Hello everyone,
at least if you live in the northern hemisphere, you might look out the window into the gray November weather and reminisce about summer. The long days, the balmy warmth, the beers, the flirts and of course the German is Easy Summer Bootcamp and its brain wreckingly hard exercises. Those were the days, right.
Well, I have good news because today, we’ll kind of do a German Summer Camp reunion. Hooray!!
If you were there, you’ll remember that we tried out a new type of exercise for practicing cases. One where we focused on one gender at a time to take that stuff out of the equation.
In summer, we did one for feminine and for masculine. Today, we’ll do an exercise for
Cases for Neuter
Here’s a quick overview of how it works…
The basic idea is that worrying about gender takes away a lot of focus and fun from exercises about cases. So all the nouns and pronouns in question today will be neuter. You don’t have to think about that anymore, and so you can focus on the case words themselves and get a better feel for them.
There are two options for you:
The first one is translation. The sentences are in English and you can just translate them to German. The words that are relevant for this exercise are marked in bold, so those are the ones that are gonna be neuter, but of course, if you translate you’ll deal with other genders, as well. You can type your solution into the textfield if you want to compare it, but it’s not auto checking what you enter.
Keep in mind that just because your translation is different to mine, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. If you’re unsure, just ask in the comments. What should be the focus here is that you get the case words right that are in bold.
Now, translating things is quite hard, actually, and it’s more than just practicing cases. So if you want to focus on that, you can show the German version with gaps by clicking the little “?” sign. Then, you just have to find the right word. Note that sometimes you’ll have to combine a preposition with an article. So “in dem” may become “im“.
Which brings me to an important point. Case exercises often focus on one aspect of the language.. like definite articles, or possessive pronouns or personal pronouns or cases and prepositions.
We will combine all of those, so on paper, you need quite a bit of theory. But I think in practice it’s actually not that bad and it might even be helpful to see an entity “move” through different states in a sentence. The sentences are all pretty common things (the phrasing at least) and I think it’s a good way to build some sprachgefühl.
So yeah… if you want to know what level, I’d say it’s B1, but feel free to try it even as an A2 student.
What else… ah yeah, to see the solutions, just click the little circle and they’ll show up. And you can also listen to it in the audio.
Oh and one last thing… don’t expect yourself to get everything right. I put some tricky ones in there and the idea is that you learn something new also.
Cool, I think you know all you need to know… so… let’s go.
Viel Spaß :)!!
The Exercise
***
“On the contrary, it is a big problem. The beer isn’t for free.”
“Doch, das ist ____ großes Problem. ____ Bier ist nicht umsonst.”
“Doch, das ist ein großes Problem. Das Bier ist nicht umsonst.”
“Don’t ask. That was a disaster.”
“Frag nicht. Das war ____ Desaster.”
“Frag nicht. Das war ein Desaster.”
“Oh, but yes. There’s one behind the tree.”
“Doch, da hinter dem Baum ist ____.”
“Doch, da hinter dem Baum ist eins.”
“Mine is good.”
“____ ist gut.”
“Meins ist gut.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Ich habe ____.”
“Ich habe keins.“
“No, I don’t have one, sorry.”
“Nein, sorry, ich hab’ ____.“
“Nein, sorry, ich hab’ keins.“
“No, the third time.”
“Nein, _____ dritte Mal.”
“Nein, das dritte Mal.”
***
And, how was it? Was it difficult? How many did you get wrong? Was there anything you had trouble with?
Let me know all your feedback and of course also all your questions in the comments below.
I hope you liked this little Summer Camp Reunion, have a great week and bis zum nächsten Mal : )!
wpDiscuz
