The German Professor

In an earlier post, I outlined how German auxiliaries and the various verb principal parts work together in forming each of the verb tenses. There I listed some representative verbs to show the patterns that exist in the formation of the principal parts. Principal parts are the basic forms of a verb a speaker must [...]

Since long before Mark Twain complained about the German language, students have been grappling with German genders.  The concept of grammatical gender is an especially difficult one for English-speakers to wrap their minds around at first. What is gender? Grammatical gender is a system of noun classification.  Nouns, not objects, have genders.  Germans therefore can [...]

I mentioned in a previous post that the 3 most common verbs in German are the ones also used as auxiliaries: sein, haben and werden. Let’s take a look at how they function in the context of German verb tenses. German has 6 tenses: 2 finite tenses, i.e. tenses that are formed using just the [...]

Today I put up a page on the 100 most commonly used German verbs. We’ll do lots of fun and useful things with this list — and the 500 most common German words list — in the coming days and weeks. Since every sentence has a predicate — i.e., verb parts — and since the predicate [...]