The indefinite pronoun man is the 34th most common word in German. Despite appearances, it never means “man”. (That would be der Mann, which is number 131 on the top words list.) As a pronoun, man is a word that can…
The second word in the new Wort der Woche series is: Stunde (noun) hour. The noun Stunde is the 40th most common noun in German and is in the top 300 most commonly used words. Lets’s take a look at its forms and most common usages. Focusing your…
I recently posted about German compound nouns and how they work. German is known for its inordinately long words and I started to wonder: Which words are considered the longest words in German? So I checked the German word bible,…
Today a student asked me “How do you turn a noun into an adjective in German?” He wanted to say “banana bread” and “orange juice”. The answer is that German doesn’t form an adjective at all, but instead forms a…
This is the first in a new series of weekly posts that will closely examine some of the most commonly used words in German. Vocabulary words are chosen from the top 1000 words in German (as determined by Tschirner and…
Top German verbs are from Tschirner & Jones’ Frequency Dictionary of German I posted a list of the top 100 German verbs a while back. It’s time to return to that list and do some more work with German verbs. Every…
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…
If you are a visual learner, or if you’d just like to expand your vocabulary, you will undoubtedly be interested in Pons’ huge online German picture dictionary (http://www.bildwoerterbuch.com). The dictionary contains 6000 words in 17 different categories and with images…
The adverbs hin and her cause much confusion for German learners. There are no direct equivalents of either of these in English and to English speakers they often seem superfluous in a sentence. German in fact signifies directional movement (vs.…
