German All-in-One For Dummies, with CD

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Learning a few words of a language in any country you visit for business can carry a very significant professional value, and German is by no means an exception. Whether you’re giving a presentation to coworkers in an international office or selling your product in European markets, you’ll find there are plenty of great opportunities to apply business German to accelerate your career. This part gets you acclimated by providing you with some German basics: how to pronounce words, how to form sentences, and so on. You find a wealth of basic survival-type expressions such as greetings and numbers. We even challenge you to boost your confidence by activating some German words that you probably already know. Finally, we outline the basics of German grammar that you may need to know when you work through later chapters in the book. Part II: German in Action All of the above options have one thing in common: they cost money. For those learners who want to be more conscious of their budgets or are okay to spend more time finding and working with more cost-effective content, there are still plenty of options! Learning German With Tandem Partners But in spoken German,Germans sometimes use the dative case with these genitive prepositions. Overview Of The German Cases

Whether it helps you master other languages faster and more easily or it gives you a new understanding of the English you already speak, there’s no doubt that if you learn German, you’ll have a learning advantage right from the start! How To Speak German Fluently If any or all of these statements apply to you, you’ve found the right book! How This Book Is Organized The same is true for the indefinite articles. Just as English has two indefinite articles — a and an — that you use with singular nouns, German also has two indefinite articles (in the nominative case): ein for masculine- and neuter-gender words and eine for feminine-gender words.The dative case is slightly more complicated than the accusative. Take a look at the dative article forms to see if you can spot the differences: But you might have a lot of questions about how to learn German or what it takes to get started — or why it’s even worthwhile at all. The good news is you can rest assured that learning the German language is an effort worth undertaking. With the right technology to guide you in your journey, you’ll see your efforts pay off in so many ways.

The first thing to know about German nouns is that they have genders. For native English speakers, this is an entirely new concept. erty of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor The following words are spelled the same way and have the same meaning in German and in English. The only differences are the pronunciation, as shown in parentheses, as well as the fact that in German, nouns are always capitalized. In addition, German nouns have one of three genders, as seen on this list by the words der (masculine), die (feminine), and das (neuter) in front of each noun. See Chapter 2 for details on what gender is all about and go to Chapter 3 for information on the pronunciation key for each word presented in this book. In a few instances, the German and English pronunciation for the word is the same, so you’ll see the English word in the pronunciation (followed by the notation as in English.) One of the hardest parts of learning German grammar for English speakers is the case system. There are four cases in German — the nominative case, the accusative case, the dative case and the genitive case — and these, like gender marking, show up on the articles before nouns as well and in pronouns (words like “you,” “they,” “him” and “us,” for example). Which case you use depends on where the noun falls in the sentence or the role that it plays; for example, nouns and pronouns in the subject position (you can think of it as the noun that’s doing the action) take the nominative case, as in Der Mann isst, or “The man eats,” from the verb essen (“to eat”). But when der Mann is the object of the action isst (so, the thing that gets eaten), it appears in the accusative case and becomes den Mann, as in Der Löwe isst den Mann, or “The lion eats the man.”In both German and English, the nominative case describes the subject of a sentence. Masculine, feminine, and neuter articles appear as follows:

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. In these cases and in others, 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.” Understanding the rules that govern German sentence structure is an important part of learning German. Basics Of German Grammar Rules One place you might be surprised to find German is in Africa — in Namibia, where Germans had a brief imperial legacy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there are a few more than 10,000 German speakers. You can even find speakers in South Africa, too! How Long Does Learning German Take?The following table shows you the definite articles and the corresponding indefinite articles (nominative case): Gender/Number To write this book, we made some assumptions about who you are and what you hope to gain from this book: