e’ll take a look at what cases are, why they exist, how they are in other languages and what cases and prepositions have in common (except that they suck).
Time to clear up cases. And we’ll start with the bland nominative and the shunned Genitive and we’ll find out if they’re really that boring.
And now for the two cases that people actually care about.
Mich, mir… Accusative, Dative… let’s find out what they mean once and for all.
One of the biggest problems with practicing cases is that the right answer also depends on the gender. So even if you get a case right, your answer might still be wrong because you had the wrong gender in mind.
In this exercise, we take gender out of the equation and focus on one at a time, so you can actually build up an intuition for the various endings.
This one is focused on masculine nouns. And optionally, you can make it a translation exercise, if you want to.
The second part of this epic exercise is all about feminine nouns. Again, we’ll mix articles and pronouns, but you never have to worry about the gender. That way, you can build an intuition for the various feminine case forms.
And if you want to, you can again make this into a translation practice.
In the third part of this epic practice series, it’s time to deal with … neuter nouns.
As in the other two, we’ll wildly mix articles and pronouns, but as scary as that may sound, it’s actually pretty helpful because you can build a feel for how a “thing” transitions through a sentence.
And as in the other two, you can either focus just on cases, or make it a translation practice (English to German). Enjoy :)
Adjective endings – nobody likes them but everyone has to learn them at some point, if only for a test. But getting them right is actually easier than you might think – once you completely forget about all the tables and the textbook approach. In part 1 we’ll learn a simple way to get about 40% correct … WITHOUT even having to bother about gender or case.
The second step to mastery of the German adjective declension will get you another 40% of the way. And with not so much of an effort. Still 100% table free :)
This part now will fix the few uncertainties that are still there… in theory. Because this is a bit nerdy. If you’re a beginner, maybe you should just go with the 80% we have an come back later.
But if you don’t shy away from somewhat more complicated stuff, then this is an interesting read.
