#German grammar how to#

The third way to make it clear that a friendship is platonic is to name that friend when you’re talking about them, for example, meine Freundin Daniela. If it’s one of your besties, you can also say mein bester Freund (my best friend – male) or meine beste Freundin (my best friend – female). When you want to say “my friend” as in “my buddy”, use the expressions ein Freund von mir (a friend of mine – male) and eine Freundin von mir (a friend of mine – female). So, how do you clear up your relationship status? Here are few tips: If you’re trying to impress a potential date when you drop a cool line about mein Freund (my boyfriend), things may not work out the way you liked. It can mean a friend but often Germans will assume you are talking about a boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s common to use mein/meine (my) with the word Freund/Freundin. But in German, watch out because the words Freund and Freundin can mean either a platonic friendship or a romantic relationship.

In English, you can simply call a friend a friend. So, remember: Half fünf is actually half past four. This is because Germans think of half TO the hour, or the hour being half full. The other way of telling the time involves the words viertel (quarter) and halb (half) just like in English, but beware, when Germans say a time as halb, they actually mean one hour earlier than English speakers. Once you get used to this, it’s a great way to avoid misunderstandings. (The train is leaving at nineteen hundred hours and forty-five). In schedules and formal environments, you will often hear the 24-hour clock times said out loud, as in Der Zug geht um 19 Uhr 45. Germans say the time in two different ways. When you’re talking about how you’re feeling in the moment, simply replace the words ich bin with mir ist: While heiß (hot), warm (warm) and kalt (cold) are the correct words to use for “hot” and “cold”, using them with ich bin will mean you’re telling people that you’re a hot or cold person.

#German grammar how to#

In Germany, the temperatures can get high in the summer and low in the winter, so it’s handy to know how to express your feelings about the temperature. This is just another way to be more efficient with your German language skills.Ĥ.

This is the one time you’re allowed to forget the actual verb at the end! Instead of saying that you can “speak” any language, you can tell a German simply that you ‘can’ language! For example, if you speak German, French, Turkish, Spanish and Italian, this is how you’d tell your German friends: Ich kann Deutsch, Französisch, Türkisch, Spanisch und Italienisch (I can speak German, French, Turkish, Spanish and Italian). You can either use the expression im Jahr (in the year of), or you can say the year, i.e. There are two ways of saying that something happened in a certain year, and neither of them contains the word ‘in’.

Don’t use “in” when saying a date in German They’re pretty independent of gender and will work for any singular word.Ģ. Spare yourself all the stress and sound super German by simply using the two expressions das da and das hier, which means “this thing here” and “that thing over there” respectively. You want to say ‘this is delicious!’, but how the heck do you say “this” again? It is, diese? dieses? dies? or dieser? What is even the gender of a streuselkuchen? Imagine you’re enjoying a wonderful afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) session with your friend and you want to compliment her awesome Streuselkuchen (heavenly crumble cake). German grammar endings can be difficult to use. Here are some tips to prevent making some of the most frequent errors made by beginning learners of German. The second is the near misses: those that you can quickly fix and avoid in the future because what you are saying is so almost correct. Two of the common errors that beginners typically make are: first, those garbled sentences that you can avoid only by learning whole new structures and making sure you remember the right words and grammar. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes – the point is to learn from them when you make them so you can avoid making them again and come yet one step closer to proficiency.