When you have finished this lesson you can:

• Talk about your German skills

• Talk about your nationality

• Talk about occupations

• Explain why you are in Austria

In German, the syntax - the order of the words - is very flexible. Nevertheless, there is one important rule: The conjugated verb must be at the second position.

You can put almost everything at the first position in the sentence - mostly you begin with the most important information at the first position to emphasize the relevance.

(In the following examples the subject is blue.)

An exception of this rule are yes/no-questions where the first position is empty and the sentence begins with the verb.

Remember: In German, you have to decide whether you talk informal with another person ("du") or formal with the courtesy form ("Sie").

To know if a person speaks a particular language ask:

In German, you often answer with a shortened sentence to yes/no-questions.

There is no realy difference in the meanings of "ein wenig" and "ein bisschen" but "ein bisschen" is more common in spoken language.

Remember: In German, you can answer with a shortened sentence to yes/no-questions.

Instead of only "nein", you can add “leider” to express your regret about this.

⇒ In the following, only the conjugation of irregular verbs and deviations in regular verbs will be explained separately.

Like in English, you can say with two verbs where you are from: with "kommen" (come) and with "sein" (be)

• Adjectives from languages also end in -isch: "ein amerikanischer Mann" (an american man)
  Exception: deutsch
  
  

• Names of languages are the same words like the adjectives, but the languages are capitalized: Deutsch, Englisch etc.
  
  

• Notice that there are different words for men and women of a nationality.

Remember: The word for the nationality depends on the gender of a person.

To answer the question “Bist du Österreicher?” you can also use the short form:

Say you are English.

Note that German does not have an article in front of the word of the profession.

As a foreigner you will often be asked why you are in Austria or Germany:

Here are some typical reasons:

If Germans say “mein Mann” (Lit: my man) oder “meine Frau” (Lit. my woman) they always mean their husband or their wife. The formal terms are “Ehemann” or “Ehefrau” but the possessive pronoun “mein” (my) shows the relation between these persons.

Maybe you've already noticed that only some words are written with capital letters.

The rule is very simple:

In German, nouns and names are written with capital letters.

Sometimes the article (here: “das”) stands instead of the pronoun (here: “es” [it]) - that’s more definite:
you are referring to something specific.

If you want to know where somebody lives, ask:

Regular verbs are conjugated with the following endings:

⇒ In the following, only the conjugation of irregular verbs and deviations in regular verbs will be explained separately.

When you need to tell where you live you say:

If someone knows the city, you can be more precise:

If you have to ask a stranger about something, it's courteous to say “Entschuldigung”.

In German, there is a possessive pronoun for each personal pronoun. The endings of the possessive pronoun depends on gender, number and cause of the following noun.

Here we only learn the possessive pronouns for "ich" (I), "du" (you) and the courtesy form "Sie", all in nominative.

! Note: Composite nouns are written in one word.

The new noun gets the gender of the last word.   

                das Telefon (n) + die Nummer (f) = die Telefonnummer (f)

                das Handy (n)    + die Nummer (f) = die Handynummer (f)