opposed to the others]”) but “this beer [in my hand] is too
warm” would often just be das Bier ist zu warm. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but it’s way too
much to get into here. If you’re really struggling to get across a this/that distinction in German, remember that
you can always use extra words to help (“this building here,” “the guy over there,” etc.)

The other two categories are the indefinite articles (like a/an in English) and possessives (my, your, his, etc).
These words have the same hard endings as the definite articles above, except that they drop them in three places.
Here’s how to say: “my dog/cat/bunny/birds”:

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative
mein-- Hund meine Katze mein--Kaninchen meine Vögel
(subject)

Accusative
meinen Hund meine Katze mein--Kaninchen meine Vögel
(direct
object)

Dative
(indirect meinem Hund meiner Katze meinemKaninchen meinen Vögeln
object)

Genitive
meines Hundes meiner Katze meinesKaninchens meiner Vögel
(possession)
We will fully review the possessives in Section 6 (Pronouns), but here are the two indefinite articles:

 ein / eine / ein (“a/an ___”)

 kein / keine / kein (“no/not a ___“)

Das
Ein Hund folgte mir nach Ich
ist keine Lösung.
Hause. spreche kein Deutsch.
That’s not
A dog followed me home. I speak no German.
a solution.
In learning these declensions, as well as the adjective forms in the next section, it’s better to focus on those 16
hard endings and the few exceptions to them than to memorize every table by rote.

More on the Genitive Case

You will often hear that the genitive is “dying out” in German, or being “replaced by the dative,” but what does this
mean exactly? It means that many Germans – especially younger people, mainly when speaking – avoid the
genitive case by using the preposition von, which is like avoiding it in English by using of:

my brother's dog --> the dog of my brother

der Hund meines Bruders der Hund von meinem Bruder

-->
GEN DAT
Now, the phrase on the left would sound a bit fancy to some native speakers, and the one on the right would
sound awkward to others. But they’re both perfectly correct. What’s not correct in standard German is to use the
dative case instead of the genitive without the von. Der Hund meinem Bruder would be just as wrong as the dog
my brother.

Some dialects replace the genitive with the dative in another way, by saying meinem Bruder sein Hund ("my
brother his dog"), but this is also not standard and you shouldn't do it. It's what the language columnist Bastian
Sick was making fun of in the title of his popular book Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod ("the dative is the
death of the genitive").

Many prepositions take the genitive case, and these are also increasingly being used with the dative – we’ll cover
this in Section VI. But in general, although it’s true that you don’t need to know the genitive as well as the other
three cases, you can’t yet – and shouldn’t try to – avoid it entirely. And you definitely need to be able to recognize
it; in particular, English speakers often confuse the genitive s at the end of a (masculine or neuter) noun with the
English plural s (which is actually one of the least common plural forms in German).
Also, you may have noticed in the tables above that some masculine and neuter nouns add an –s in the genitive,
and some add an –es. There are complex rules for this but no simple one, and some sources will suggest that you
memorize the genitive ending for every masculine and neuter noun just like the gender and plural form. But given
how infrequently you’re likely to use the genitive actively (as opposed to just reading or hearing it), this is not a
great use of your time. If you’re writing something important and want to get it right, the –s or –es is included in
any good German-English (or German-only) dictionary.

Weak Nouns (the "N-Declension")

Just to make things more complicated, certain masculine nouns are “weak” and take an “n” ending in all cases
except the nominative. For example, most of the words for “boy” in German (Junge, Bursche, Knabe, Bube) fall
into this group:

SI NGULAR PLURA L

Nominative der Junge die Jungen

Accusative den Jungen die Jungen

Dative dem Jungen den Jungen

Genitive des Jungen der Jungen

There are at least a few hundred weak nouns and it’s impractical to memorize them all, but once you know some
of the most common ones, you can start to recognize them. They fall into two basic groups. The first, which you
just saw, end in e and usually refer to people or animals:

der Kunde (customer) der Soziologe (sociologist)

der Neffe (nephew) der Löwe (lion)
der Russe (Russian) der Rabe (raven)
der Schwede (Swede) der Schimpanse (chimpanzee)
These aren’t hard to remember, because there are very few masculine nouns in German that end in a single e and
are not weak. Der Käse (cheese) is the only common one we can think of.

The only wrinkle with this group is that a few of them keep the genitive s after the n. These are often the ones
that don’t refer to a person or animal, like der Wille (will, volition) or der Gedanke (thought, idea). So the genitive
of those would be des Willens and des Gedankensrespectively. And the only non-masculine weak noun also works
this way: das Herz (heart) --> des Herzens.

The second group is a little fuzzier, but it’s basically nouns with certain Latin and Greek endings. Most of them are
so close to their English equivalents that we don’t even have to translate:

der Elefant der Kapitalist der Astronaut

der Emigrant der Kommunist der Kandidat
der Präsident der Diplomat der Kamerad(comrade)
Finally, there are a few weak nouns that don’t fit into either group. The most common are:

der Bauer (farmer) der Nachbar (neighbor)

der Bär (bear) der Pilot
der Held (hero) der Idiot
der Mensch (person) der Architekt
You can find long lists of weak nouns, but you shouldn't try to memorize them all. If you remember the basic types
above, you’ll get most of them right, and if you don’t, it’s not a real barrier to comprehension anyway.

Some Rules of Noun Formation

Nouns that describe an occupation or a type of person are usually masculine. Many are formed by attaching
an er ending to a verb or noun. These er nouns have no change in the plural:

die Musik der Musiker die Musiker

music (male) musician multiple (male) musicians

lehren der Lehrer die Lehrer

to teach (male) teacher multiple (male) teachers
Even those that don't fit the er pattern tend to be masculine. But their plural forms can vary:

der Arzt die Ärzte

(male) doctor multiple (male) doctors

der Matrose die Matrosen

sailor multiple (male) sailors
The feminine version is formed by adding an in, and it always has the same plural. With the non-"er" forms, they
often add an umlaut:

die Musikerin die Musikerinnen

female musician multiple female musicians

die Lehrerin die Lehrerinnen

female teacher multiple female teachers

die Ärztin die Ärztinnen

female doctor multiple female doctors

die Matrosin die Matrosinnen

female sailor multiple female sailors
Like many other languages, German is struggling a little to create modern gender-neutral noun forms; a
construction like "Lehrer/in" is a common approach, but it doesn't always work: you can't say "Arzt/in," because
you'd be leaving out the umlaut on the feminine form. Sometimes you'll also see the present
participle, Lehrende: "[those who are] teaching."
A related problem in German is that there's no single form for a mixed-gender group. For example, speeches in
East Germany often began with the awkward Liebe Genossen und Genossinnen: "Dear male comrades and female
comrades."

There are many other standard noun formations, but for now we'll just cover two of the most common. The first is
the ung ending, which converts a verb to a noun. These nouns are always feminine, they all have the
same en plural, and they include some of the most common words in German:

die Wohnung
wohnen die Wohnungen
home,
to live homes, apartments
apartment/flat

zahlen die Zahlung die Zahlungen

to pay payment payments

regieren
die Regierung die Regierungen
to rule,
government governments
govern

impfen
die Impfung die Impfungen
to
vaccination vaccinations
vaccinate
This looks like the English "ing" ending, but as you can see above, it rarely translates that way. And in the other
direction, "-ing" verb forms in English (walking, talking) generally do not translate to "ung" nouns in German. See
our sections on present participles, gerunds and the progressive aspect for more on this.

Finally, there are the endings heit and keit, which convert an adjective into a noun and roughly correspond to the
English "ness." As with ung, these endings always make the noun feminine and always take an en plural:

krank die Krankheit die Krankheiten

sick, ill sickness, illness illnesses

möglich die Möglichkeit die Möglichkeiten

possible possibility possibilities

schwierig die Schwierigkeit die Schwierigkeiten

difficult difficulty difficulties

Diminutive Endings
Diminutive noun endings in German are used for a smaller version of something, or just to communicate cuteness,
informality or affection. We don't have many diminutive endings in English, and the ones we do have are usually
just a matter of size, without the other connotations: for example, let as in "piglet" or "booklet."

There are many different diminutive endings in regional German dialects, some of which you've already heard --
like the li in muesli cereal or the el in Hansel & Gretel. But there are only two in standard
German: chen and lein.
You need to remember three main things about chen and lein:

 they always make the noun neuter;

 they never change in the plural; and

 they usually add an umlaut to the base word when they can

Here are a few examples:

der Tisch das Tischlein die Tischlein

table small table small tables

die Maus das Mäuschen die Mäuschen

mouse (cute) little mouse (cute) little mice

das Brot das Brötchen die Brötchen

bread bread roll bread rolls
There are a few common diminutives in German where the base word has fallen out of use, but they still follow the
above rules. Two examples are das Märchen (fairy tale, "little story") and das Mädchen (girl, "little maid").

It's possible to take things too far: even some native speakers find expressions like Hallöchen(for Hallo) or Alles
Klärchen (for Alles Klar, "understood") to be overly cute or ditzy.

Some nouns can take either chen or lein, but for others, one is more standard than the other. There's no clear rule
for this, but you shouldn't be making up your own diminutives anyway. It's more a matter of recognizing them
when you see or hear them.

How to Memorize Nouns

Rather than memorizing genders and plurals by rote, try to remember short phrases that encode them. For
example, instead of trying to remember die Nacht (night), think of the song title Stille Nacht (Silent Night).
The –e ending on Stille tells you that Nacht is feminine. For the plural, think of 1001 Arabische Nächte.

You probably already know some other examples, like Guten Abend (good evening), in which the –n should
remind you that Abend is masculine. Or take the expression In der Nacht sind alle Katzen grau (“In the night all
cats are gray”) – in those seven words you’re reminded both that Nacht is feminine and that Katze (cat) has an –
n plural with no umlaut. In general, our brains are better at retaining things in context this way than just in
arbitrary lists. And you’ll be strengthening your grammar at the same time.

The other thing that some find helpful is to learn various rules and guidelines: most types of alcohol are
masculine, most types of trees are feminine, nouns with certain Latin endings are neuter, and so on. You can find
these guidelines in any good textbook or all over the web. In the sections above, we’ve already mentioned the ones
that we think are the most important, and we’re not big fans of the others – most of them have enough exceptions
that they don’t seem worth the trouble. But your mileage may vary.

Adjective Declensions
German adjectives work just like English ones, except that they take on case endings when they come right before
a noun:
 Der Hund ist groß und braun.
The dog is big and brown.

Der große braune Hund bellte mich an.

The big brown dog barked at me.

To understand these endings, you need to be familiar with the "hard" endings for nouns from Section II.3. The
rule for adjectives before a noun is this: when there’s no hard ending in the noun or article, add it to
the adjective. When there is a hard ending in the noun or article, the adjective takes a “soft” ending as follows:

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative -e -e -e -en

Accusative -en -e -e -en

Dative -en -en -en -en

Genitive -en -en -en -en

The following tables show how this rule is applied. The hard endings are highlighted in yellow, and the “soft”
adjective endings are underlined. With a definite article, the adjective ending is always soft:

TYPE 1: Definite Articles "The nice man / woman / child / children"

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative der nette Mann die nette Frau das nette Kind die nettenKinder

Accusative den nettenMann die nette Frau das nette Kind die nettenKinder

Dative dem nettenMann der nettenFrau dem nettenKind den nettenKindern

Genitive des nettenMannes der nettenFrau des nettenKindes der nettenKinder

For the indefinite and possessive articles, the adjective endings are the same except for the three places where the
article has no hard ending and the adjective has to take it on:

TYPE 2: Indefinite & Possessive Articles "My little dog / cat / bunny / birds"

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominati meine kleineKatz mein kleinesKaninche meine kleinenVöge

mein kleinerHund
ve e n l

Accusativ meinen kleinenHu meine kleineKatz mein kleinesKaninche meine kleinenVöge

e nd e n l

Dative meinem kleinenHu meiner kleinenKa meinemkleinenKaninc meinen kleinenVö

 nd tze hen geln

meines kleinenHun meiner kleinenKa meines kleinenKaninc meiner kleinenVög

Genitive
des tze hens el
And with no article ("the taste of hot coffee"), the adjective always takes on the hard ending, except in the three
cases where it’s still there on the noun:

"hot coffee / cold milk / fresh bread / warm

TYPE 3: No Article
rolls"

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative heißer Kaffee kalte Milch frisches Brot warmeBrötchen

Accusative heißen Kaffee kalte Milch frisches Brot warmeBrötchen

Dative heißem Kaffee kalter Milch frischem Brot warmenBrötchen

Genitive heißen Kaffees kalter Milch frischenBrotes warmerBrötchen

Comparative & Superlative Forms

The comparative forms of German adjectives work a lot like English:

Mein Auto ist klein. Dein Auto ist kleiner. Sein Auto ist am kleinsten.
My car is small. Your car is smaller. His car is the smallest.
When these forms come before a noun, they take the standard adjective case endingsfrom the previous
section:

Nimm das größere Stück Mein größter Sieg war...

Take the larger piece My greatest victory was...
As illustrated above, some adjectives add an umlaut in their comparative forms. There’s no rule about this,
although it happens most often with shorter and more common adjectives.

As in English, there are a few common adjectives with irregular comparative forms. For example:

gut / besser / am besten bald / eher / am ehesten

good / better / best soon / sooner / soonest

hoch / höher / am höchsten viel(e) / mehr / am meisten

high / higher / highest much, many / more / the most
In English, you can use “more” and “(the) most” with some adjectives instead of the –er and –est endings. You
wouldn’t say “more small” or “more good” but you can say “more friendly” or “more intense” -- in fact, "intenser"
would sound odd. In German you can’t do this, and “mehr ____” is one of the most common “Englisch-Deutsch”
mistakes. Always use the "er" and "st" forms, even when you wouldn't use them on the English word.
However, in cases where you’d use “more” in the sense of comparing two adjectives, you can use the German word
“eher”:

Es ist eher langweilig als schwierig.

It’s more boring than difficult.

Personal & Possessive Pronouns

Like articles and adjectives, pronouns in German vary according to gender and case. But this time it should be
slightly more familiar, as English has kept some of these distinctions too. Here are the personal pronouns in
English, which hopefully look familiar:

SI NGULAR PLURAL

1ST 2ND 3RD 1ST 2ND 3RD

NOM I you he / she / it we you they

ACC/DAT me you him / her / it us you them

GEN my/mine yours his / her(s) / its our(s) your(s) their(s)

As you can see from the table below, German pronouns are a little more complicated. Three important things to
notice:

1. German pronouns often distinguish between the accusative and the dative case, while English pronouns
never do. Old English did have this distinction, but even by the time of Chaucer it was gone (e.g. thee was
both accusative and dative).

2. German has a second person plural (ihr) that’s different from the singular (du); English uses "you" for
both, except in casual/regional plurals like “y’all” or “you guys."

3. German adds a formal “you” (Sie), which is both singular and plural. These “Sie” forms share the same
conjugation as the third person plural, but are capitalized.

SI NGULAR PLURAL FORMAL

1ST 2ND 3RD 1ST 2ND 3RD 2ND

NOM ich du er / sie / es wir ihr sie Sie

ACC mich dich ihn / sie / es uns euch sie Sie

ihm / ihr /
DAT mir dir uns euch ihnen Ihnen
ihm

seiner / ihrer
GEN meiner deiner unser euer ihrer Ihrer
/ seiner
The genitive forms (last row) are grayed out because they're almost never used. We've included them mainly
because they give you the stems of the possessive articles (mein, dein, sein, etc.) that are used instead (see II.3).
Indeed, saying "der Hund meiner" instead of "mein Hund" would be just as awkward as saying "the dog of me” in
English.

When to use the Sie form rather than du or ihr is one of the most common questions for German learners, and
there's no simple answer. Like most “proper” forms of address (“sir/ma’am” in English, vous in French) it’s no
longer used in every situation where the teachers and textbooks suggest that it is. However, it’s still important to
use Sie with police officers (in Germany this is actually the law) and other authority figures. It’s also polite to use
it with anyone in a service position, like waiters, clerks or salespeople.

After that, it’s largely a matter of familiarity and age – both the absolute age of the person you’re talking to (older
people are more likely to expect Sie), and their age relative to yours. It can be about the setting, too: sometimes
the same two people will address each other with Siein the office and du in the bar after work. It’s also about the
tone you’re trying to adopt, and sometimes even a touch of politics; for example, it was kind of a Hippie thing to
use du with everyone as a statement of egalitarian values. Anyway, you should never use Sie with children, but
otherwise it’s safer to fall back on Sie whenever you’re not sure.

Reflexive Pronouns
Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, etc) are more common in German than in English, because there are many
more verbs that require them. (Reflexive verbs will be covered in Section V.12.) By default, a reflexive pronoun
is the direct or indirect object of a verb, so it can only take the accusative or dative case. As you can see, there's a
great deal of overlap between the reflexive pronouns and the personal pronouns:

SI NGULAR PLURAL FORMAL

1ST 2ND 3RD 1ST 2ND 3RD 2ND

ACC mich dich

sich uns euch sich sich
DAT mir dir

him-/her-/ [yourself/
English myself yourself ourselves yourselves themselves
itself yourselves]
By the way, those plural forms can also be used to mean “each other” or “one another.” For example, “wir sehen
uns” doesn’t mean that we'll see ourselves, it means we’ll see each other – or translating more idiomatically, “see
you later.”

Relative Pronouns
The function of relative pronouns in English is usually served by “that,” “who” or “which.” In German the main
ones are fully declined, and the relative clause is usually set off with commas:

Das Auto, das ich sah, war

blau. Der Mann, der fuhr, hatte einen Hut auf.
The car that I saw was The man who was driving had a hat on.
blue.
Note that “das” in the first sentence above is in the accusative case, as the car is the direct object of the verb “see”
in the relative clause. The “der” in the second sentence is nominative, as the man is the subject of the relative
clause.

As you may have noticed, the relative pronouns in German decline for the most part the same way as the definite
article “the.” The only differences are in the dative plural and in the genitive:
 MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

Nominative der die das die

Accusative den die das die

Dative dem der dem denen

Genitive dessen deren dessen deren

Those genitive forms of the relative pronoun would usually translate to “whose” or "of which" in English. Since
genitive constructions always involve two nouns – possessor and possessed – they can be a little tricky to decline.
The relative pronoun takes its gender and number from the possessor:

Der Mann, dessen Hunde du hörst, ist mein Nachbar.

Interrogative Pronouns
Finally, there are the interrogative pronouns, or “question words.” In German they’re sometimes
called W-Wörter, since they all start with W. Most of them have a direct English equivalent:

Warum? Was? Wann? Wie?

Why? What? When? How?
But "where" is a little more complicated:

Wo? Woher? Wohin?

Where at? Where from? Where to?
And "who" has a full set of case endings:

Nominative Wer? Who?

Accusative Wen? Who(m)?

Dative Wem? To who(m)?

Genitive Wessen? Whose?

Wo can also be added to the beginning of many prepositions to make a question word. If the preposition starts
with a vowel, an “r” is inserted between them to make the pronunciation easier:

Wofür lebe ich? Worüber sprichst du?

What am I living for? What are you talking about?
As you can see, we usually do this using “what” in modern English, but it used to be a more direct equivalent –
think of “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [why, what for] art thou Romeo?”

“Which” in German is welch— and is fully declined according to gender and case (see Section II).

As in English, the interrogative pronouns can also sometimes be used as relative pronouns. Unlike the standard
relative pronouns in the previous subsection, they are not declined:
 Der Ort, wo ich zur Schule ging, ist nicht weit von hier.
The place where I went to school is not far from here.

The man whose dogs you hear is my neighbor.

Overview of Verb Types

German verbs always end in –n in their infinitive form, usually –en:

kaufen arbeiten helfen fliegen

to buy to work to help to fly
When introducing verbs, most textbooks and classes jump right into conjugation (I work, you work, he works…)
but let’s take a few minutes first to understand the big picture. German root verbs can be broken into five
categories:

Auxiliary Modal Mixed Strong Weak

(3) (6) (9) (about 150) (thousands)

sein dürfen brennen tun - to do kaufen - to buy

to be may to burn
(to be kommen - to machen - to
haben allowed to) bringen come make
to have to bring
können gehen - to go träumen - to
werden can denken dream
will/would (to be able to think stehen - to
to) stand nutzen - to use
kennen
mögen to know schlafen - to danken - to
to like (to) (a person) sleep thank

müssen nennen schreiben - to sagen - to say,

must to name write tell

sollen rennen sehen - to see malen - to paint

should to run
essen - to eat bauen - to build
wollen senden
to want to to send …etc. …etc.

wenden
 to turn

wissen
to know
(information)

All five of these categories have close parallels in English. Here’s what they mean:

 Auxiliary (“helping”) verbs are used with other verbs to form compound tenses, like the future tense
in English (I will find it) and German (Ich werde es finden)

 Modal verbs are used with other verbs to indicate their modality, which means the desire, ability,
permission or obligation to do them: “You must listen to me!” (“Du musst mir zuhören!”)

 Strong verbs form the past (preterite) tense with a vowel shift, like "swim / swam" in English
(schwimmen / schwammen in German). Strong verbs in German have an irregular participle form that
ends in –n, which is also true of many strong verbs in English (I choose, I chose, I have chosen). But more
on all that later.

 Weak verbs form the past tense with a hard consonant added at the end, t in German and d (or
sometimes t) in English. Learn is a weak verb in both English (I learn, I learned [US] or learnt [UK]) and
German (ich lerne, ich lernte)

 Mixed verbs get their name because they form the past tense with both a vowel shift and a hard
consonant sound at the end. Bring is a mixed verb in both English (we bring/we brought) and
German (wir bringen/wir brachten)

If you’re familiar with the concept of regular and irregular verbs in English or another language, you can think of
the weak / strong distinction in German as more or less the same thing. Weak verbs in German are all regular,
which means that once you know the infinitive you can form any other conjugation in standard ways. For the
other four types, you have to memorize a few other forms when you learn the verb.

We said above that there are thousands of weak verbs, which is technically true, but don't let it scare you: there
are at most a few hundred that you really need to know. After that, the vast majority of German verbs in common
usage are:

 formed by adding prefixes to the root verbs above -- we'll cover this in Section V.11;

 obvious derivations of a non-verb -- for example, if you know that mehr means "more," it'll be clear in
context that mehren is "to increase."

 obvious Germanizations of foreign verbs, including the -ieren verbs (covered in V.4) and many modern
tech-related terms like "adden" (on a social network)

In both German and English, there’s a tendency for strong and mixed verbs to become weak over time, i.e. for
people to start treating them as regular verbs. At any given point, there are certain verbs that are still completely
strong (you can’t say "I falled" rather than "I fell"), certain verbs where the strong form is almost gone (to say
"children clad in rags" rather than "clothed in rags" would sound a little pretentious in modern English), and
some where it's been gone so long that few people today have even heard it, though it often still counts in Scrabble
(like "holp" for "helped"). A few are somewhere in between: for example, "dived" and "dove" both sound OK to
most people today, but in a few decades "dived" may have completely taken over.

In any event, some sources don't do enough to distinguish the strong forms that are mandatory from those that
sound old-fashioned or silly. In our list of strong verbs we try to make the distinctions a little more clear.
Overview of Tenses & Moods
A verb’s tense has to do with the time of the action, and its mood has to do with the reality of the action. To start
with, here are some of the basic tenses and moods in English. Even if you’ve forgotten their names, the forms
should look familiar:

MOOD

TENSE Indicative Conditional Imperative

Present he does it he would do it Do it!

Preterite
he did it
("simple past")

Perfect he has done it he would have done it

Past Perfect
he had done it
(“pluperfect”)

Future he will do it

he will have
Future Perfect
done it
And here are the tenses and moods in German. The statement is the same as above, using er(he), es (it), and the
strong verb tun (to do):

MOOD

TENSE Indikativ Konjunktiv I Konjunktiv II Imperativ

Er würde es
Präsens Er tut es Er tue es Tu(e) es!
tun

Präteritum Er tat es

Er hat es
Perfekt Er hätte es
getan Er habe es getan
getan
Er hatte es
Plusquamperfekt
getan

Futur I Er wird es tun Er werde es tun

Er wird es Er werde es
Futur II
getan haben getan haben
Be careful: although most of the German tenses and moods look very much like their English
counterparts, there are some big differences in how they're used. In particular, the present and perfect
tenses (Präsens and Perfekt) account for a huge proportion of actual German speech. The Perfekt is used for
almost anything that happened in the past, and the Präsens is used for much of the future as well as the present.
You still need to know the other four tenses, but they’re not used as often as their English equivalents.

The moods are easier to describe, so let’s take them first:

 The Indikativ/Indicative mood is the most common in both languages, used for describing reality:
things that have actually happened, are happening or are expected to happen.

 The Konjunktiv I serves to distance the writer from indirect or reported speech: according to his
spokesman, he knows nothing about the scandal. There is no useful English equivalent, and it’s used
almost exclusively in news reporting. It’s in italics in the table above because you don’t need to learn to use
it actively unless you’re a journalist.

 The Konjunktiv II is similar to the conditional mood in English. It expresses hypothetical and/or
conditional actions, and it usually uses a form of werden in the same way that we use "would"
("I wouldn’t do that" --> Ich würde das nicht tun).

 The Imperativ/Imperative mood is used for commands ("Go away!"; "Clean your room!"). It’s the
easiest mood to learn in either language, because it only exists in the present tense and the second person.
In German (but not in English) the infinitive form of the verb can also be used as an imperative in some
circumstances.

Note: we said above that there’s no “useful” English equivalent to the Konjunktiv I. In fact, we do have sentences
like “I suggest that you be careful” that are related in form, and many sources try to explain the
German Konjunktiv moods in terms of these English Subjunctive/Conjunctive moods. But these comparisons are
often just wrong and always more confusing than they’re worth. The terms subjunctive/conjunctive occur in
multiple languages but often refer to different things, and the forms they refer to in English are complex enough
that they could be a whole section on their own. So we’re not even going to consider the English subjunctive here,
and neither should you. Even the conditional/Konjunktiv IIcomparison that we made above is not perfect.
The Konjunktiv moods are one of the few concepts that you really have to learn in German to fully get them.

And now the tenses:

 The Präsens corresponds to the simple present tense in English ("I take the bus") as well as the
“emphatic” ("I do take the bus"). It can also be used to refer to future events, in which case it’s called
the Futuristisches Präsens (“futuristic present”). We have a futuristic present in English too (e.g. "I get paid
tomorrow" means "I will get paid tomorrow") but in German it’s more common. And like all German verb
forms, the Präsens can also translate to the equivalent continuous form in English, in this case "I am
taking the bus." (See V.15 for more on this.)

 The Präteritum and Perfekt, as you can probably guess from their names, are closely related to the
English preterite and perfect tenses. As described in the verb types at the beginning of this section,
the Präteritum and English preterite are both formed with either a hard consonant ending (weak verbs), a
vowel shift (strong verbs) or both (mixed verbs). The Perfekt is formed by conjugating the verb haben (or
sometimes sein) in the present tense and adding the participle of the main verb, just the way we do with the
verb "to have" in English. Again, these tenses do not translate directly between the two languages, despite
their similar forms. In English we mainly use the preterite, but in spoken German the Perfekt dominates.
We'll cover this in more detail in the Perfect vs. Preterite section.

 The Plusquamperfekt is directly related to the past perfect (also called the pluperfect) in English. It’s
used for an action that was already completed at some point in the past. It’s formed the same way as the
Perfekt, except that it uses the past (Präteritum) form of haben or sein instead of the present form.

 the Futur I tense is similar to our future tense; it uses werden the same way we use "will" in English:
"I will read it" --> Ich werde es lesen. But note that we have other ways of expressing the future in
English (like I’m going to read it) that don’t exist in German – and they also use the futuristic present tense
in ways that we wouldn’t. We’ll cover this in detail in the section on Future Tenses.
  the Futur II is similar to the English future perfect, with will + have in English and werden + haben/sein
in German: "I will have read it" --> Ich werde es gelesen haben.

Finally, as in English, most of these tenses/moods also exist in a passive voice. Passive constructions in English
usually (but not always) use a form of to be; in German they always use a form of the verb werden. This is the
third major auxiliary usage of werden, after the Konjunktiv II and Futur usages mentioned above. We’ll cover the
passive voice in V.10.

The Present & Preterite Tenses

The Präsens and Präteritum are the two "fully conjugated" forms in German (that is, they don't use an auxiliary
verb), so it's good to learn them together. Here’s the weak verb kaufen(to buy):

Präsens Präteritum

1st ich kaufe I buy ich kaufte I bought

2nd du kaufst you buy du kauftest you bought

singular
he/she/it he/she/it
3rd er/sie/es kauft er/sie/es kaufte
buys bought

1st wir kaufen we buy wir kauften we bought

you (pl.) you (pl.)

2nd ihr kauft ihr kauftet
plural buy bought

they
3rd sie/Sie kaufen they buy sie/Sie kauften
bought

Notice the pattern: the "en" ending of the infinitive is removed (sometimes it’s just an "n") and replaced with the
appropriate highlighted ending. The past tense endings are mostly just the present tense endings with an extra t;
this is the “weak” past tense ending mentioned in V.I, and it’s directly related to the –d ending in the weak
English past tense.

These twelve endings are used for every weak verb in German, without exception. Some of them are hard to
pronounce if the verb has certain consonants at the end of the stem; in this case an e is added in between the stem
and the ending. For example, here is the weak verb reden (to talk). Notice how without the extra e it would be
harder to distinguish among these forms:

Präsens Präteritum

singular 1st ich rede I talk ich redete I talked

 2nd du redest you talk du redetest you talked

he/she/it he/she/it
3rd er/sie/es redet er/sie/es redete
talks talked

1st wir reden we talk wir redeten we talked

you (pl) you (pl)

2nd ihr redet ihr redetet
plural talk talked

they
3rd sie/Sie reden they talk sie/Sie redeten
talked
Also notice that the Sie form, the formal second person that we learned about in Section 4, is conjugated exactly
the same as the third person plural (“they”). This is true for all tenses and moods, and for all types of verbs.

Strong verbs are a little different. Remember that strong verbs form their past tense with a vowel shift rather than
an added t; some of them also have a (different) vowel shift in the present tense, but only in the 2nd and 3rd person
singular. There’s no one rule for these vowel shifts -- you have to learn them when you learn the verb, just as you
once learned to say "broke" instead of "breaked" in English. Here’s the strong verb fallen (to fall):

STRONG
Präsens Präteritum
VERBS

1st ich falle I fall ich fiel I fell

2nd du fällst you fall du fielst you fell

singular
he/she/it he/she/it
3rd er/sie/es fällt er/sie/es fiel
falls fell

1st wir fallen we fall wir fielen we fell

plural 2nd ihr fallt you (pl) fall ihr fielt you (pl) fell

3rd sie/Sie fallen they fall sie/Sie fielen they fell

Notice that the present tense endings are the same as for weak verbs. Also notice that with both strong and weak
verbs, the 1st and 3rd person singular are the same in the past tense, and the 1st and 3rd person plural (we and they)
are the same in both tenses.

Now let’s try a mixed verb. Remember that there are only a few of these, and they combine the strong past stem
changes with the weak past endings. Mixed verbs do not have the strong vowel shift in the present tense, except
for wissen (which becomes weiß). Here is bringen (to bring):

MIXED
Präsens Präteritum
VERBS

1st ich bringe I bring ich brachte I brought

singular
2nd du bringst you bring du brachtest you
 brought

he/she/it he/she/it
3rd er/sie/es bringt er/sie/es brachte
brings brought

we
1st wir bringen we bring wir brachten
brought

you (pl) you (pl)

plural 2nd ihr bringt ihr brachtet
bring brought

they they
3rd sie/Sie bringen sie/Sie brachten
bring brought
Modal verbs are irregular in the present singular tenses, and weak in the plural:

MODAL VERBS: Präsens dürfen können mögen müssen sollen wollen

1st ich darf kann mag muss soll will

singular 2nd du darfst kannst magst musst sollst willst

3rd er/sie/es darf kann mag muss soll will

1st wir dürfen können mögen müssen sollen wollen

plural 2nd ihr dürft könnt mögt müsst sollt wollt

3rd sie/Sie dürfen können mögen müssen sollen wollen

You may have guessed that the English modal verbs can and must are directly related to these forms. So is will,
but be careful, because the way we use it in modern English translates to werden rather
than wollen. Ich werde es tun means I will do it, while Ich will es tun means I want to do it.

The modal verbs have weak endings in the past tense, but they lose their umlauts and mögenhas a stem change:

MODAL
dürfen können mögen müssen sollen wollen
VERBS: Präteritum

1st ich durfte konnte mochte musste sollte wollte

singular 2nd du durftest konntest mochtest musstest solltest wolltest

3rd er/sie/es durfte konnte mochte musste sollte wollte

1st wir durften konnten mochten mussten sollten wollten

plural 2nd ihr durftet konntet mochtet musstet solltet wolltet

3rd sie/Sie durften konnten mochten mussten sollten wollten

Finally, the three auxiliary verbs are almost completely irregular, especially sein:
 sein haben werden
AUXILIARY VERBS
Präs. Prät. Präs. Prät. Präs. Prät.

1st ich bin war habe hatte werde wurde

singular 2nd du bist warst hast hattest wirst wurdest

3rd er/sie/es ist war hat hatte wird wurde

1st wir sind waren haben hatten werden wurden

plural 2nd ihr seid wart habt hattet werdet wurdet

3rd sie/Sie sind waren haben hatten werden wurden

Past Participles
In English, the perfect tense is formed with the present tense of the verb “to have” and the past participle of the
main verb: Have you written the report? Yes, I have written it. In German it’s the same, except that
sometimes sein (to be) is used instead of haben (to have). But before we get to that, we have to learn how to form
German participles.

To form the past participle of weak verbs, add ge to the beginning, then drop the en or n and add t to the end.
So kaufen, for example, would become gekauft.

Strong verbs take the ge- but keep their regular (–n or –en) infinitive ending. They also often have a vowel shift.
The participle is the third and last irregular form that you have to learn for each strong verb – the first two being
the present-tense vowel shift (if any) and the past stem. Strong verbs are often given with all three irregular forms
immediately after them, present-past-participle, like this:

halten (hält, hielt, gehalten) – to stop

riechen (riecht, roch, gerochen) – to smell
helfen (hilft, half, geholfen) – to help

(Annoyingly, some language dictionaries and textbooks leave out the present form in their list of strong verbs and
just give past-participle. Try to find one that has all three, or just use our list.)

Notice that the vowel in the participle can match the infinitive (halten/gehalten), the past (roch/gerochen) or
neither (geholfen). Some people find it easier to learn the strong verbs when they’re arranged in these three
groups. We’ve presented them that way in our list of strong verbs, as well as in a single alphabetical list.

Mixed verbs are all of the second type, with the vowel in the participle matching the one in the past:

brennen (brennt, brannte, gebrannt) – to burn

bringen (bringt, brachte, gebracht) – to bring
denken (denkt, dachte, gedacht) – to think
kennen (kennt, kannte, gekannt) – to know (people)
nennen (nennt, nannte, genannt) – to name
rennen (rennt, rannte, gerannt) – to run
senden (sendet, sandte, gesandt) – to send
wenden (wendet, wandte, gewandt) – to turn
wissen (weiß, wusste, gewusst) – to know (facts)

As for the auxiliary verbs: the participle of sein is gewesen, for haben it's gehabt, and for werden it's geworden or
just worden, depending on the context.

The only other exceptions to the above rules are a group of weak verbs that end in -ieren. These get the t but not
the ge. So studieren (to study) becomes studiert in the participle (not gestudiert). In other respects these
-ieren verbs are completely weak, and they are some of the easiest German verbs to remember, because you can
usually just drop the ending and get pretty close to the English verb. A few more examples:

diskutieren – to discuss existieren – to exist

installieren – to install markieren – to mark
informieren – to inform integrieren – to integrate
fotografieren – to photograph realisieren – to realize / implement
Although the English forms are very similar, many of these –ieren verbs actually come to German through French,
and they can occasionally come from German roots as well. Here are a few that are a little more distant from
English:

buchstabieren – to spell (from the German Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet)

etablieren – to establish (from the French établir)
jonglieren – to juggle (Fr. jongler)
regieren – to rule, govern (Fr. régir)
kaschieren – to conceal (Fr. cacher)

The Perfect Tenses

Once you know a verb’s participle, the Perfekt is formed by adding it to the present tense of haben or sein:

haben: sein:

Ich habe gelacht. Du bist aber gewachsen!

I laughed. Have you ever grown!

Es hat funktioniert. Wir sind wieder zu Hause angekommen.

It worked. We arrived back home.

Habt ihr gegessen? Sind sie da geblieben?

Have you (guys) eaten? Did they stay there?
Your first instinct will be to translate every Perfekt statement in German with the perfect tense in English: "I have
laughed," "It has worked," etc. But as you can see above, the most natural translation is usually the simple past
(preterite) tense. There is effectively no connectionbetween the Präteritum/Perfekt distinction in modern
German, which is mainly a written/spoken one, and the preterite/perfect distinction in English, which is about
the relationship between past and present (see the next section for much more on this).
Most verbs take haben, but some of the ones that take sein are pretty common. In general, sein is for verbs
showing a change of location (movement) or a change of state/condition (transformation). For example:

movement: change of state:

gehen – to go sterben – to die
kommen – to come wachsen – to grow
laufen – to walk, run genesen – to recover, convalesce
There are some regional differences; generally, as you go further South you'll hear more verbs used with sein. For
example, in Bavaria it's more common to say ich bin gesessen (I was sitting) but in the rest of Germany it's ich
habe gesessen.

Verbs that take sein are always intransitive, which means that they don't take a direct (accusative) object.
Unfortunately, many intransitive verbs also take haben, like schlafen (to sleep) or starren (to stare), so this rule
doesn't work in the other direction.

In the rare cases where a sein verb is used with a direct object, it takes haben instead:

intransitive (sein): transitive (haben):

Ich bin in die Stadt Ich habe meine Schwester in die Stadt
gefahren. gefahren.
I drove into the city. I drove my sister into the city.
However, it’s more common for verbs to have a transitive variant: one example that still has the shift in English
is fallen (with sein, as in "a tree falls") vs. fällen (with haben, as in "to fella tree"). Another is liegen/legen,
which corresponds to the English "lie/lay." With pairs like these in German, the transitive verb (with haben)
tends to be weak, while the intransitive verb (with sein) is strong.

The Plusquamperfekt is used for an event that had already occurred before some other point in the past. It’s the
same as the Perfekt, only it uses the past tense (Präteritum) of haben/seininstead of the present tense:

Es hatte bereits angefangen zu regnen, als Stefan nach Hause kam.

It had already started to rain when Stefan came home.

Wir waren bis zur Brücke gekommen, bevor uns einfiel, dass wir unser Geldvergessen hatten.
We had come to the bridge before it occurred to us that we had forgotten our money.

Damals hatten wir noch nie ein echtes Schloss gesehen.

At the time, we had never seen a real castle before.

One of the more complex aspects of the perfect tenses in German is what to do when there are multiple verbs in a
dependent clause. Generally, German does not allow two adjacent past participles in the same clause. Instead,
both become infinitives. (There is an exception to this, termed the Ultra-Perfekt by some, but it’s regional and
very non-standard usage.) And when such a bundle of verbs gets grouped together at the end of a dependent
clause, the conjugated auxiliary verb goes before the infinitive forms, not after them.

Ich habe es gemacht. (I did it.)

Ich musste es machen. (I had to do it.)
Ich habe es machen müssen. (I had to do it.)
Weißt du, bis wann er es hatte machen müssen? (Do you know by when he had to have done it?)

Perfect vs. Preterite

In English we use the preterite about 90% of the time, and we tend to reserve the perfect for situations where a
past action has ongoing implications or relevance in the present. For example, consider "have you seen the
Godfather movies?" (perfect – if you haven’t, you still could) versus "did you see the circus while it was in
town?" (preterite – it’s too late to see it now).

In German, this distinction no longer really exists. There is a single concept of the past (die Vergangenheit)
and the Präteritum and Perfekt tenses are interchangeable in expressing it. In practice, Germans use
the Perfekt for about 90% of speech; they only use the Präteritum in speech for the auxiliary and modal verbs and
a few very common strong or mixed verbs. Overusing the Präteritum in speech will make you sound like a snob
or a robot, depending on the context.

Here are the rules you should follow in spoken German:

1. Always use the preterite for sein:

Ich war glücklich. Es war schönes Wetter auf der Insel.

I was happy. The weather on the island was nice.

Warst du zu Hause? Wir waren noch nie in Griechenland.

Were you home? We've never been to Greece.
2. Always use the preterite for modal verbs:

Das solltest du schon gestern machen.

Ich konnte es nicht sehen.
You were supposed to do that
I couldn't see it.
yesterday.

Durfte er nicht mitkommen?

Wir wollten aber nicht.
Wasn't he allowed to come
But we didn't want to.
along?
3. Use the perfect tense for everything else:

Ich bin ihm am Sonntag begegnet. Was hast du ihm gesagt?

I met him on Sunday. What did you say to him?

Es ist vor langer Zeit gemacht worden.

It was done a long time ago.

Meine Vorfahren haben Deutschland vor 150 Jahren verlassen.

My ancestors left Germany 150 years ago.
You'll hear native speakers using more exceptions than these, of course, but they tend to be verb-by-verb (and
often regional) preferences that you have to just pick up by ear.

Written German always uses the Präteritum more than spoken German, but just how much varies according to
the context. The Präteritum is most favored in novels, history and other literary/academic writing. For example,
here's the opening of a detective novel by the German author Jakob Arjouni. We've highlighted all the conjugated
verbs for you:

Finally
I opened my eyes
and located the
damned fly. Fat
and black,
Endlich schlug ich die Augen auf und ortete die it sat on the white
verdammte Fliege. Dick und schwarz saß sie auf der blanket.
weißen Bettdecke. Ich zielte anständig und stand I aimed well
auf, um mir die Hand zu waschen. Den and stood up to
Spiegel mied ich. Ich ging in die wash my hand.
Küche, setzte Wasser auf und suchte Filtertüten. I avoided the
mirror. I wentinto
the kitchen, set
up some water [to
boil] and looked
for coffee filters.
Arjouni has used every one of those verbs in the Präteritum. Let's review them:
Strong Verbs Präteritum

aufschlagen (to open) schlug auf (opened)

sitzen (to sit) saß (sat)
aufstehen (to stand up) stand auf (stood up)
meiden (to avoid) mied (avoided)
gehen (to go) ging (went)

Weak Verbs Präteritum

orten (to locate) ortete (located)

zielen (to aim) zielte (aimed)
aufsetzen (to set) setzte auf (set)
suchen (to look for) suchte (looked for)
Journalistic content generally leans towards the Präteritum too, although not quite as much. In fact, most news
stories begin with either the Präsens or the Perfekt before switching back to the Präteritum. For example:

Angelina Jolie hat mit Partner Brad Angelina Jolie celebrated her
Pitt in Berlin ihren 38. 38th birthday with her partner
Geburtstag gefeiert. Dafür mieteten Brad Pitt in Berlin. They rented
sie eine ganze Restaurant-Etage. an entire floor of a restaurant.
Doch das Essen war nicht seine But the food wasn't his only gift...
einzige Aufmerksamkeit...
This usage of the Perfekt is one of the few remaining echos in German of that "relevance to the present"
distinction. It just sounds a little more up-to-the-minute, more like news to begin a story that way.

Once you get to less formal writing -- personal emails, online posts, text messages -- it's much harder to offer any
clear guidelines. You will definitely see a lot more Perfekt in these formats than you would in a novel, often
because we tend to affect a looser "spoken" register (in any language) in these kinds of casual writing. But there's
also more use of the Präteritum than in speech. The exact mix of the two depends on the person and the context.

All students of German are told to avoid the Präteritum in speech, but few take it seriously enough. The fact is,
many native speakers are unaware that certain preterite forms even existin their language unless they've learned
about them in advanced grammar classes. This is especially true of the second-person preterite forms, since books
and newspapers are almost never written in the second person. For example, we know a teacher who was giving
an English class to young Deutsche Bahn employees, and wanted them to come up with the phrase "what did
you (guys) do?" in English. Instead of the normal "Was habt ihr gemacht?" (Perfekt) he asked them to translate
"Was machtet ihr?" (Präteritum) so that they wouldn't have "what have you done?" as an option. But "Was
machtet ihr?" sounds so odd to modern ears that the students absolutely refused to accept that it was proper
German at all!

The Future Tenses (and Futuristic Present)

The basic future tense in German is the Futur I; it’s formed with the present tense of the verb werden (given
in section V.3) and the infinitive of the main verb. We do the same thing in English with will:

Ich werde dort ein Hotel suchen.

I will look for a hotel there.

Ich werde das Geschirr spülen.

I will do the dishes. [literally, spülen is more like "rinse"]

To form the Futur II (future perfect), use werden + past participle + haben/sein. Again it's similar in
English: will have. The only difference is that, as always in German, the non-conjugated verbs move to the end of
the clause:

Wenn ihr ankommt werde ich ein Hotel gefunden haben.

By the time you arrive, I will have found a hotel.

Bis heute Abend werde ich das Geschirr gespült haben.

By this evening, I will have done the dishes.

In English we also have the more casual form "I’m going to..." to replace "I will..." This form does not exist in
German, so don’t try to translate it literally: Ich gehe zu [verb] would not make sense. Just use werden instead.*
The futuristic present (Futuristisches Präsens) refers to a tendency in both languages to use the present tense for
future events. In English we do this in two main situations: when we have arranged to do something in the near
future ("I’m going to the movies tomorrow") and when referring to an action that will take place according to a
fixed (usually printed) schedule or timetable ("The train leaves in half an hour"). German also uses the present
tense for these situations:

Meine Freundin besucht mich nächstes Wochenende.

My girlfriend visits [is visiting] me next weekend.

Der Zug fährt in 10 Minuten ab.

The train departs in ten minutes.

(Note that we often use the progressive aspect in these situations -- "is visiting" -- which doesn’t exist in
German.)

There are a few situations where German uses the futuristic present and English does not. The most important is
an offer or promise to do something:

German (Präsens):
Ich zahle es dir morgen Ich hole dir eine
Literal English
zurück. Jacke.
(present):
I pay you back tomorrow. I get you a jacket.
Correct English
I’ll pay you back tomorrow. I’ll get you a jacket.
(future):
There’s another case where use of the present is optional: predictions or speculation. In the case of speculation,
we usually use may/might/maybe in English, and German uses vielleicht(perhaps):

German Vielleicht gehe ich nächste

(Präsens): Woche.
Morgen regnet es.
German Vielleicht werde ich nächste
Morgen wird es regnen.
(Futur I): Woche gehen.
Tomorrow it will rain.
English I may go [Maybe I’ll go] next
(future): week.
*(To be more specific: the verb phrase “going to” in English usually means that a future event is already planned
or expected (“I’m going to do my homework later”) rather than the announcement of a decision (“I’ll do my
homework later”). In German, “going to” will often have werden, or possibly schon or noch. Ich werde meine
Hausaufgaben später machen; Ich mache meine Hausaufgaben schon/noch. But an announcement is in the
futuristic present: Ich mache mein Hausaufgaben später.)

The Konjunktiv Moods

Again: the Konjunktiv I mood is fairly uncommon and you shouldn’t spend too much time on it. At most, it can be
mildly helpful to recognize it when reading the newspaper. It's used for reported speech (without quotation marks)
in a relatively formal setting: According to a witness, the robbers escaped in a blue van. It’s rarely used in
informal settings; in a sentence like My sister says her friends will meet us at the restaurant at 8, you just use
the ordinary (indicative) present or future tense.

The endings for the present Konjunktiv I are like those of the strong verb present tense (V.3) with a few extra Es,
and with no stem changes: even a strong, mixed or modal verb just takes the normal infinitive stem. Sein is the
only irregular verb in the Konjunktiv I (see below).
Past tense statements are formed like the Perfekt, only with haben/sein in the Konjunktiv Iinstead of the normal
present tense. Likewise, the future tenses are formed with werden in the Konjunktiv I.

Konjunktiv I
haben sein werden

1stperson ich kaufe I buy habe sei werde

2ndperson du kaufest you buy habest seist werdest

singular
he/she/it
3rdperson er/sie/es kaufe habe sei werde
buys

1stperson wir kaufen we buy haben seien werden

you (pl)
plural 2ndperson ihr kaufet habet seit werdet
buy

3rdperson sie/Sie kaufen they buy haben seien werden

You may have noticed that some of the above forms are identical to the normal (indicative) present tense – ich
kaufe, for example. In these cases it’s common to use the Konjunktiv II forms instead (coming up next) to avoid
confusion.

In practice, the Konjunktiv I is mostly used in the third person. You are most likely to notice itin a news article in
the form of sei where you’d expect ist, or habe where you’d expect hat.

The Konjunktiv II mood is much more common than the Konjunktiv I. It’s used to express wishes, desires,
speculation, conditionality, and other “unreal” conditions, and it usually translates in English with words
like were, would, or could:

If I were rich, I would buy it. Wenn ich reich wäre, würde ich es kaufen.
There are three ways to form the Konjunktiv II:

1. For weak verbs, it’s the same as the (indicative) Präteritum (given in V.3)

2. For non-weak verbs (aux., modal, mixed, strong), it’s the simple past stem with an added umlaut and
those same –e endings from the Konjunktiv I (above)

3. BUT for certain strong verbs, the vowel in that past stem is conventionally replaced with a ü; for example,
the KII of "helfen" is not hälfen from the past stem half, but rather hülfen

Sounds like a nightmare to learn, right? But you probably don't have to. Because in practice, the only verbs that
are always conjugated in the Konjunktiv II are the modal and auxiliary verbs. Once you’ve learned their
subjunctive forms, you can just use those forms with the infinitives or participles of other verbs. Notice
that sollen and wollen are the only exceptions to rule #2 above, in that they don’t get the umlaut:

sein haben werden dürfen können mögen müssen sollen wollen

ich wäre hätte würde dürfte könnte möchte müsste sollte wollte

du wäres hättes würdes dürftes könntes möchtes müsstes solltes wolltes

 t t t t t t t t t

er/sie/e
wäre hätte würde dürfte könnte möchte müsste sollte wollte
s

wir wären hätten würden dürften könnten möchten müssten sollten wollten

ihr wäret hättet würdet dürftet könntet möchtet müsstet solltet wolltet

sie/Sie wären hätten würden dürften könnten möchten müssten sollten wollten
The main one you’ll use is werden, which works like would in English:

Would you help me with this?

Würdest du mir damit helfen?

There are a few strong verbs that are occasionally used in the Konjunktiv II, but as a foreign speaker,
you really don’t need to worry about them: just use the werden form for everything except the nine verbs in the
table above.

One of the most common forms in that table is möchten (would like), from mögen (to like); it’s used for ordering
in restaurants (Ich möchte einen Kaffee) and other polite requests, as well as more general wishes and desires. In
fact it’s so common that it’s often introduced, confusingly, as a seventh modal verb independent from mögen. If
you’ve learned it that way, then now you know the truth.

The Imperative Mood

The imperative mood is used for commands and instructions. It can only occur in the second person, so we just
need to learn three main forms: du (informal singular), ihr (informal plural), and Sie (formal singular & plural).
The du form is just the present tense du form without the st ending:
gebento du gibst 2nd
--> --> Gib mir das! Give me that!
give person singular

nehmento du nimmst 2nd Nimm die Schlüssel

--> -->
take person singular mit. Takethe keys with you.
The ihr form is identical to the present tense:
[examples]

Finally, the Sie form is also the same as the present tense, but the Sie is included after the verb. There can be a
slight tension between the respectful tone of Sie and the fact that you’re giving an order, so this is often softened
with bitte (please) – and in practice it’s used mainly for polite requests, not outright commands.
Nehmen Sie bitte eine Broschüre. Please take a brochure.

The verb sein is irregular in the imperative, based on the infinitive instead of the conjugated stems:
 "ihr"
"du"
form: Seid brav, "Sie" form: Seien Sie bitte
form: Sei still! Be
Kinder. Be good, geduldig... Please be patient...
quiet!
kids.
That's it for the conjugated imperative forms, but there are two related forms you should be aware of. The first is
the "infinitive imperative," which is common in posted rules and regulations. When it's used in speech, it usually
has a sharper "drill sergeant" tone than the forms above. You probably won't use the infinitive this way yourself,
but you should be able to recognize it. Unlike "true" imperative statements where the verb comes at the beginning
(as in all the examples above), when you use the infinitive this way it comes at the end:
Hinten Anstellen! Go to the back! [of a line]

Nicht mit dem Fahrer sprechen! Don't speak to the driver!

And finally, there's a "friendly suggestion" formation in German that's equivalent to "Let's..." in English. It's the
same as the normal "wir" present tense form, you just switch the order of the verb and pronoun:
Lass uns zur Seitentür reingehen. Let's go in the side door.

The Passive Voice

The passive in German always involves at least one form of the verb werden, and sometimes also a form of sein.
There are no conjugation tables in this section because we’ll only be using forms of werden and sein that we’ve
already covered; learning the passive is not a matter of learning new endings, it’s about understanding the
structure and word order of a passive clause. To highlight this, we’ll use the same sentence in all eight forms.

The present and simple past use the present and past conjugations of werden, respectively:

Die Wohnung wird durchsucht. Die Wohnung wurde durchsucht.

The apartment is [being] searched. The apartment was searched.
The Perfect tenses use sein with the participle and worden (a short form of werden’s participle geworden).
Remember that the Perfekt translates the same as the Präteritum form above:

Die Wohnung ist Die Wohnung war

durchsucht worden. durchsucht worden.
The apartment was searched. The apartment had been searched.
The future tense uses werden in the present tense, then the participle and another werden in the infinitive. The
future perfect adds sein:

Die Wohnung wird

Die Wohnung wird
durchsucht worden sein.
durchsucht werden.
The apartment will have been
The apartment will be searched.
searched.
Finally, the conditional forms of the passive use either the Konjunktiv I form of werden or the Konjunktiv II form
of sein, as follows:
Die Wohnung würde Die Wohnung wäre
durchsucht werden. durchsucht worden.
The apartment would be The apartment would have been
searched. searched.
A few descriptive past participles are so common that they’ve essentially become adjectives, and you can use them
without invoking the passive voice at all:

Ich bin [not werde] beeindruckt! Er ist [not wird] geschieden.

I’m impressed! He's divorced.

Prefix Verbs
So far we’ve been talking about ‘root’ verbs, but many common verbs in German are formed by combining a root
verb with a prefix. We have prefix verbs in English too (recalculate, unwind) but they’re much more common in
German, and the way they work is a little different.

Verb prefixes in German can be separable or inseparable. A separable prefix moves to the end of a sentence
when the verb is conjugated.* For example, the mixed verb bringen (to bring) can add the separable
prefix mit (with) to become the verb mitbringen (to bring along, bring with). Or add the separable prefix zu (to)
to the weak verb hören (to hear) to make zuhören (to listen to):

Ich bringe morgen meinen Freund mit.

I’ll bring my friend along tomorrow.

Sie hörte mir zu.

She listened to me.

When the verb is not conjugated – when it’s used with a modal verb, for example – the prefix stays attached:

Darf ich meinen Freund mitbringen?

May I bring my friend along?

Er will mir nicht zuhören.

He doesn’t want to listen to me.

At this point, you may be starting to think of English "phrasal" verbs like “take out the garbage,” which are
similar in that the extra word can often be moved to the end of the sentence (“take the garbage out”) and even
occasionally stuck onto the beginning (“the outtakes from the film”). These can be helpful in conceptualizing
separable prefixes, but remember that they’re not quite the same thing grammatically.

Inseparable prefixes are more like English verb prefixes, although they don’t always have a direct English
translation. Inseparable prefixes are never stressed in the pronunciation of the verb. There are nine major
inseparable prefixes: be-, emp- ent-, er-, ge-, miss-, ver-, voll- and zer-.

Other than these nine, almost all other prefixes in German are separable. Separable prefixes are always stressed
in pronouncing the verb. The most common ones are prepositions, like mit- (with) or zu- (to) above.
Finally, there are a few prefixes which can be separable or inseparable, even when attached to the same root verb.
The pronunciation rules still apply – they are stressed when separable and unstressed when inseparable. There’s
also a rough logic to the different usages: generally the more figurative meanings of the verb are inseparable, and
the literal ones are separable. The classic example of this is übersetzen, which can mean to ferry, carry
over (literal, separable, stress on ‘über’) or to translate (figurative, inseparable, stress on ‘setz’).

Truthfully, though, no one really uses übersetzen in the old separable sense anymore. A better example would
be durchsuchen, which we used in the section on the Passive voice. Durchsuchen is formed from the weak
verb suchen (to search) and the prefix durch(through). We were using the inseparable form, which means to
thoroughly search (a physical space), as the police would do after a crime. In the separable form, it means to
literally search through (files, records, mail) and the past participle would have been durchgesucht instead
of durchsucht.

As that example indicates, prefix verbs are a little irregular in how they form the past participle. An inseparable
prefix verb does not take the ge— prefix. But a separable prefix verb takes the ‘ge’ between the prefix and the
main verb.

This is easier to visualize with a table. The first column is what you already learned in section V.4, and the next
two columns show how prefixes fit in:

separable
root verbs (no prefix) inseparable prefix
prefix

prefix + ge +
verb stem
ge + verb stem + t prefix + verb stem +t
weak
kaufen > gekauft + tverkaufen > verkauft
verbs
einkaufen >
eingekauft

prefix + verb
stem + t
verb stem + t prefix + verb stem
weak –
+ tmissinterpretieren >
ieren anprobieren
fotografieren > fotografiert missinterpretiert
verbs >
anprobiert

prefix + ge +
irreg. stem
prefix + irreg. stem + (e)n
ge + irreg. stem
strong + (e)n beginnen > hat
+ (e)nschreiben > geschrieben
verbs begonnen anbieten >
hat
angeboten
 prefix + ge +
past stem
ge + past stem + t prefix + past stem + t
mixed +t
denken > gedacht benennen > bennant
verbs auskennen >
ausgekannt

Separable prefix verbs are especially likely to use the ‘infinitive imperative’ mentioned in V.7,
e.g. Aufpassen! (pay attention!). And in an infinitive clause – where you’d put zu (to) in front of the verb – a
separable verb ‘swallows’ the zu the same way it does with the ge above:

[example]

Reflexive Verbs
A reflexive verb is one that refers back to the subject using a reflexive pronoun, as in "Give yourself a break!" We
covered the reflexive pronouns in Section IV.2, but here they are again:

SI NGULAR PLURAL FORMAL

1ST 2ND 3RD 1ST 2ND 3RD 2ND

ACC mich dich

sich uns euch sich sich
DAT mir dir

him-/her-/ [yourself/
English myself yourself ourselves yourselves themselves
itself yourselves]
As in English, most verbs can take a reflexive pronoun in one of these positions, but some verbs require them.
These reflexive verbs in German are usually given with the 3rd person pronoun sich in front of the infinitive.
This may seem redundant at times, but there are two reasons you need to learn them this way:

1. There are many actions that drop the reflexive pronoun in English but not in German, so you can’t just
translate them word for word. For example, in English you’d say I’m going to shower, but in German you
say I’m going to shower myself. (Ich werde michduschen). By learning the verb shower as sich
duschen rather than just duschen, you’ll remember when you have to include a reflexive pronoun. [But if
you use these verbs non-reflexively (to shower someone with compliments), then you don’t need the
pronoun.]

2. Some verbs in German have different meanings in their reflexive and non-reflexive forms. For
example, versprechen means to promise, but sich versprechen means to misspeak; umziehen means to
move house, but sich umziehen means to change clothes.

As far as where to put the reflexive pronouns, they usually go right after the conjugated verb. In questions or
subordinate clauses, where the conjugated verb moves to the end, the reflexive pronoun comes after the subject:

[examples]
The reflexive clauses that sound the most unnatural to English speakers are those where the reflexive pronoun
has to be used in addition to a separate direct object. This usually occurs with parts of the body:

Ich wasche mir die

German: Er putzt sich die Zähne.
Haare.

Literal “I wash myself the “He cleans himself the

English: hair.” teeth.”

Correct He cleans [brushes] his

I wash my hair.
English: teeth.

Dative Verbs
There are certain verbs in German that always put their object in the dative, even when there’s no preposition and
it seems to be a direct object. In the Perfect Tenses section, we mentioned a few that take sein, but most of
them actually take haben. Here are a few more examples:

antworten – to Ich antworte dir [not dich] Morgen.

answer I’ll answer you tomorrow

Ich danke dir für deine Hilfe.

danken – to thank
[I] thank you for your help.

Es gefällt mir [not mich].

gefallen – to please
It pleases me / I like it

Kann ich dir helfen?

helfen – to help
Can I help you?

Ich habe ihm [not ihn] geraten, es nicht

raten – to advise zu tun.
I advised him not to do it.
Sometimes you’ll see verbs like schreiben (to write) identified as dative verbs, because they commonly take a
dative (indirect) object in addition to an accusative (direct) one, as when you write a letter [accusative] to
a friend [dative]. That’s not what we’re talking about here, though. A “true” dative verb is one that takes a dative
object without an accusative object, and there are only about 50 of them. If you look closely, what’s going on with
most of them is that an implied direct object is being dropped, often because it’s being used as the verb itself.
You answer someone by giving them an answer, help them by giving help, advise them by giving advice, and so
on.

Click here for our full list of dative verbs.

Present Participles & Gerunds

It's a little harder for native English speakers to remember the difference between these two forms, because in
English they have the same -ing ending. But in German (and most other languages) they're formed differently.
The present participle is a way of using a verb as an adjective, and in German it's only used right before a noun,
as in "running water" or "barking dogs." It’s formed by adding a –d to the end of the infinitive, then the normal
adjective case endings:

Auf der A1 ist fließender Verkehr. (traffic report)

[Smoothly] flowing traffic on the A1.

Don’t confuse the present participle with the more common past participle that we’ve been discussing up till now.
You can also use the past participle as an adjective, but of course it has a different meaning (think of breaking
glass vs. broken glass).

A gerund is a verb used as a noun, as in "The Taming of the Shrew" or "the running of the bulls." The gerund
in German is just the infinitive, capitalized. (Like all nouns.) All gerunds are neuter, and when there’s a plural, it
has no added ending or umlaut.

You often see the gerund on signs, in both German and English:

Rauchen tötet
Smoking kills

Parken verboten
No parking [literally "parking forbidden"]

The Continuous/Progressive Aspect

If you think there are too many verb forms in German, consider that Germans learning English have to deal with
at least eight more:

Indicative Conditional

present he is walking he would be walking

past he was walking

he would have been
perfect he has been walking
walking
past perfect he had been walking

future he will be walking

future he will have been

perfect walking
These are called the “continuous” or “progressive” aspects in English grammar,* and they’re difficult to learn,
especially because they only work with certain verbs and in certain contexts. This is why non-native English
speakers often make mistakes like I am needing your help with this or I was having to take a different route.

Fortunately for you, these forms don’t exist in German. Don’t make the mistake of trying to translate them
directly with the present participle; Ich bin lesend for I am reading is incorrect.** Instead, you can just translate
them with the equivalent non-continuous form, in this case the Präsens: Ich lese. This takes some getting used to,
but usually it will be clear from the context when you’re using the verb in the progressive sense.
However, when that’s not specific enough, you have two other options:

1. Add the word gerade after the verb. Ich lese gerade is a more exact way to say I’m reading than
just Ich lese, which could also mean I read, I do read, etc.

2. Use the contractions “am” (= an dem) or “beim” (= bei dem) and the gerund: Ich bin beim Lesen or Ich
bin am Lesen. This is even more idiomatic (literally I’m at the reading) but it means the same thing. It’s
more of an informal/spoken form than gerade and it used to be just a regional thing, so it will still sound
wrong to some Germans, but it’s becoming fairly widespread. Try to avoid it in writing, though.

*There’s actually a slight difference between “continuous” and “progressive,” but they’re often used
interchangeably and for our purposes they’re exactly the same thing.

**In the section on the Passive, we mentioned that a few past participles are so common that you can use them as
normal adjectives, avoiding the werden form. Analagously, there are a few present participles that have also
become adjectives, and these are exceptions to the rule above. Probably the most common example
is dringend (urgent), which comes from the verb dringen (to force). A few others
are entscheidend (decisive), spannend (exciting), and auffallend (conspicuous). These are often used as adverbs
too; as you’ll see in the last section, there’s less of an adverb/adjective distinction in German than in English.

Introduction to Prepositions
In German, prepositions tell you which case to use for the following noun. You should never learn a preposition
without learning the associated case.

The following lists are meant to be as complete as possible, so they include some less-common prepositions that
you may not find in textbooks. Rather than leave anything out, we’ve italicized these less important words so you
don’t spend too much time on them. The genitive group in particular has many little-used members.

Keep in mind that it’s almost impossible to translate prepositions exactly in any language, because they have so
many idiomatic usages. Imagine trying to explain the word “up” to someone learning English in a way that
accounts for phrases like “give up,” “screw up,” “put up with,” “put up a fight,” “what are you up to?” and so on.
What you’ll find in this section are the most literal and/or common English equivalents, but they’re not
exhaustive.

A few terms marked with an asterisk can also be used after the noun, as “postpositions.” For example, wir liefen
den Strand entlang (we walked along the beach) rather than wir liefen entlang den Strand. The line between
postpositions and separable verb prefixes can be a little fuzzy – some German teachers would read that first
sentence and see the verb entlanglaufenwith no preposition – but it’s often a distinction without a difference.

When two or more prepositions are used together, the one closer to the noun trumps. For example, in ab ins Bett
mit dir ("off to bed with you"), the bed is in the accusative case from the “in” (ins = in das) rather than the dative
case from “ab.”

Accusative Prepositions
E NG LI SH
S AMP LE U SAGE AND NO T E S
E QU IVALENT (S )

betreffend* concerning, Ihre Anfrage betreffend…

(btrf.) with reference to regarding your inquiry…
 Zähle von 1 bis 10.
until
Count from 1 to 10.

bis

Bis wann mussen wir fertig sein?

by
By when do we have to be finished?

Es bringt mich durch den Tag.

through
It gets me through the day.

durch einen Anwalt vertreten werden

by
to be represented by a lawyer

durch
Durch den Regen war das Picknick
ein Fiasko.
because of
Because of the rain, the picnic was a
fiasco.

Ich habe es durch Freunde erfahren.

via
I found out through/from friends.

eine Nachricht für dich

für for
a message for you

[accusative when postpositional…]

den Strand entlang laufen
entlang* along(side) to walk along the beach

[…but usually genitive when

prepositional] die
 Häuser entlang derStraße
the houses along the street

„Gegen die Wand” (movie title)

Against the Wall
against
Alle sind gegen mich.

gegen Everyone's against me.

Gegen Mitternacht gingen wir ins

around/about [a
Bett.
time]
We went to bed around midnight.

ohne Zweifel
without [a] doubt
ohne without
Ohne dich kann ich nicht leben.
I can't live without you.

around um den Block laufen

to walk around the block
um
Wir treffen uns um 14:00 Uhr.
at [a time] We're meeting at 2 pm.

[more idiomatic / literary than

wider against
"gegen"] wider meinen Willen
against my will

Dative Prepositions
E NG LI SH S AMP LE U SAGE AND NO T E S
 E Q U I V ALE NT(S)

from ab dem ersten Schultag

ab
[a point in time] from the first day of school

from Ich komme aus den USA.

[origin or source] I come from the US.

Tomaten aus der Dose

aus from (out of)
tomatoes out of the can

aus Metall
from (made of)
made from/of metal

except for, besides, keiner außer mir

apart from no one but me

außer außer Kontrolle

out of control
out of
außer Betrieb
out of order

Wasser kocht bei hundert Grad.

Water boils at 100 degrees.
at

bei bei der Arbeit

at work

with/at the house

of Ich bleibe bei dir
 I’ll stay with you / at your place

Sie lief mir entgegen.

towards
She ran towards me.

entgegen* Dem steht nichts entgegen.

There's nothing to stop it from
contrary to, happening.
notwithstanding
entgegen den Erwartungen...
contrary to expectations...

considering,
den Umständen entsprechend...
entsprechend* according to,
considering the circumstances...
corresponding to

gegenüber der Strasse

across from
across the street

gegenüber*

Mir gegenüber hat er nichts darüber

to (a person) gesagt.
He didn’t say anything to me about it.

gemäß Paragraf 27 des

Strafgesetzbuches...
according to, according to Paragraph 27 of the
gemäß* in accordance with criminal law code...
(often used legally)
unseren Instinkten gemäß…
according to our instincts…

laut according to
 laut dem Pressesprecher...
according to the press spokesman...

[can also be genitive (laut des

Presseprechers)]

Bier mit Cola

with beer with cola (popular German
drink)

mit mit den Jahren

over [time]
over the years

ein Kind mit 2 Jahren

at [an age]
a two year old child

samt Familie
with one's whole family
including, together
(mit)samt
with
samt Gepäck
with all one's baggage

nach der Arbeit/Schule

after
after work/school

nach* nach meiner Meinung

according to [or meiner Meinung nach]
according to (in) my opinion

to
Ich fliege nach Deutschland
 I’m flying to Germany

nahe der Natur

nahe near
close to nature

since [point in seit September

time] since September

seit

seit langer Zeit

for [time period]
for a long time

from (immediate Ich komme von der Arbeit.

origin) I'm coming from work.

die Königin von England

von of
the Queen of England

von Hand gemacht

by
made by hand

Ich gehe zum Arzt.

to
I'm going to the doctor.

zu
zu diesem Zeitpunkt
at
at this point in time

too (adverb)
zu groß
 too big

Two-Way Prepositions
The following two-way prepositions are called Wechselpräpositionen in German (from the verb wechseln, to
change). They’re accusative when they express motion/direction, and dative when they express only location:
The book is on the table.
I put the book on the table.
ACC
DAT

E NG LI SH
S AMP LE U SAGE AND NO T E S
E QU IVALENT (S )

Setz dich an den Tisch. [ACC]

Sit down at the table.

ein Bild an die Wand hängen [ACC]

an at, on
to hang a picture on the wall

Das Bild hängt an der Wand. [DAT]

The picture hangs (is hanging) on the wall.

auf den Berg steigen [ACC]

to climb up the mountain

eine Vase auf den Tisch stellen [ACC]

auf on, up
to set a vase down on the table

Die Vase steht auf dem Tisch. [DAT]

The vase is (standing) on the table.

an vs. auf: The word auf implies a position on top of something;

an is more like "beside" or suspended from.

ein Blick hinter die Kulissen [ACC]

hinter behind
a glimpse behind the scenes
 Was passiert hinter den Kulissen? [DAT]
What's happening behind the scenes?

Die Kinder gehen in die Schule. [ACC]

The kids are going to school.
into, to [ACC]
in
in [DAT]
Was hast du in der Schule gelernt? [DAT]
What did you learn in school?

Komm, setz dich neben mich. [ACC]

Come sit down next to me.
next to (not just
neben
near)
Der Platz neben mir ist frei. [DAT]
The seat next to me is free.

Der Zug fuhr über die Brücke. [ACC]

The train went over the bridge.
over, above
Die Sonne hing über dem Meer [DAT]
über The sun hung over the sea.

Wir redeten über den Film. [ACC]

about We talked about the movie.

Schau unters Bett vorm

Schlafengehen[ACC]
Look under the bed before going to sleep.
under, below

unter Ein Monster versteckt sich unterm

Bett.[DAT]
A monster is hiding under the bed.

among ein Schaf unter Wölfen [DAT]

a sheep among wolves
 unter anderem (u.a.) [DAT]
among other things / inter alia

Ich stellte mich vors Mikro(fon). [ACC]

in front of I went up to the microphone.

Der Tisch steht vor dem Fenster. [DAT]

The table is in front of the window.

vor
of Angst vor Höhe [DAT]
fear of heights

Ich muss es vorm Wochenende

before machen[DAT]
I have to do it before the weekend.

etwas zwischen die Finger

bekommen[ACC]
to get a hold of something
(literally, between one's fingers)
zwischen between
zwischen den Jahren [DAT]
between the years
(German expression for the time between
Christmas and New Year’s)

Genitive Prepositions
As mentioned in Section II.4, the slow death of the genitive extends to prepositions. You may hear some of the
following genitive prepositions used with the dative case instead. We've noted a few where the dative is especially
common.

E NG LI SH
S AMP LE U SAGE AND NO T E S
E QU IVALENT (S )

Statt der erwarteten Beförderung

bekam er die Kündigung.
(an)statt instead of
Instead of the expected promotion, he
was let go.

abzüglich der Unkosten...

abzüglich less, minus
after expenses...

Angesichts der Tatsache, dass…

angesichts in view of, given
In view of the fact that…

außerhalb der Stadt

außerhalb outside of
outside the city

Bar jeder Vernunft

devoid of, barring
bar (famous cabaret in Berlin)
any
"against all reason"

concerning,
bezüglich unseres Telefonats
bezüglich (bzgl.) regarding,
regarding our phone conversation
with respect to

within [a time binnen einer Woche

binnen
period] within a/one week

dank thanks to
 dank Ihrer Hilfe...
thanks to your help...

[also frequently used in the dative]

einschließlich aller Kosten

einschließlich including
all expenses included

infolge einer schweren Erkrankung

infolge due to, because of
due to a serious illness

in the inmitten der Menge

inmitten
middle/midst of in the middle of the crowd

innerhalb eines kleinen Kreises

innerhalb inside of
within a small circle [of people]

Das Verfahren war mangels Beweisen

for lack of (esp. eingestellt.
mangels
legal) The case was dismissed for lack of
evidence.

mittels eines
by means of (esp. Schraubenziehers...[assembly
mittels
technical) instructions]
using a screwdriver...

oberhalb des Gefrierpunktes

oberhalb above, beyond
above the freezing point
 unbeschadet des zuvor Gesagten...
despite/notwithstanding what was
just said...
unbeschadet notwithstanding

unbeschadet dessen, dass...

notwithstanding the fact that...

Ungeachtet der Drohungen des Irans

will Deutschland Sanktionen.
ungeachtet in spite of
In spite of Iran's threats, Germany
wants sanctions.

unterhalb der Armutsgrenze

unterhalb below, underneath
below the poverty line

unweit des Hotels

unweit not far from
not far from the hotel

zugunsten meines Mandanten

in favor of,
zugunsten [note weak noun]
in the interests of
in the interest of my client

trotz des schlechten Wetters [GEN]

trotz dem schlechten Wetter [DAT]
despite the bad weather

trotz despite [Native speakers disagree about

whether the correct usage of "trotz" is
genitive or dative. This is partly a
North/South thing and partly a
function of how it sounds with
different nouns. We had to put it
 somewhere, but you can absolutely
use it either way.]

Während des Semesters gelten

folgende Sprechstunden...
während during
During the semester the following
office hours apply...

wegen Krankheit geschlossen

closed due to illness
wegen because of

[Like "dank" and "trotz" this is very

commonly used in the dative.]

Contractions
A few common preposition-article pairs are usually contracted, as follows:

an dem > am hinter dem > hinterm unter dem > unterm

an das > ans in das > ins von dem > vom

auf das > aufs in dem > im vor das > vors

bei dem > beim über das > übers vor dem > vorm

durch das > durchs um das > ums zu dem > zum

für das > fürs unter das > unters zu der > zur

Adverbs
German does not have the –ly distinction in English between an adjective and an adverb. You can use almost any
adjective as an adverb without changing it, as long as it makes sense:
Das Pferd ist schnell. Er rennt schnell.
The horse is quick. He runs quickly.
The only thing in German that’s somewhat comparable to our –ly is the –erweise fomulation, which modifies an
entire clause rather than just a verb or an adjective:

Es ist normal, dass wir um 7 Uhr

Normalerweise essen wir um 7
essen.
Uhr.
It's normal for us to eat at 7
Normally we eat at 7 o'clock.
o'clock.
As in English, there are also some common adverbs that don’t map as directly to adjectives. They all work
grammatically in the same way as their English equivalents, and they don’t take any case endings, so you just have
to memorize them. Some of them you’ve probably seen already:

TIME MANNER PLACE

anfangs -- at the beinahe -- nearly, aufwärts -- upward

beginning almost auseinander --
bald -- soon besonders -- especially separated, apart
bereits -- already bloß -- merely, simply, außen -- outside
damals -- at that time, just da -- here, there
then daneben -- besides, in drüben -- over there
danach -- afterward addition geradeaus -- straight
dann -- then ebenfalls -- likewise, also ahead
diesmal -- this time ebenso -- equally, hier -- here
einmal -- once similarly hinten -- in back, at the
endlich -- finally, at eigentlich -- actually, in back
last fact innen -- inside
früher -- earlier, fast -- almost links -- left
previously gemeinsam -- in nebenan -- next door
gestern -- yesterday common, jointly nirgends/nirgendwo --
heute -- today gern, gerne -- gladly nowhere
immer -- always hoffentlich -- hopefully oben -- above
inzwischen -- insgesamt -- in total, rechts -- right (≠left)
meanwhile altogether rückwärts -- backwards
jemals -- ever kaum -- hardly überall -- everywhere
jetzt -- now leider -- unfortunately unten -- under
langsam -- slowly mindestens -- at least, vorn(e) -- in front, at the
längst -- long ago at minimum front
manchmal -- nämlich -- namely vorwärts -- forward
sometimes natürlich -- naturally
meistens -- mostly, nebenbei -- by the way,
most often incidentally
neulich -- recently
nie -- never
noch -- still
nochmal -- again
nun -- now
oft -- often
schon -- already
sofort -- immediately
vorbei -- over, past
vorher -- previously,
before
vorhin -- just now, a
short time ago
wieder -- again
zuerst -- first, at first
zurzeit -- at the
moment, at present
schließlich -- finally
sehr -- very
sogar -- even
sonst -- otherwise
teilweise -- partially
übrigens -- by the way
ungefähr --
approximately
ursprünglich --
originally
vielleicht -- perhaps,
maybe
wahrscheinlich --
probably, likely
wirklich -- really, truly
ziemlich -- rather, quite
zufällig -- accidentally,
by chance
zurück -- back
zusammen -- together

Conjunctions
In German there’s an important distinction between subordinating conjunctions, which send the verb to the end
in the following (subordinated) clause, and coordinating conjunctions, which link two main clauses and keep
each clause’s conjugated verb in the second position. There are only five one-word coordinating conjunctions –
three main ones that you already know if you’ve made it this far, and two that are a bit less common. We’ve
underlined the conjugated verbs so you can see how they stay in the second position in both clauses:

Coordinating Conjunctions

Du machst das noch mal und ich gehe ohne dich.

und (and)
You do that again and I’m going without you.

Du hörst auf damit oder ich gehe.

oder (or)
You stop it or I’ll leave.

aber (but)
Ich wollte es abholen, aber der Laden hatte schon zu.
 I wanted to pick it up, but the store was already closed.

[more lyrical and nuanced than aber, often expresses a

mild paradox (it's like this, and yet it's also like that)]
doch
(but, and yet)
Jahre vergehen, doch die Liebe bleibt.
Years go by, but love remains.

[a bit softer than "weil" (next table) and often used when
denn the hearer is already aware of the following explanation.]
(because, for)
Bleibe bei uns, denn es will Abend werden.
Stay with us, for evening is nigh.

The list of subordinating conjunctions is a bit longer. Again, we’ve underlined the verbs -- notice how they move
to the end in the subordinate clause:

Subordinating Conjunctions

Ich will, dass du deine Hausaufgaben machst.

I want you to do your homework.
(literally I want that you do your homework)

dass (that)
Er sagte, dass er kommen würde.
He said (that) he’s coming.

[notice that "dass" is often required in German

where "that" is optional in English.]

Wenn du möchtest, kannst du bei mir bleiben.

If you’d like, you can stay with me.
wenn
(if, when) Jeden Tag, wenn ich von der Schule nach Hause kam,
wartete mein Hund schon vor der Tür.
Every day, when I came home from school, my dog was
already waiting at the door.

"When" is a more differentiated concept in German than in English. "Wenn" is

used for the present, future, and repeated events in the past ("Remember when
we used to stay out all night long?"). For a single event in the past ("When I got
there, the house was empty") you should use "als" (below).

immer wenn
Immer wenn es regnet, muss ich an dich denken.
(whenever)
Whenever it rains, I think of you.

Ich komme zu spät, weil ich eine Reifenpanne hatte.

weil (because)
I'm arriving late because I had a flat tire.

Many Germans also use weil in speech as a coordinating conjunction, without

moving the verb to the end afterwards. Often they're not even aware of it,
although they would instantly see the mistake if it was used this way in writing.
One possibility is that they’re doing it for sentences where the listener already
knows the "reason" (as with denn above). Another is that they’re accommodating
a longer subordinate clause that would be harder to understand with the verb at
the end.

sobald Wir reden darüber, sobald ich zurück bin.

(as soon as) We'll talk about it as soon as I'm back.

Ich hoffe, wir sehen uns noch mal, bevor ich das
bevor (before) Land verlasse.
I hope we see each other again before I leave the country.

Sie kamen an, nachdem alles schon vorbei war.

nachdem They arrived after everything was already over.
(after)
Nachdem alles vorbei war, konnten wir darüber reden.
After it was all over, we were able to talk about it.

Ich bin gestolpert, als ich aus dem Bus stieg.

als
I stumbled as I was getting off the bus.
(as, when, while)

[Again, als is for a single past event; use wenn for a

 repeated event.]

Sie fuhren gerne Rad, da ihnen die Bewegung gut tat.

da (because, since)
They enjoyed cycling because being active did them good.

Er konnte an nichts anderes mehr denken, seit[dem] er sie

seit, seitdem
zum ersten Mal gesehen hatte.
(since [a point in
He couldn't think of anything else since he had seen her for
time])
the first time.

Ich weiss nicht, ob er alt genug ist.

I don’t know whether he’s old enough.
ob (whether)
Often translates to "if" in casual English, e.g. we’ll say "I
don’t know if he’s old enough" rather than "I don’t know
whether"

Ich habe zugesagt, obwohl ich Bedenken hatte.

obwohl (although)
I agreed, although I had my doubts.

solange Solange du hier bist, kannst du dich nützlich machen.

(so long as) As long as you're here, you can make yourself useful.

während Während du auf mich wartest, kannst du die Zeitung lesen.

(while, during) While you're waiting for me, you can read the paper.

Ich bleibe hier, bis du zurückkommst.

bis (until)
I'll wait here till you come back.

Two-Part Conjunctions
Most two-part conjunctions in German have direct English equivalents, so it's faster to learn them by example
than to break them down grammatically. The easiest are either/or and neither/nor:

Wir können entweder ins Kino oder ins Restaurant gehen.

We can either go to the cinema or to the restaurant.

Sie isst weder Fisch noch Fleisch.

She eats neither fish nor meat.

(Also, if someone offers you two options and you want to reject both, you can just say weder noch to mean
"neither one.")

Sowohl literally translates to "as well (as)" and is usually combined with als auch or wie to indicate that two
things are both true. The sentence structure is a little different from English, though. We put "as well as" or "and"
in between the two items, but sowohl goes before them. The nearest English equivalent in terms of sentence
structure is "both/and":

Dieses Gerät spart sowohl Zeit als auch Geld.

This appliance saves both time and money.
OR This appliance saves time as well as money.

sowohl im Inland wie auch im Ausland

both at home and abroad
OR at home as well as abroad.

Je/desto expresses a relationship between two comparative adjectives:

Je mehr du redest, desto dümmer klingst du.

The more you talk, the dumber you sound.

Zwar usually translates to "indeed" or "granted" or "it's true." It's frequently used with aber("but") to partially
concede an argument or fact but still maintain an opposing position:

Er mochte sie zwar, wollte sie aber nicht heiraten.

While he certainly liked her, he did not want to marry her.

Modal Particles
“Particle” is a catch-all term for words that have no clear part of speech, like “hmm.” (Many English particles are
also described as “interjections.”) A modal particle is a word that’s used in speech to convey extra emphasis or
emotion, without any real grammatical function.

It’s often said that English has no modal particles, but we have some pretty similar features. Think of asking a
small child “What have you got there?” or “What’s your name then?” The there and then aren’t really necessary in
those sentences, they’re just a friendly way of expressing interest. Or if you say “Come on now!” to express
disbelief or frustration, the nowisn’t strictly necessary. Some other examples are a little more old-timey:
“What ever are you talking about?” or “I’ll get him but good.” Notice that all these words have ‘ordinary’ usages
apart from their use as particles; this is also the case for the German particles below.
In any case, the exact definition of a modal particle is complicated, but hopefully you’re getting the idea. For our
purposes, let’s just define them as any common verbal flourish in spoken German. (Another way to think of them
is as ‘verbal emoticons.’) You’re going to hear a lot of these if you talk to native speakers, so it’s useful to know
them. Some can have different emphatic meanings, so they appear under more than one heading below.

aber gerne!
with pleasure!
aber

aber sicher!
most certainly

Das ist wohl wahr!

wohl
That’s certainly true!

Affirmation/
Agreement
Das ist ja eine tolle idee!
ja
That’s really a great idea!

Na klar komme ich!

You bet I‘m coming!
na
Na logisch!
Of course!

Du bist doch nur zugekifft.

You're just [saying that because you're] high.
Contradiction/
doch
Disagreement
Q: Das ist doch nicht dein Ernst, oder? A: Doch!
Q: You’re not being serious, are you? A: I am!

Dass ich das gerade von DIR höre...

Special
That I'm hearing that from YOU (of all people)…
Emphasis/ gerade
Focus
Gerade heute musste es schneien!
It had to snow today (of all days)!
 Ich versuche, eine Antwort auf eben die Frage zu
formulieren.
eben
I'm trying to find an answer to [just] that very
question.

So ist es eben. / Es ist eben so.

eben
That's just how it is.

Naja, was hast du erwartet?

Resignation naja
Ah well, what did you expect?

Ich war halt besoffen.

halt
(What can i say?) I was drunk.

Das war aber nett von dir!

aber
That was nice of you! [I wasn't expecting it]

Surprise

Ist das etwa für mich?

etwa
Is that for me?

Wie alt bist du denn? [to a child]

denn
So how old are you?

Interest

Guck dir das mal an!

mal
Take a look at that!

Intensifiers schon
 Das ist schon viel!
It’s more than you think/more than it seems

Du bist ja blöd!
ja
Are you ever dumb!

Das ist aber völliger Quatsch!

aber
That's complete nonsense!

Wie konntest du nur?

How COULD you?
nur
Was hat er sich nur dabei gedacht?
What WAS he thinking?

Exasperation/
Anger
Was will er schon von mir?
schon
What in the world does he want from me?

Was soll das nun bedeuten?

nun
Now what’s that supposed to mean?

Es war halt ein Vorschlag.

halt
It was just a suggestion.

Softening/
Casual

Warte mal.
mal
Wait a sec.
Strong Verbs
When a strong verb in German is becoming weak, language dictionaries often show it by adding the weak past
tense in parentheses, like this: "backen / buk (backte) / gebacken." This can be misleading, because many native
speakers wouldn't write "buk" or "backte" -- they'd just avoid the problem by using the Perfekt: "hat gebacken."
This should be your approach too. For the past forms that we've put in brackets, just avoid them and use
the Perfekt, even in writing.

Where a present or participle form has weakened, the forms are more interchangeable, but we've tried to put the
less common one in parentheses.

This list does not include auxiliary, modal or mixed verbs. It's better to learn those separately, since there are so
few of them and they each have their own quirks. We cover all their forms in sections V.3 and V.4.

Some people find it easier to learn the strong verbs when they're sorted into groups by vowel pattern. Click
here for the list in that format.

I N F I N I TI V E PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

backt
backen [buk] hat gebacken to bake
(bäckt)

befehlen1 befiehlt befahl hat befohlen to order, instruct

beginnen beginnt begann hat begonnen to begin

beißen beißt biss hat gebissen to bite

to save, rescue,
bergen birgt barg hat geborgen
recover

bersten birst barst hat geborsten to burst

biegen biegt bog hat/ist gebogen to bend

bieten bietet bot hat geboten to offer

binden bindet band hat gebunden to bind, tie

bitten bittet bat hat gebeten to ask, request

blasen bläst blies hat geblasen to blow

bleiben bleibt blieb ist geblieben to stay, remain

hat/ist gebleicht
bleichen bleicht [blich] to bleach, fade
(geblichen)

braten brät [briet] hat gebraten to fry, roast

hat/ist
brechen bricht brach to break
gebrochen
INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

dreschen drischt drosch hat gedroschen to thresh

dringen dringt drang ist gedrungen to push through

empfehlen1 empfiehlt empfahl hat empfohlen to recommend

hat/ist to frighten, be
erschrecken erschrickt erschrak
erschrocken frightened

erwägen erwägt erwog hat erwogen to consider

essen isst aß hat gegessen to eat

fahren fährt fuhr hat/ist gefahren to drive, to travel

fallen fällt fiel ist gefallen to fall

fangen fängt fing hat gefangen to catch

to fence (with
fechten ficht [focht] hat gefochten
swords)

finden findet fand hat gefunden to find

flechten flicht [flocht] hat geflochten to braid, weave

fliegen fliegt flog hat/ist geflogen to fly

fliehen flieht floh ist geflohen to flee

fließen fließt floss ist geflossen to flow

to eat (used with

fressen frisst fraß hat gefressen
animals)

frieren friert fror hat gefroren to freeze

hat gegoren
gären gärt [gor] to ferment
(gegärt)

gebärt
gebären gebar hat geboren to give birth (to)
(gebiert)

geben gibt gab hat gegeben to give

gedeihen gedeiht gedieh ist gediehen to flourish

gehen geht ging ist gegangen to go

gelingen gelingt gelang ist gelungen to succeed

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

to be valid, to
gelten gilt galt hat gegolten
count

to recover,
genesen genest [genas] ist genesen
convalesce

genießen genießt genoss hat genossen to enjoy

geschehen gescheht geschah ist geschehen to happen

gewinnen gewinnt gewann hat gewonnen to win

gießen gießt goss hat gegossen to pour

to be similar to, the

gleichen gleicht glich hat geglichen
same as

gleiten gleitet glitt ist geglitten to glide

hat geglommen
glimmen glimmt [glomm] to glow
(geglimmt)

graben gräbt grub hat gegraben to dig

greifen greift griff hat gegriffen to grab, grip

halten hält hielt hat gehalten to stop, hold

hängen hängt hing hat gehangen to hang

to hew, cut (wood)

hauen haut haute hat gehauen
/ to hit, slap

heben hebt hob hat gehoben to lift, raise

heißen heißt hieß hat geheißen to be called

helfen hilft half hat geholfen to help

klimmen klimmt klomm ist geklommen to clamber, climb

klingen klingt klang hat geklungen to sound

kneifen kneift kniff hat gekniffen to pinch

kommen kommt kam ist gekommen to come

kriechen kriecht kroch ist gekrochen to crawl

laden lädt lud hat geladen to load

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

lassen lässt ließ hat gelassen to let, leave, stop

laufen läuft lief ist gelaufen to run

leiden leidet litt hat gelitten to suffer

leihen leiht lieh hat geliehen to lend, to borrow

lesen liest las hat gelesen to read

liegen liegt lag hat/ist gelegen to lie (position)

lügen lügt log hat gelogen to lie

mahlen mahlt mahlte hat gemahlen to mill, grind

meiden meidet mied hat gemieden to avoid

milkt
melken [molk] hat gemolken to milk
(melkt)

messen misst maß hat gemessen to measure

misslingen misslingt misslang ist misslungen to fail, to miss

nehmen nimmt nahm hat genommen to take

pfeifen pfeift pfiff hat gepfiffen to whistle

preisen preist pries hat gepriesen to praise

to well up, gush,

quellen quillt quoll hat gequollen
swell

raten rät riet hat gerieten to guess

reiben reibt rieb hat gerieben to rub

reißen reißt riss hat/ist gerissen to tear; to snatch

reiten reitet ritt hat/ist geritten to ride

riechen riecht roch hat gerochen to smell

ringen ringt rang hat gerungen to wrestle

to run (water),
rinnen rinnt rann geronnen
leak, flow, trickle

rufen ruft rief hat gerufen to call

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

hat gesalzen
salzen salzt salzte to salt
(gesalzt)

to drink (used with

saufen säuft soff hat gesoffen
animals)

saugen saugt sog hat gesogen to suck, vacuum

schaffte
schaffen schafft hat geschaffen to create, do
(schuf)

schallte to resound, ring,

schallen schallt hat geschallt
[scholl] echo

hat/ist
scheiden scheidet schied to separate
geschieden

to shine / to seem,
scheinen scheint schien hat geschienen
appear

scheißen scheißt schiss hat geschissen to shit, crap

scheren2 schert schor hat geschoren to shear, crop, cut

schieben schiebt schob hat geschoben to push

hat/ist
schießen schießt schoss to shoot
geschossen

to maltreat / work
schinden schindet schindete hat geschunden
someone too hard

schlafen schläft schlief hat geschlafen to sleep

schlagen schlägt schlug hat geschlagen to hit

schleichen schleicht schlich ist geschlichen to slide, slip, slink

to grind, sharpen,
schleifen3 schleift schliff hat geschliffen
polish

schließen schließt schloss hat geschlossen to close

schlingen schlingt schlang hat geschlungen to loop, tie, wrap

schmeißen schmeißt schmiss hat geschmissen to throw, chuck

schmelzen schmilzt schmolz hat geschmolzen to melt

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

schneiden schneidet schnitt hat geschnitten to cut

schreiben schreibt schrieb hat geschrieben to write

schreien schreit schrie hat geschrien to shout, cry

schreiten schreitet schritt ist geschritten to step

schweigen schweigt schwieg hat geschwiegen to be/remain silent

to swim (for
hat/ist
schwimmen schwimmt schwamm exercise/sport) / to
geschwommen
float

to fade, dwindle,
schwinden schwindet schwand ist geschwunden
wane

hat
schwingen schwingt schwang to swing
geschwungen

schwören schwört schwor hat geschworen to swear

sehen sieht sah hat gesehen to see, look

singen singt sang hat gesungen to sing

sinken sinkt sank ist gesunken to sink

to think, reflect,
sinnen sinnt sann hat gesonnen
ponder

sitzen sitzt saß hat/ist gesessen to sit

hat gespalten
spalten spaltet spaltete to split, crack
(gespaltet)

speien speit spie hat gespien to spit, spout, spew

to spin / (fig.) to be
spinnen spinnt spann hat gesponnen
crazy

sprechen spricht sprach hat gesprochen to speak

sprießen sprießt spross ist gesprossen to sprout

springen springt sprang ist gesprungen to jump

stechen sticht stach hat gestochen to sting, bite, stab

stehen steht stand hat/ist to stand

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

gestanden

stehlen stiehlt stahl hat gestohlen to steal

to climb, rise,
steigen steigt stieg ist gestiegen
ascend

sterben stirbt starb ist gestorben to die

stinken stinkt stank hat gestunken to stink

stoßen stößt stieß hat gestoßen to push, knock

to spread, paint /
streichen streicht strich hat gestrichen to cancel, strike off,
delete

streiten streitet stritt hat gestritten to argue, quarrel

tragen trägt trug hat getragen to carry, to wear

to meet someone /
treffen trifft traf hat getroffen
to hit a target

treiben treibt trieb hat getrieben to drive, drift, do

treten tritt trat hat/ist getreten to step, kick

trinken trinkt trank hat getrunken to drink

trügen trügt [trog] hat getrogen to deceive

tun tut tat hat getan to do

hat/ist to spoil, go bad,

verderben verdirbt verdarb
verdorben perish

to irk, irritate,
verdrießen verdrießt verdross hat verdrossen
annoy

vergessen vergisst vergaß hat vergessen to forget

verlieren verliert verlor hat verloren to lose

hat/ist
verschleißen4 verschleißt verschliss to wear out
verschlissen

verzeihen5 verzeiht verzieh hat verziehen to forgive

wachsen wächst wuchs ist gewachsen to grow

INFINITIVE PRESENT PAST PARTICIPLE ENGLISH

waschen wäscht wusch hat gewaschen to wash

hat gewoben
weben webt [wob] to weave
(gewebt)

to yield, lose
weichen weicht wich ist gewichen
ground, soften

weisen weist wies hat gewiesen to direct, show

werben wirbt warb hat geworben to advertise

werfen wirft warf hat geworfen to throw

to weigh / to
wiegen wiegt wog hat gewogen
cradle

winden windet wand hat gewunden to wind (e.g. string)

wringen wringt wrang hat gewrungen to wring

ziehen zieht zog hat/ist gezogen to pull

zwingen zwingt zwang hat gezwungen to force

1 oddly, "fehlen" is weak but "befehlen" and "empfehlen" are strong

2 there's also a reflexive version meaning "to care for" with a weak conjugation
3 used in the weak form (schleifte, geschleift) it means "to drag"
4 "schleißen" by itself is used for stripping feathers or wood, but it's very uncommon
5 "zeihen" by itself is an old-fashioned word for "accuse"

Dative Verbs
As a reminder, these are verbs that can take a dative object even without an accusative object or a dative
preposition. (See V.13 for more.) The best way to remember them is a short phrase with a dative pronoun or
article, so we've given you one for each verb:

ENGLISH SAMPLE USAGE

Er ähnelt seinem Vater sehr.

ähneln to resemble
He really resembles his father.

Sie haben mir nicht geantwortet.

antworten to answer
They haven't answered me.

auffallen to stand out, Der Kratzer an seinem Auto ist ihm nie
 ENGLISH SAMPLE USAGE

make an impression aufgefallen.

He never noticed the scratch on his car.

Er weicht meinen Fragen ständig aus.

ausweichen to evade
He constantly evades my questions.

Der Offizier befiehlt den Soldaten den

befehlen to order, command Angriff.
The officer orders the soldiers to attack.

Ich bin ihm schon einmal begegnet.

begegnen to meet someone
I've met him before.

In schweren Zeiten standen

beistehen to stand by, support wir ihnen bei.
We stood by them in difficult times.

Ich möchte Ihnen nochmals danken...

danken to thank
I wanted to thank you again...

Lass dir das als Warnung dienen!

dienen to serve
Let that serve as a warning to you!

Mein Chef drohte mir mit der

drohen to threaten Kündigung.
My boss threatened to fire me.

to come to mind, Es fällt mir nicht im Traum ein.

einfallen
think of something I wouldn't dream of it.

Dem ist auch nichts zu entgegnen.

entgegnen to reply, retort
There's nothing to say to that.

Erlauben Sie mir die Bemerkung...

erlauben to allow, permit
Permit me to remark...

Das erscheint mir gar nicht geheuer.

erscheinen to appear
That doesn't appear safe to me.

Sie wusste nicht, was sie ihm daraufhin

erwidern to reply erwidern sollte.
She didn't know how to reply to him.

Mir fehlen die Worte...

fehlen to be missing
Words fail me...
 ENGLISH SAMPLE USAGE

Da kann ich dir nicht folgen.

folgen to follow
I'm not following you.

Wie gefällt dir das Essen?

gefallen to please [someone]
How do you like the food?

Der Hund gehorcht nur seinem

gehorchen to obey Herrchen.
The dog only obeys his owner.

Wem gehört diese Tasche?

gehören to belong to
Who does this bag belong to?

Mit etwas Geduld wird es dir gelingen!

gelingen to succeed
With a little patience you'll succeed!

Leider genügt es den

Anforderungen nicht.
genügen to suffice, be enough
Unfortunately it doesn't fulfill the
requirements.

Ich habe ihm dazu geraten.

geraten to advise
I advised him to do it.

Ihr ist etwas geschehen.

geschehen to happen, occur
Something happened to her.

Du kannst es mir glauben.

glauben to believe [someone]
You can trust me on this.

to closely resemble
Du gleichst ihm aufs Haar.
gleichen [someone or
You resemble him down to a hair.
something]

to succeed, work Hoffentlich wird es ihnen glücken.

glücken
out Hopefully it'll work out for them.

Wir hatten ein Geschenk gekauft,

um ihm zu gratulieren.
gratulieren to congratulate
We had bought a gift to congratulate
him.

Könntest du mir bitte helfen?

helfen to help
Could you give me a hand?
 ENGLISH SAMPLE USAGE

Sie konnte nicht widerstehen, ihnen zu

to eavesdrop, listen
lauschen.
lauschen in
She couldn't resist eavesdropping on
[on someone]
them.

Sie konnten sich nicht sicher sein, ob

misslingen to fail es ihnen misslingen würde.
They couldn't be sure whether they'd fail.

Lebkuchen mundetet ihr in der

to taste good Weihnachtszeit immer noch am besten.
munden
[to someone] Gingerbread cake still tasted best [to
her] at Christmastime.

to be of use Es wird dir nichts nützen.

nützen
[to someone] It won't do you any good.

Das Kleid passt ihr wie angegossen.

passen to fit
That dress fits her like it was poured on.

Das kann jedem einmal passieren.

passieren to happen
It can happen to anyone.

Dazu kann ich dir nur raten.

raten to advise
I can only advise you to do so.

to damage
Ein bisschen Bewegung
[something],
schaden kann niemandemschaden.
do harm [to
A little exercise can't hurt anyone.
someone]

to taste good Hat dir das Essen geschmeckt?

schmecken
[to someone] Did you like the food?

Es ist einfach, einem Kind zu

schmeicheln to flatter schmeicheln.
It's easy to flatter a child.

to approach, Er nähert sich dem Ruhestand.

sich nähern
draw near to He's nearing retirement.

Dem Glück ist nicht zu trauen.

trauen to trust
Good fortune is not to be trusted.

vertrauen to trust, confide in, Ich vertraue ihm nicht.

 ENGLISH SAMPLE USAGE

rely on I don't trust him.

Verzeihen Sie mir die Unterbrechung...

verzeihen to forgive
Forgive me the interruption...

to yield to, make Allein der Gewalt wird er weichen.

weichen
way for He will only yield to force.

to contradict, Wage nicht, mir zu widersprechen!

widersprechen
gainsay Don't you dare contradict me!

to wave [to Er winkte mir zum Abschied.

winken
someone] He waved goodbye to me.

Complete Declension Tables

The "hard" case endings are highlighted in yellow in these tables, and the “soft” adjective endings are underlined.

TYPE 1: Definite
"The nice man / woman / child / children"
A r t i c l es

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

NOM der nette Mann die nette Frau das nette Kind die netten Kinder

ACC den netten Mann die nette Frau das nette Kind die netten Kinder

DAT dem netten Mann der netten Frau dem netten Kind den netten Kindern

GEN des netten Mannes der netten Frau des netten Kindes der netten Kinder

T Y P E 2 : I n d e f i n i t e & P o s s es s i v e " M y l i t t l e do g / c a t / b u n n y /
A r t i c l es birds"

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

mein kleiner meine kleine mein kleines meine kleinen

NOM
Hund Katze Kaninchen Vögel

meinen kleinen meine kleine mein kleines meine kleinen

ACC
Hund Katze Kaninchen Vögel

meinem kleinen meiner kleinen meinem kleinen meinen kleinen

DAT
Hund Katze Kaninchen Vögeln
 meines kleinen meiner kleinen meines kleinen meiner kleinen
GEN
Hundes Katze Kaninchens Vögel

TYPE 3: No Article " h o t c o f f e e / c o l d m i l k / f r e s h b r e a d / w a rm r o l l s "

MASCULIN E FEMI NI NE NEUTER PLURAL

NOM heißer Kaffee kalte Milch frisches Brot warme Brötchen

ACC heißen Kaffee kalte Milch frisches Brot warme Brötchen

DAT heißem Kaffee kalter Milch frischem Brot warmen Brötchen

GEN heißen Kaffees kalter Milch frischen Brotes warmer Brötchen

Non-German Keyboards
Here's how to type the "extra" German characters on a non-German keyboard, with a few more notes below for
Windows users:

WINDOWS WINDOWS 7
MAC
( A L L V ER S I O N S ) (SOMETIMES)

Alt-0196 (capital) Control-colon

Option-U, then A
Ä/ä or -0228 (control+shift+;),
or a
(lowercase) then A or a

Option-U, then O Alt-0214 Control-colon,

Ö/ö
or o or -0246 then O or o

Option-U, then U Alt-0220 Control-colon,

Ü/ü
or u or -0252 then U or u

Control-&
ß Option-S Alt-0223
(control-shift-7)

German
Alt-8218 (open),
quotes,
or -8216 (close)
single (‚‘)

German
quotes, Alt-8222 (open),
double or -8220 (close)
(„“)

"Chevron"
Alt-8249
quotes,
and -8250
single
 (‹›,›‹)

"Chevron"
quotes, Shift-Alt-3 Alt-0171
double and -4 and -0187
(«»,»«)

Those Windows shortcuts in the middle column usually have to be entered on the numeric keypad, and
sometimes it has to be the left Alt key, not the right one. As for the Windows 7 shortcuts, we put "sometimes"
because they're unpredictable -- they tend to work only in certain installations of Windows, or in Word but not a
web form, etc.

To be honest, the whole process on Windows is so annoying that most users who have to type any serious amount
of German text will be better off just switching their keyboard layout. This may interfere with a few other
keyboard shortcuts (especially the ones with the right-hand Alt key) but it's usually worth it. Click here for
instructions on how to switch your keyboard layout in Windows.

Of the default layouts, the "US-International" one is a good alternative to "German," because it keeps most of the
letters and basic punctuation in the same places and uses alt-key combos for the umlaut vowels. But our favorite
is a custom layout called DeKey, which you can download here for free.