Specials

Why do “The Versions” exist (raus, heraus, hinaus)

In a sample chapter of my book, I explore WHY German has these verb versions with r-, her- and hin- and how they related to English.

My Coming Book – Sample Chapter 2

I'll show you another sample chapter of my upcoming book. This time, we'll learn the one concept that is key to understanding German sentence structure.

My Coming Book – Sample Chapter

I show you a sample chapter of my book,that is finally making serious progress.

Your mindset when studying

I'm sharing some thoughts about what makes good learning material, how much is too much and about the mindset a learner should have when engaging with material.

German Adjective Endings – A New Type of Chart

Hello everyone, And welcome to our Word of the Week. And this time, it’s actually a chart of the week. A chart for German Adjective Endings Now you might be like “Boring! I have seen enough of these tables.” And maybe you have. But this one is NOT a table. In fact, I’m pretty sure you have never seen this type of a chart for adjective endings before. I mean, unless you’re a long time reader here. Then you might remember my epic German Case Triangle. Basically, what this is is a new way to visualize and depict German case and gender endings. I do not like tables and they do not work for me as a way to learn stuff like this. And I was thinking that there must be different ways to represent the same information. So I played around and came up with the German Case Triangle. Or we could say German Declension Triangle because it covers gender and case. A while back, I showed it for the definite articles (I’ll leave a link below this article). And I wanted to do more, but then I kind of forgot about it. But it works just as well … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/prepositional-phrases-german-exercise/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

German Election Results (and Wahl-O-Mat III)

I'll give you my breakdown of the German election results along with a little insight into the parties and what to expect now. And we'll complete the Wahl-O-Mat :)

Coming German Elections – Part 2

Hello everyone, And welcome back to election weeks. It’s super intense at the moment in Germany, and I have honestly never seen even remotely the amount of talk-shows that are happening currently. Pretty much every single day, the front runners are on TV, often in town-hall type formats and I actually really enjoy it. It’s engaging and feels much more democratic than, say, 10 years ago when they just did the boring TV duels. Anyways, today, we’ll do part two of the: Wahl-O-Mat – German Election Topics Reviewed In part one, we went over the first 12 questions, so now, we’ll do the second 12 questions (of 38 in total). And today is particularly interesting, because among other things, we’ll talk about: German health insurance system (No matter how complex you think it is… it’s more complex than that) education policy (surprisingly chaotic) the national debt (Germany is quite unique in that regard) and the state of Germany manufacturing And I think I have a few bits of info for you that you absolutely did not know and that most Germans aren’t aware of either. #FOMO Like last time, I’ll largely keep this objective, but I will share my very … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/prepositional-phrases-german-exercise/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

Vocab: Spitzensteuersatz, Schuldenbremse, privatversichert, gesetzliche Versicherung,  Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz, Grundgesetz, BAföG

Germany Explained – The Election System

In this article, we'll look at the German election system, find out why everyone has two votes and explore the wonderfully German way they're translated to seats.

Vocab: Bundestag, Wahlkreis, Erststimme, Zweitstimme, Direktkandidat, Direktmandat, Überhangmandat, Ausgleichsmandat

The Coming German Elections

We'll check out the Wahl-O-Mat for the upcoming German elections and go through some of the questions together to get an idea of policy and language.

Vocab: Bürgergeld, erneuerbare Energie, Beitragsjahr, Wahl-O-Mat, Fachkraft, Kernenergie

German Verbs and Prepositions – Quiz 1

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of PYG. That’s the latest acronym I came up with and it stands for : Practice Your German. I feel like many of you really enjoyed Practice-January and it also felt fresh for me, so I have decided that I’ll just mix in more exercises in the regular postings and slowly build a nice stash of quizzes for various topics. Today we’ll deal once again with prepositions, but this time, it’s not about prepositions and location. Today, we’ll do an exercise about: Verbs and their Prepositions Here’s a quick primer of what I mean by that.

Locations and Prepositions in German – The Quiz

Hello everyone, And welcome back to “Practicanuary”. The whole of January (and maybe also a little of February), we’ll do a series of quizzes for various topics. The very first one was about how to use the word lieber to express preference (find it here). Then we had a fun one about some nice German expressions (you can find it here). And today, things are getting real, because today, we’ll take a first jab at a topic that has low key frustrated every German learner at some point. Locations and their prepositions in German  Talking about location is one of those topics that I have yet to cover, and I actually hope to get to it this year. But today, we’ll start with a nice juicy quiz about it. And not just a quiz. It’s a quiz with benefits.

German Cases – A Slightly Different Chart

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of… uh… the German Show! Hooray. Now, we’re in the middle of Summer, Sun, Vocab Fun Season, but today, I actually want to mix in something different and take a look with you at a case chart. A case chart that I have come up with that is … well… it’s quite crazy. Actually, it’s been already a few years that I first had the idea, and I did talk about it on the site back then. Some of you might remember it – the “German Case Fidget Spinner”, as I used to call it. But I didn’t really introduce it properly back then and didn’t explain what’s what, which made it kind of confusing. And then I kind of forgot about it myself until recently, and I was like “Hmmm… I still really like this concept” So I decided to talk about it again, but this time with a proper explanation. And also much better graphics :) So, today I will introduce to you my absolutely incredible, mind blowing German Case Triangle

German Past Tense – Speaking Practice

What’s up everyone, how are you all doing? Are you feeling fit and awake? Kinda sorta? Well, that’ll have today, because today it’s time for a nice proper exercise about German Past Tense There are a few exercises about this on the site already, but this one is next level, because this one involves … speaking. By YOU :). Those of you who were following me through the summer might remember that the company EF -Languages offered me to use their AI speech recognition system and I actually put my hacker-hat on and integrated it into my site and the quiz system I’m using. We already did a test of that in summer, and I’ve worked out a few kinks since then. I’m still working on it and adding features but I think it’s definitely ready for use. So… in today’s exercise we’ll practice the German spoken past tense and you will HAVE to actually say the answer to pass.

German Irregular Verbs – Statistics and Trends

We'll use some serious excel skills to analyze which patterns there are for German irregular verbs and how common they are.

German Noun Gender – With Data Analysis

Hello everyone, And welcome to a a very special episode, because today, I actually have a guest. A while back someone sent me a really interesting email. His day name is Emmanuel Haton, but I’ll refer to him with his secret identity…. Excel-Man. He had done some serious number crunching on German noun gender and I found his work so interesting that I absolutely had to share that with you.   Using a giant database of German nouns and their usage frequency, Excel-Man used his superpower to check for trends between endings and gender and calculated how accurate this rule of thumb is if you just follow it blindly. And he didn’t stop there. Then, he collected the most common exceptions to the particular rule of thumb and then calculated the accuracy again. And it’s all weighted by frequency, mind you. So if 99 of 100 words follow a certain pattern but that one exception is super common, it’ll increase the accuracy quite a bit. And to top it all off, it even accounts for compounds. So if die Sicht was an exception for instance, its frequency would also include words like Einsicht and Aussicht and so on. He used the … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/prepositional-phrases-german-exercise/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

German Noun Gender – A learner’s story

Hello everony, and welcome to your favorite German learning site ever. And no, everony is not a mistake. It’s Italian based slang term meaning friends or guys. And it’s also a type of pasta. Everoni with butter and parmeson… soooo tasty. Yeah, I bet you can tell I am in nonsense mode today. But no reason to worry that the article is rife with nonsense. Because it’s actually not mine :). A few years ago, back before the Corona stuff and all, we had a guest here. Slavica, an actual studied linguist told us a bit about collocations in German. You everony (guys) seemed to have enjoyed it, and so we decided to do it again. Today, she will talk a bit about the elephant in the room of this blog… German gender. I barely ever talk about it. But it’s there, and it’s important. She’ll share a bit about what it is, a few rules,  and a couple of her learning tricks that she used when learning German. So without any further ago… have fun :) *** Thinking about German Gender (by Slavica) Once upon a time, there was the mighty Mr. Sun who lived up in the sky … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/prepositional-phrases-german-exercise/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

German Collocations – And How to Learn Them

Hello everyone, this week I’m having a guest on here :). Her name is Slavica, and a while back, she reached out to me about something relating to her final paper in linguistics. She has since graduated, but she obviously didn’t stop studying and being fascinated by languages. And not so long ago she reached out again and asked if I was interested in a guest post. Usually, when people ask if one is interested in guest posts it’s because they want to place text links to their own websites in there. And the posts are usually super generic and boring, because the author doesn’t really care about the material. That’s why I don’t usually take guest posts. But with Slavica it’s different. She REALLY loves languages and she just wanted to share her passion with you, not a link. That’s why I have decided to give it a try. Also… I have done quite a bit of work behind the scenes these past weeks. Specifically, I am giving old articles a much needed do over… I just got done editing the one about “sondern” and I have to say… that was a mess. Like… what was I even thinking … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/prepositional-phrases-german-exercise/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

A new kind of case chart

Hello everyone, and welcome to, well, I don’t actually really know how to call it. A special. I’ll have the German Case Special and a pint of PBR. But seriously… I was working on the article on relative pronouns that I wanted to post this week, when I suddenly ran into a problem. I could tell you the problem now, but hey, see for yourself…

How to Learn Vocabulary Fast

Rote learning vocabulary works! If you do it the right way. No counting, no pressure and instead quantity, chaos and trust in your brain.