German Grammar Workshop

OR “How German Grammar Works”

What are cases? Where do certain words go in a German sentence? How can I better guess if something is “der”, “die” or “das”? Teachers usually don’t like to answer these questions in class – either because they’re told not to (which is common in modern communicative classrooms) or because they simply don’t know and believe “that’s just the way it is”. This seminar is for those of you who want clear explanations – in plain English, on why are you constantly being corrected in class, and how does it all fits together. This seminar introduces any grammar concepts from scratch – you don’t need to know anything about grammar (or even German).

This special 3-hour workshop is fun, hands-on and does not require participants to know anything at all about grammar or even German. The German Grammar Workshop will be conducted in English and will offer insights into the structures of the English and German languages (and their comparative advantages and disadvantages) in terms anyone can understand, play around with – and get excited about.

You’ll learn:

I. The German Case System
• What Transitive and Intransitive Verbs are (and why they matter)
• What subjects and objects are (and how to tell them apart)
• What prepositions are (and what role they have to play)
• How to talk about location and movement in German (and how this could lead to odd miscommunications)
• How to express “putting” something somewhere in German
• How articles (all of them) and adjectives behave in a sentence
• How reflexive verbs and verbs with prepositions work in the case system
• What the Genitive Case is

II. Sentence Structure
• What clauses are, what types exist and how they are arranged differently
• How sentences in the past, and multi-verb and split-verb sentences work
• How to make questions and commands
• What the tendencies of typical German sentences are and how where you put something matters

III. Genders in German
• Some tips and tricks on how to better guess (and know!) whether something is masculine, feminine or neuter

This workshop is currently available as a streaming version available online, anytime. Check it out here.