Intro

Before you think I am nuts for trying to learn this famously difficult language out of the blue, just know that I do it for a good reason. I learned from my-to-be father-in-law that the secret to a happy life for a man is to follow one simple rule: “happy wife, happy life”. I got engaged last year to a smart, gorgeous, good-hearted, charismatic, crazy amazing German woman. And learning her language is my attempt at starting married life following that simple principle. Now you know my motivation, let’s get to it.

The rant

The first day of class, after the introduction of the teacher to their students, the first thing that is stated is something that we all have been hearing about the German language forever: mastering the articles is the complicated part of the language. Once that is done, everything else is standard.

The problem is, there is no way the teacher could exaggerate that enough for you to take it seriously, at least in my case, my first thought was “so you have three genders instead of two, what is the problem?“.

Der, Die, Das

After the introductory class and some basics, such as how to say I, You, He/She/It (Ich, Du, Er/Sie/Es), we jumped into some basic vocabulary. The first thing you notice, is that all the words in the vocabulary sections of the course book (Kursbuch), are accompanied by their corresponding article e.g. In English textbooks you might have Beer, and a drawing of it on the side, in our textbook it reads Das Bier to indicate that Beer has no gender.

For English speakers, this might sound odd, having things have a gender, but my native language is Spanish, and all things have an arbitrary gender assigned to them; for instance, Beer (La Cerveza) is a feminine word. At first, I thought that there must be a good reason why Germans have three articles, maybe all living things have a gender and all non-living things are neutral, but then, why have neutral? Can’t you just not have none? If you are talking about a living thing, the gender is implicit; if you are talking about a thing, it should have no gender, so it would be very inefficient to have one more gender just because.

But it does not take long before you realise that the gender attribution in German is arbitrary; the example of the beer was a lie to give you hope. And in Spanish, even if we assign the gender somewhat randomly, there is a clear rule: If a word ends in ‘-a’ it is feminine; otherwise it is usually masculine. There are exceptions, but for the most part, you won’t go wrong following that rule. In German, on the other hand, besides a couple of heuristics that will help you like in 30% of the cases, the rest is just random, and if you want to learn a word, you will have to learn its arbitrarily assigned gender.

My best guess of why they do this is that Germans love rules so much that this gives them an extra degree of freedom to make up exponentially more rules as to how their language is learned. At the same time, it works as a great torture mechanism.

Our first sentences in German

For an A1 level course, we start with the most basic and build up. The first sentence we formed is “I am {name}” (Ich bin {name}). And to be fair, the grammatical structure is fairly standard:

[Subject][Verb][Direct/Indirect complements]

And there is a simple rule to follow for the order of the compliments (mnemonics in Spanish):

1. Temporal
2. Causal
3. Modal (Mode)
4. Lugar (Place)

If you take the Acronym in Spanish it gets you TQML -> Te Quiero Mucho Linda, which means, I love you a lot, Linda. I do ;).

At least for A1 level If, you follow the TQML rule and always place the verb in the second position of the sentence, you will be grammatically correct.

W-Question Words”

For questioning in German (A1 level), all you need to know is the basic grammatical structure above, plus the W pronouns:

• Wann: When (Wann ist der Supermarkt geöffnet?)
• Wo: Where (Wo ist der Supermarkt?)
• Woher: From where (Woher kommst du?)
• Wie: How (Wie heißt du?)
• Welche: Which (Welche Sprache sprichst du?)
• Wie viel: How much (Wie viel kostet das Bier?)
• Wie viele: How many (Wie viele Euro kostet das Bier?)

Notice that you need to know the article of the thing you are inquiring about. That annoying part of the language permeates the entire language (we will see more of this later).

Negating

Negotiations are very straightforward in German. You can negate a thing, or you can negate an action (verb).

Negating a thing

To negate a thing, you just put kein (Masculine or Neutral) or Keine (Feminine or Plural) in front of the thing:

• Ich habe keine kinder (I have no children).

Notice that you cannot negate a thing correctly if you don’t know the gender :D

Negating a verb or action

Here, you just put nicht after the verb:

• Ich esse nicht gern Salat
  • Translation: I don’t like Salad
  • Literal Translation ~ I eat salad not happily (more or less)

Talking about the past in the Perfect Tense

The perfect tense in German is very similar to English, with a catch. The sentences are generally formed in the same way:

• English: I have slept
• German: Ich habe geschlafen (verb schlafen)

In the same way as in English, the auxiliary verb is the one that gets conjugated, and the main verb is presented in its participle form. Which is formed by adding ge- before the infinitive form of the verb when the verb is irregular. And ge + stem of the verb + t if the verb is irregular, e.g. gemacht (verb: machen, which means, to do).

The catch is that, depending on the main verb, the auxiliary verb changes from to have to to be. But unlike the articles, here, there is a somewhat clear criterion. If the verb entails moving from one place to another, we use to be as the auxiliary, otherwise, we use to have.

e.g:

• Ich bin zum Museum gefahren (I have driven to the museum).

You might have noticed that there is no article in the example above, but there is; this is my next point of contention with the German language. If one thing should be clear by now is that articles come back to bite you at any turn in your journey to learn the language.

Nominative, Akkusative, Dative

What on earth is that?

Do you remember the three articles from above (Der for masculine, Die for feminine, and Das for neutral)? The ones I said are just a torture mechanism? So this section is when the torturer achieves its climax.

Seriously, what are they?

They are essentially the way you use nouns and pronouns depending on whether these are the subject, the direct object or the indirect object of the sentence:

• Nominative: when the noun is the subject.
• Akkusative: when the noun is the direct object.
• Dative: when the noun is the indirect object of the sentence.

What is so terrible about them?

So, you have three articles, right? Der, Die and Das + Prural (which in general is the same as the feminine for some reason). So, one Thursday evening, the rulers of the different kingdoms of Germany got together and decided that 4 was not enough articles; they wanted more (why? to use them as currency? I don’t know). And decided that the articles should change depending on how the noun was being used.

Here is the result of that meeting

Case	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter	Plural
Nominativ	der	die	das	die
Akkusativ	den	die	das	die
Dativ	dem	der	dem	den (+ -n on noun)

If you pay attention, multiplying the number of articles by 3 was not enough; they wanted more. Look at the masculine article for the nominative case der, now look at the feminine article for the dative case der. Why? The only right answer is torture. And you would think - that is certainly enough torture - but in that same meeting, there was Steve Jobs, and by the end of it, he went: One More Thing!

• Do you remember the example from above? (Ich bin zum Museum gefahren)

Well, Museum is a neutral word, and in this case, it is an indirect complement. Following the table, the corresponding article would be dem, but why not combine zu (to) and dem (the) and create zum? If the article were feminine, it would be zur, and so on. And zu is not the only preposition that gets combined with the article, why would it be? Here are the ones I know so far:

Preposition + Article	Contraction	Meaning
an + dem	am	at the / on the
an + das	ans	onto the / to the
zu + dem	zum	to the (masc./neut.)
zu + der	zur	to the (feminine)
in + dem	im	in the
in + das	ins	into the

And at this point, you go: Sure, why not?

Utils

The above rant can serve as a review of the basic German grammar done during the entry-level A1 course. Most of the rest is vocabulary, listening and speaking practice and some basic utils to be able to maintain a short conversation about the weather, order something in restaurant or ask for the hour, some of which I will try to summarise in this section.

Telling the hour

This is annoying to get used to in any language. The following 4 examples encapsulate most of the logic.

• 08:00 -> Acht Uhr (Literal: 8 hour)
• 08:30 -> Halb Neun (Literal: Half Nine)
• 08:15 -> Viertel Nach acht (Literal: Quarter after eight)
• 08:45 -> Viertel Vor Neun (Literal: Quarter before nine)

Opening hours

This is also very simple, the following template covers it

Der/Die/Das _{establishment}_ ist von _{hour from}_ bis _{hour to}_ geöffnet

The Weather

For A1, stick to the basics. Here are some translations of the most basic stuff:

• It’s warm/cold -> Es ist warm/kalt
• The sun shines -> Die Sonne scheint
• It’s sunny -> Es ist sonnig
• It’s cloudy - > Es ist bewölkt
• There is wind -> Es ist windig
• It rains -> Es regnet
• It snows -> Es schneit
• It’s 4 degrees -> Es hat vier grad

Compas

• North: der Norden
• East: der Osten
• South: der Süden
• West: der Westen

Things I did not cover in this blog post, but are part of the A1 course

• Counting (Cardinal and Ordinal)
• Dates
• Prepositions of space and time
• List of irregular verbs
• A ton of vocabulary