German Grammar: A Traveler's Guide | The Linguistic Traveler

Germany, for many, is a dream destination.

Filled with idyllic valleys and castles straight out of fairy tales, it’s a land with a rich history.

But, you might struggle to get around if you don’t know German.

Many Germans speak English (in fact, over half of the country’s population speaks it!). If you find yourself out in the country or forced to interact with someone who doesn’t speak English, though, knowing some German can come in handy!

It’s worth noting that many countries besides Germany speak the language, too, or have sizeable communities that speak it. Besides Germany, it’s the official language of Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxemburg, and Belgium! Did you know Belize has a lot of German speakers?

Also, learning phrases will certainly help, but knowing the basics of grammar will make it easier to read signs or understand someone’s response.

You definitely don’t need to speak the language fluently, either. My goal here is not to teach you every bit of German grammar. I’ll focus on what you need to know as a traveler.

My goal here will be to explain the basics of the grammar to help you find your way around, and provide some resources to aid you. I’ll link to some good dictionaries, phrases, and pronunciation guides, too.

As English speakers, German shouldn’t be too difficult to grasp the basics of, since they’re both Germanic languages. (But in many ways, German bears more resemblance to Old English than to Modern English.)

So, let’s get into it!

The Basics of German Grammar

Sentence Structure and Word Order

Like I said above, German is pretty similar to English in a lot of ways.

One of these is sentence structure. But, pay close attention to what I say here, because it’s not always going to be the same as English:

German sentences generally go in order of subject (the thing performing the action), then the verb (the action being performed), then the object (the thing receiving the action).

BUT, because they change the spelling of nouns based on their role in a sentence, this structure can change when they want to emphasize something. Articles (like a/an/the) are vital for identifying the role of a noun in a sentence.

Adverbs can also come at the beginning of a sentence, forcing the subject of the sentence to come after the verb.

Just know that the verb is always the second thing in the sentence in German unless you’re asking a question.

Asking Questions

Questions in German follow a lot of the same rules as English.

For example, for a yes or no question in English, we place certain parts of a verb first, like “Did I give you the remote?” German follows this same pattern.

Non- yes and no questions also follow similar patterns to English, where we use special question words to start the sentence. “Where do you work?” or “When is the play?” are examples of this.

For a full explanation on forming sentences, see the section on interrogative pronouns below.

Finally, certain prepositions appear first in the sentence. This is a pattern in English, but not one that is often followed (at least among the people I talk to). “For whom are you getting that present?” is an example of what I mean.

More Word Order to Know, and a Quick Review/ Summary

Most of the rules for sentence structure are identical to English.
German sentences follow SVO word order, like English, but can sometimes change to OVS to emphasize the object. Nouns have special endings that allow this to happen.
Questions follow an almost identical pattern to English.
Prepositions come before the thing they modify, like in English.
Adjectives come before the noun they modify.
Adverbs come after whatever they modify.

Nouns and Articles in German

All nouns are capitalized in German. This should be the easiest way of finding nouns when they’re written on signs. Even generic nouns like Car and Book are capitalized.

In English, our nouns don’t have gender, case, or any other special categories that many other languages use. German does.

This can make it more complicated to learn languages like German as an English speaker. Don’t worry, it’s not too bad! I’ll make it as easy as I can.

Gender is basically just categories for nouns. They can align with actual gender, but everything, from rocks to people, has a noun gender in languages that use them.

Case shows a noun’s function in a sentence. This aligns with the sentence order/ structure I talked about above.

If those terms are confusing, don’t worry too much. German speakers will have a fairly easy time understanding you regardless. And many of these nouns don’t actually change their form at all.

One final thing to be aware of is that German loves its compound words. Nouns get combined into a single word very often, so be on the lookout for it.

Articles

Articles are a great way to find nouns in German sentences, especially when spoken:

Listen/ look out for words like der, die, das (these are the core three); den, dem, des (meaning the)
Listen/ look out for ein, einen, einem, eines, eine, einer (meaning a)
Kein/ keine is an article used for negative sentences (like saying not)

These will only come up before nouns, so they’re an easy identifier if you’re listening to someone. But that doesn’t mean they’ll always be there, and nouns aren’t always modified to show their role in a sentence.

The easiest way to determine a noun’s role in a sentence is also with these articles, but there’s a lot of overlap.

A big thing that people encourage while learning vocabulary in German is to learn nouns alongside their article. Once you know that, it’s far easier to identify when that form changes.

For example, der is used for masculine nouns that receive the action of a sentence, but is also used for feminine nouns that act as an indirect object (the receiver of something besides the verb in a sentence). If you know the noun is feminine, though, then it’s easy to tell when that form is suddenly coming first.

Plurals

Plurals are a little complicated in German. In English, we just add -s or -es. In Spanish, it’s the same.

But in German, there are several endings that can be added to a noun to make it plural. Some nouns don’t add anything at all.

I’m not sure I can explain the patterns here easily or quickly, since there’s some overlap between endings. (For example, I could say to look for nouns ending in -r, but some singular nouns end with that and do something else to become plural.)

Instead, I’ll link to one of my sources for this post that talks about it (and can be a great resource for those of you wanting to learn more!)

Pronouns in German

After all the stuff about nouns, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that pronouns are fairly complicated, too.

But for pronouns that mainly just means that there are more of them than we’re used to in English.

Pronouns, as a reminder, are just simplified versions of nouns that can take their place in a sentence. Words like he, she, it, me, you, and mine/ yours.

These are categorized into a few types based on their function, but I’ll make sure to keep it simple.

Because nouns change based on their role in a sentence, pronouns do, too.

Personal Pronouns

Personal pronouns are words like I, you, and we.

Unlike nouns, these don’t overlap at all and are easy to identify. Here’s a list of which ones mean what:

ich, mich, and mir = I, me
du, dich, dir = you
er, ihn, ihm = he, him
sie, ihr = she, her
es, ihm = it

That’s it for singular pronouns. Next up is the plural ones:

wir, uns = we
ihr, euch = you all
sie, ihnen = they/ them

So, what’s the difference between these?

Their role in the sentence. Just like we don’t use me for the subject of a sentence, German wouldn’t use mich. The key difference is just that they have a few extra forms for each, usually.

These should be pretty easy to identify in any sentence.

Possessive Pronouns

Just like mine and yours in English, German has possessive pronouns.

However, just like the personal pronouns above, these have several forms to account for grammatical features of German.

These work from a base form, though. And that’s what you should look out for as a traveler:

mein = mine
dein = yours
sein = his
ihr = hers
sein = its
unser = ours
euer = yours (plural)
ihr = theirs

These base forms don’t change. Things just get added to the end of the word. So, as long as you can find these, you’re set!

If you want more detail, I think you’ll find the information here useful. It contains charts of the endings (on the second chart) and goes into much more detail about the pronoun forms.

Some Other Quick Pronouns

German has several other pronoun forms, but I don’t think they’re all important enough to talk about in a post intended for travelers.

Still, there are a few more I want to talk about.

Demonstrative pronouns, like this/that, these/those, are useful for travelers asking to buy something or needing directions:

Dieser = choosing something out of a group (like saying that/those)
Der/Derjeniger/Derselber = emphasizing a specific thing (like using that in the sentence “I didn’t do that.”)

Like the other pronouns I list here, they are modified in certain ways, but in order to simplify it for you as a traveler, I’m only listing the base forms. They don’t change very much from that form, so you’ll be able to find them easily.

The other one I want to talk about is interrogative pronouns, the words used at the beginning of questions like “What are those?”

Was = what
wer = who
wen = who
wem = who/whom
wessen = whose

Adjectives + Adverbs

I’m combining these two into one category because they do some similar things in sentences, and have a combined function sometimes.

Both of them modify other words in a sentence. Adjectives modify nouns, adding more description to them in some way. Adverbs modify verbs, but can also modify adjectives, or other adverbs.

Here’s how to tell adjectives and adverbs apart in German: adjectives change their form to match the noun they modify. Adverbs never change their form.

Adverbs come after whatever they modify, while adjectives come before. This pattern is the same as in English.

Also, don’t forget that phrases can sometimes act as an adjective or adverb!

Adjectives

Like I said just above, adjectives change their ending to match whatever noun they’re describing. There are three different ways this can happen depending on the circumstances (and aren’t all that different), but as a traveler, as long as you can identify the base form, you should be fine.

Superlatives exist in German, too (like good, better, and best in English). Other than some verbs with special forms, this is done by adding -er to an adjective. Follow this up with the word als (than) to say “more ___ than”. To say something is “the most ___” you would say am before the word and add -sten to the end.

Adjectives can also be placed without an ending after verbs to act as an adverb. It’s kinda like quick in English becoming quickly.

Adverbs

Adverbs don’t change their form to match whatever they modify (unlike most German words). So, here’s what you should know, starting with where they might show up:

It is possible for adverbs to be the first word in a sentence if the speaker wants to emphasize it. This means that everything else comes after the verb.
Adverbs are always ordered by time, manner, and place. When something happens will always come before how and where.
They will always come before personal pronouns (I, you, them, etc.)

There are several categories of adverbs:

Adverbs of time (when something happens).
Adverbs of place (where something happens; this can include movement or direction).
Adverbs of manner (how something happens; these can modify adjectives to show intensity)
Adverbs of reason (why something happens)

Like adjectives, adverbs can be comparative and superlative. It’s done slightly differently, though.

Again, adverbs don’t change their endings. Certain ones entirely change their form to show more-ness or most-ness.

For all other adverbs, you just add weiter or am weitesten before them to show a comparison.

Verbs

German verbs actually have a lot in common with Old English, namely the presence of both weak and strong verbs.

Like verbs in any language, German verbs are complicated; there are a lot of different forms and patterns to keep an eye out for.

I’m just going to focus on some of the basics here to help you identify verbs in a sentence and understand some of the changes to their form and meaning, but I won’t get into the detailed stuff. If you do want to learn more about that, the website linked in the resources section gets pretty in-depth.

First of all, German verbs use many of the same tenses/ structures as English.

A verb will be the second thing in a sentence in German (not second word, but second thing). This is the easiest way to identify it, but that won’t often tell you the full meaning. That’s where other bits of the word come in.

Many verbs just have an ending added to change their form, but others undergo a much larger spelling change. On most dictionaries, I would expect that searching these forms would redirect you to the main word.

For a convenient list of the top 50 verbs in German and their forms, check out this list.

Tenses

Past and present tense are the main things you’ll want to know. Let’s start with present tense.

Other than irregular forms, present tense is easy to find by looking for the following endings:

-e (I)
-st (you)
-t ( he/she/it or you all)
-en (we or they)

Past tense is similar. It’s important to know that the past perfect (explained below) is actually more commonly used than a full past tense in German. Still, here are the endings to look for:

-te (I or he/she/it)
-test (you)
-ten (we or they)
-tet (you all)

One common form to look out for is the imperative/ command form. It’s used commonly in German, and has a meaning like “Give me that!” or “Let’s go!”. It’s not intended to be rude and is usually just the most efficient way to tell someone to do something, but you can make it more polite by saying bitte which means “please”. To find this form, look out for:

Infinitive (or the “neutral” form of verbs) forms used in a sentence
Shortened versions of verbs
Verbs with no subject pronoun (i.e. no pronoun before the verb)

To form verb phrases like “I have gone” or “I had gone” in German, you’ll see the verbs haben and sein before a verb. This is called the “perfect” tense. The issue with these verbs is they aren’t always spelled like this. They’re irregular verbs, meaning their spelling changes easily. If the tense or subject is different, they have a different spelling. The more common one is haben, so I’ll show some other possible forms of it here:

habe
hast
hat (with several endings)

Prepositions

Prepositions primarily exist to describe locations or movements while also connecting words. They’re a little different from adverbs or adjectives since they usually connect to other nouns. A sentence like “I saw him at the store” is an example of this.

There’s not a ton to talk about here, since they mostly function like English prepositions.

But, be aware that certain noun forms will always come after the prepositions, and this can change depending on the preposition used. As a traveler, don’t worry about it too much. They’ll understand you as long as you use the right vocabulary.

Now, another quick thing is that some German prepositions combine with articles. Here’s a quick list:

am = on the
beim = at the
im = in the
ins = into the
vom = of the
zum/ zur = to the

That’s really it for prepositions! The easiest way to identify any word will always be to look it up in the dictionary, but this should help!

Now let’s move on to something less complicated.

German Dialects

There are around 250 dialects of German scattered around the world. Besides the nations with German as their official language, many other European countries have sizeable German-speaking populations. Even Brazil!

The one you’re most likely to encounter is High German, spoken in the southern end of the country. It’s the “standard” dialect of the country, and the one taught in schools.

Some other big dialects include:

Low German, spoken in northern Germany and the Netherlands
Swiss German, heavily influenced by Italian and French which are also heavily spoken in Switzerland
Austrian German, which has some noticeably different vocabulary.

There are many other dialects, but within primarily German-speaking countries, these are what you’ll likely encounter. I’ll make a longer post sometime soon that delves into these in more detail. (And talks about other languages in Germany!)

Useful Resources for German

For a full grammar source that delves deeply into the intricacies of German grammar, I would recommend using this site that I sourced much of my information from. It’ll be linked at the end, too.

As I say in all my language guides, I don’t like to include any text-based pronunciation guides in case your accent is different than mine. I would recommend looking at a video or audio reference like this one instead.

As far as dictionaries, you can’t go wrong with the Collins English-German dictionary. There is also an app available, at least for android users.

And, finally, for travel phrases, I really like the list from FluentU, since it includes audio recordings (though I would definitely prefer if they didn’t sound like Siri).

Review, Conclusion, and Sources

So, I know that was a lot. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to come back to it and review. Here’s the big takeaways to remember:

Sentence structure generally follows the same rules as English, but sometimes an adverb or object can come first. This is usually just for emphasis.
Most word order rules are the same as English.
Nouns are always capitalized.
German has a lot more pronouns than English, but as long as you can recognize certain ones, you should be fine.
Verbs change their form a lot more than English, but have the same tenses and grammar generally.
Adjectives and adverbs are a bit interchangeable. Adjectives change form, adverbs don’t.
Prepositions are pretty similar to English, but sometimes combine with the German words for “the”.

Finally, my sources for this post:

I hope this was helpful, and I want to make it a useful resource/ reference. If you have any corrections, please let me know! I’m always open to feedback, be it questions, comments, or concerns. Leave them below!

What language do you want to see a guide to next? Let me know below!