Master German Grammar with Babbel

German grammar is a bit notorious for being complex, particularly for English speakers. Maybe you’re worried, for example, about learning the German case marking system that shows up on German articles, pronouns and adjectives — the nominative case, the accusative case, the dative case and the genitive case — or perhaps you’re downright terrified of verb tenses and conjugations.

It’s okay to feel a little wary of starting out practicing German grammar. But the important thing is that you find a way to make learning German grammar easier for you. German grammar exercises can help you take your skills to the next level by helping you lock in the information you need to know with repeated drills. Try getting a handle on German grammar with a free Babbel German lesson, or read on for a quick guide to the basics.

Breaking German into simple grammar exercises

It will take more than a single article to learn everything about German grammar, but here’s a good place to get started.

German nouns and German gender

Just like in English or any other language, one of the key elements of German grammar is the German noun, which describes a thing, person, place, idea, quality or action. The first challenge with German nouns is building your vocab, but then you have to put these words into practice.

When it comes to German grammar, though, there is something else you’ll need to pay attention to: all German nouns have a number (singular or plural) and a gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter).

The concept of grammatical gender doesn’t exist in the same way in English, so it can be tricky to grasp at first. Every noun belongs to one of three categories, and the adjectives and articles — that is, the words “the,” “a” and “an” — that accompany these nouns must reflect the gender, too. For example, the gender of the word Buch (“book”) is neuter, so it takes the article das to become das Buch (“the book”). Sometimes the ending of a noun can clue you into which gender it might have, but so many words are irregular that you’ve got to learn and practice to master them.

German verbs

Now that you know how to talk about a person, place or thing, it’s time to get into action German verbs — and that means knowing how to deal with German verb conjugations. While verb conjugations technically exist in English as well, there aren’t nearly as many, so learning them (and how and when to use them) takes time in German. Let’s start with a few important concepts.

• German infinitives — German verbs exist initially in what’s known as the infinitive form, what English speakers would think of as a verb in the “to (verb)” form, like “to do” or “to sleep,” for example. With a few exceptions, German verbs in the infinitive form end in -en, making them fairly easy to recognize.

• Simple conjugations — when you’re using the simple present tense, things aren’t too different from English. For example, if we take a verb like kaufen, “to buy,” we need to change the verb ending depending on the subject of the verb, or who’s doing the action of buying. To say “I buy” (in the present tense), we would say Ich kaufe, but to say “You buy,” we’d have to say Du kaufst. “He buys” is Er kauft, but “We buy” is Wir kaufen.

• Modal verbs — for some verb tenses, you also must change the form of the main verb itself and add in an auxiliary verb. To form the past tense, we in many cases use a conjugated form of the verb haben (“to have”) plus a past participle form of the main verb. So, for the verb kaufen, to say “I bought,” you’d say Ich habe gekauft, where habe is conjugated to match the subject ich and gekauft is the past participle form of kaufen. “You bought” would be Du hast gekauft, and “He bought” would be Er hat gekauft (note that gekauft stays the same while the forms of haben change).

• Irregular verbs — another thing likely to trip you up is that there are many irregular verbs to memorize. The verb sein, meaning “to be,” for example is irregular, so in the first-person present it would be bin, while in the third-person singular it’s ist. 

German articles and pronouns

As you can see, the gender of a German noun is reflected in the definite articles (the English equivalent of “the”) and the indefinite articles (the English “a” or “an”) that come before a German noun.

But that’s not the only grammatical element that shows itself in German articles; you’ve also got to understand how to use the German case system. German case markings, or declensions, help speakers indicate and understand what role a certain noun is playing in the sentence — whether it’s the agent of an action, the direct recipient of that action or some other role.

Remnants of the case marking exist in English in pronouns (words like “you,” “they,” “him” and “us,” for example). To get an idea of how this works in English, think about how you’d say something like “We like him,” but not “Us like he.” It all depends on whether these pronouns are serving as the subject of the sentence or in this case, the object of the main verb (here, the verb “like”). If the man is the subject of the verb, the sentence becomes “He likes us,” not “Him likes us.”

But the German case system is much more complex than the one in English and affects all nouns, not just pronouns. There are four cases in German — the nominative case, the accusative case, the dative case and the genitive case. What does that mean, and what does it look like on German nouns?

• Nominative — this is the noun performing the action of the sentence, also called the subject. In the sentence Der Löwe isst den Mann (“The lion eats the man”), Der Löwe is in the nominative case.

• Accusative — also called the “direct object,” this is what an action is being performed on, so in the previous sentence it would be den Mann. You can tell it’s in the accusative not only because of its location in the sentence, but also because it’s den Mann instead of der Mann.

• Dative  — the “indirect object,” this is another noun affected by the verb of the sentence, but it is not the direct object. In Der Mann gibt seiner Mutter das Geschenk. (“The man gives the gift to his mother.”) the indirect object is seiner Mutter, because he is not giving his mother, he is giving the gift to his mother.

• Genitive — last but not least, the genitive case is for nouns that possess other nouns. In the sentence Das Kleid der Frau ist wunderschön. (“The woman’s dress is beautiful”), der Frau is in the genitive case because she possesses the dress.

Depending on which case the noun is in, the article that comes before it will appear differently, so it may be ein Mann in the nominative but eines Mannes in the genitive, einen Mann in the accusative, and einem Mann in the dative. If the noun is also connected to an adjective, that adjective will also change. This is one of the hardest parts of learning German, but with practice you’ll get it down.

The basics of German sentence structure

Now that we’ve got the pieces, let’s put them all together to make some German sentences.

In simple sentences with a subject, verb and direct object, like “He reads the book,” German word order looks a lot like the subject-verb-object word order of English — Er liest das Buch. For the most part, in sentences like these, the conjugated German verb goes in the second position. And if the sentence is a question rather than a statement, the verb usually comes first: Liest er das Buch?

But when you introduce more complex syntax, such as when you include so-called modal verbs like “can,” “will,” “must” and “should,” German sentence structure follows a slightly different set of rules. Here, the main verb in German moves to the very end of the sentence, like in the example Er muss das Buch lesen, or “He must read the book.” While there are lots of nuances, a simple rule of thumb is that in a statement, the first verb should be in the second position in the clause, while the rest appear at the end.

This may sound like so much to memorize, but keep in mind that no one learns a language overnight. Using Babbel will give you lots of opportunities to practice German in various exercises, and you’ll start building your muscle memory for the language. What are you waiting for?