German Grammar Primer

What is Grammar?
“Grammar” is the word we use to talk about “how words fit together to change meaning”.
When we combine words into sentences, we use grammar to show how those words connect and
interact. One of the things that makes toddlers difficult to understand is that they frequently don’t use
grammar…
"BLUE!"
"Yes, sweetie, good job!” That car is blue."

Most traditional language learning methods want you to drill and practice German grammar before
you really understand anything. This primer is different.
German grammar rules are very complicated and difficult to grasp, even for native speakers.

But learners can fully understand German even if they don't know all of the underlying grammar rules.
The brain is a natural pattern-recognition machine and is capable of picking up these rules
subconsciously, as long as it receives enough comprehensible input.
This primer will explain the main things you should be aware of before going into German so that it’s
easier to understand.

Nouns (aka things)

Libs," If you’ve ever played “Mad Libs," you might remember that nouns are the “things” we talk
about. People, places, ideas, and stuff. All German nouns are written with a capital letter, no matter
where they are in the sentence, so it makes finding them super easy!

But there are a few things about nouns you will want to keep in mind:

Gender
All nouns fall into one of three categories. These are masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Gender Word Meaning

Masculine der Hund the dog (hound)

Feminine die Katze the cat

Neuter das Schaf the sheep

As you can see above, the word “the” changed for each word. This will change often. This can be
disconcerting, especially for beginners, because it feels like words are changing at random. It’s not
random, but you don’t need to know exactly what’s going on in order to understand the sentence.

German Grammar Primer 1

 Here’s an example of some changes:

Gender Phrase Meaning Change

Masculine mit dem braunen Hund with the brown dog der turns into dem, en is added to braun

Feminine mit der braunen Katze and the brown cat die turns into der, en is added to braun

Neuter mit dem braunen Schaf over the brown sheep das turns into den, en is added to braun

This may seem daunting, but these changes start to make a lot more sense once you’ve spent more
time with German. For now, just allow yourself to think, “oh look! That changed. I still understand,
though!”

Cases
You may have heard of “German Cases” with big words like Nominative, and Genitive. German cases
are a lot less scary than they are made out to be. When we say “case” what we mean is “situation”.
German cases help us understand who is doing what.

In English, we use word order to figure out who is doing an action, and who is receiving it:
✅ I write my mother a card
If we rearrange the words, the sentence doesn’t make sense anymore:
❌ I write a card my mother
There’s an invisible “to” in the first sentence that we need to add in to make the rearranged version
work:

✅ I write a card to my mother.

The order of the sentence tells us:

“I” am the subject

“write” is the action
“a card” is the direct object
“(to) my mother” is the indirect object

German Grammar Primer 2

 In German, the word order is a lot more flexible. You can’t rely on word order to tell you who is doing
the action and who is receiving it. The 3 sentences below all mean the same thing:

Think of “scribe” when you see “schreiben”

‼

Instead of using word order, German changes the endings of words to tell us who is doing the action
and who is receiving it. This is called “marking the case”.

mein my⇒
meiner ⇒
to my

The sentences above are all the same because “meiner Mutter” (my mother) is the same, no matter
where it is in the sentence. meiner (to my) is an example of the “dative” case.

There are 4 different cases in German. You don't need to memorize this table below, it’s just here to
teach you the basics so you know what to look up later.

Case Name Use in a Sentence English Example Grammar Term

The person (or thing) that is doing the He gave his mom’s
Nominative Subject
action ring to me.

The thing (or person) being directly acted He gave his mom’s
Accusative Direct Object
upon ring to me.

The thing (or person) to whom the direct He gave his mom’s ring
Dative Indirect Object
object is going to me.

Showing when something belongs to He gave his mom’s

Genitive Possessive
someone ring to me.

German Grammar Primer 3

 Case Marker Craziness
What makes German challenging is that the ending we use to “mark the case” is not consistent. It
changes based on the gender, quantity, and several other factors that we’re not going to go into.

If we look at more examples, it can get crazy!

The last four sentences don’t actually mean “at the”, but English has no other way to break
‼
the word order rules to show who’s doing what.

This is why speaking and writing German is so hard, because you need to know the gender, quantity,
case, and more when choosing the right ending for each word. It’s too much stuff to keep in your
head.

German Grammar Primer 4

 Which is why we focus on understanding first. It’s much easier to understand case markers than to
use them. After hundreds of hours of immersion, you’ll gain an instinct for which marker is right in
which situations. You won’t have to think about it. It will just sound right.

Plurals
Unlike in English where plurals (more than one of something) are almost the same, some words in
German can change a lot between their singular and plural forms.

German English

der Fuß the foot

die Füße the feet

der Hund the dog

die Hunde the dogs

der Mann the man

die Männer the men

die Blume the flower

die Blumen the flowers

As you can see, it's not always the end of the word that changes, sometimes the middle. Every
dictionary has these different forms, so if you come across one you're unsure of, you can simply look
it up to verify.

Pronouns
In language, we use smaller words to refer to "things" that have already been mentioned. Such as
words like "he", "they" or "her". These are called "pronouns" and take the place of another thing (or
person) that is being talked about.
Mein Auto ist kaputt. Ich muss es reparieren.
My car is broken. I must (have to) repair it.
Here, it (es) is taking the place of mein Auto instead of saying it again.
You only need to know two things about pronouns:

1. There are different versions of each of them. They change, as we saw in the part on cases.

2. Things that aren’t alive use the pronouns "he" and "she" (er and sie).

German Grammar Primer 5

 To clarify, the ball is masculine (der Ball) and if someone's looking for it, they might say:

While the word er translates directly to he, it means it, as in, the ball.

Pronouns are actually quite easy to understand as you're getting familiar with the language. Just to
make sure you've seen them before you start, here is a quick "cheat sheet" for the pronouns of
German.

German Pronouns Cheat Sheet

English 💡Hints:
I, me ich mich mir mein Starts with 'M'

You du dich dir dein Starts with 'D'

You (formal) Sie Sie Ihnen Ihr Capitalized

Changes the
He, him er ihn ihm sein
most
Almost like
She, her sie sie ihr ihr
English
You get used to
It es es ihm sein
this one
Almost like
We, us wir uns uns unser
English
"Oi! You lot!"
You all ihr euch euch euer (dumb
mnemonic)
Same as other
You all (formal) Sie Sie Ihnen Ihr
formal*
They, them sie sie ihnen ihr

*The capitalized ones sound the same as the non-capitalized in speech

German Grammar Primer 6

 Compound Nouns
In German, words can get mushed together to make bigger, more expressive words! However, since
they have no spaces in them, they can be hard to lookup.
As a learner, you just need to be able to recognize the borders of these “words within words”. Here
are some examples:

Hundefutter
Dogfood
Dog food
Hundefuttermarke
Dogfoodbrand
Dog food brand
Trockenfutter
Dryfood
Dry food (for animals)

So whenever you come across a word that feels “too large”, get out your magnifying glass and break
it apart!

Ending modifiers
Some “partial words” can be added to the ends of things to change their meanings. Think about “-let”
or “-er” in English.
Pig
Piglet

Eat
Eater
While this isn’t super common in English, it often happens in German! You can add -chen or -lein to
the end of almost any noun to make it small! If a dictionary isn’t finding a word you’re trying to look up,
make sure it doesn’t have an ending modifier. There are several endings you might encounter, but
they’re often similar to English, so you won’t need to study them super hard.

German English Suffix Meaning

der Hund the dog

das Hündchen the little dog (puppy) -chen a small version

der Freund the friend

die Freundschaft the friendship -schaft -ship or a community of something

gesund healthy

die Gesundheit the state of being healthy -heit the state of being something

German Grammar Primer 7

 Verbs
Verbs might look like they change a lot in German, but that makes them easier to understand. Verbs
show "who is doing the something".

English German English German

I speak Ich spreche We speak Wir sprechen

You speak Du sprichst Y'all speak Ihr sprecht

She speaks Sie spricht They speak Sie sprechen

Most verbs are consistent and follow this pattern. There are exceptions with irregular verbs, but you’ll
learn those as you encounter them in your immersion.

Verb Kicking
One of the weird quirks of German is that there’s only enough “space” for one verb toward the
beginning of a sentence or phrase. So all the other verbs have to go to the end. You can think of this
as the “helper verb” actually kicking the important one to the end.

It doesn’t matter how many words go between the verbs, it goes all the way to the end.

Here are some other common “kicker verbs”:

Example German English Translation

Ich werde meiner Mutter helfen werden will I will help my mother

Kannst du mir mit meinem Auto helfen? können to be able to Can you help me with my car?

Möchtest du eine Pizza essen? möchten would like to Would you like to eat a pizza?

Ich will dir helfen wollen to want to I want to help you

Ich soll meiner Mutter helfen sollen should I should help my mother

Würdest du mir helfen, wenn ich… würden would Would you help me if I…

German Grammar Primer 8

 The Past
Something you might notice is that using "have" for the past tense is the default in German.

The past tense “to have” (haben) kicks the verb to the end, just like we learned in the “Verb Kicking”
section. This can take some getting used to since it feels like you’re missing key information.
Almost all the verbs in the past will have ge in them. It's like the German version of "-ed".

Separable Verbs
Many verbs in German are actually two pieces that like to “drift apart”. In English, a verb like “let out”
is already in two pieces and you can add words in between.
Can you let the dog out, please?

The same thing happens with a verb like “aufgeben”

The strange part is that verbs might look like they’re one single word, even though you’ll need to look
in two different places. The nice thing is that the “first part” (auf in this case) is always at the end of
the phrase.
You can recognize these verbs because they usually start with a preposition: an, auf, zu, aus (and
many more). But not all of them are separable, so watch out in your immersion if they can “come
apart”!

German Grammar Primer 9

 Reflexive Verbs
Some verbs you "do to yourself" in German. These verbs often change the meaning of the words
subtly or completely.

On its own “anziehen” can mean “to attract” or “to pull”, but with “sich”, it means “to get dressed”

This is very similar to how "What do you see" and "How do you see yourself" are very different
meanings of "see".
Be on the lookout for words like "sich anziehen":

Backwards Verbs
Some verbs feel backwards to English speakers. These are only a few words like this in German. But
we mention it because one of the most common verbs does this:

In German, something pleases you instead of you liking something.

And the same goes for the simple phrase, “what’s up?”

German Grammar Primer 10

 Final German Notes
Man
You'll come across the word "man" (not to be confused with der Mann). This is equivalent to the
English "one" or the "collective you".

Gern
Just think of this as "gladly"! It's super commonly used to express when someone's happy to do
something.

German Grammar Primer 11