Category: German

German Present Perfect Inseparable Prefix Verbs do not add the normal past participle prefix ge- in the perfect tenses. Examples: bekommen becomes hat…

All of the separable-prefix verbs form their past participle with ge-. Examples: Sie hat gestern angerufen. Separable prefix verbs can be regular, irregular or mixed. Separable prefixes…

German temporal prepositions are related to time and answer questions like “When?” and “For how long?” Some require the accusative case, some the dative case,…

The German Comparative is quite similar to the forms in English Grammar. We use comparative adjectives to compare things. There are three comparative forms in…

There are nine prepositions that always take the dative case, but for memorizing them, we will use only the most common eight (see chart below; gegenüber is not listed). A…

Conditional clauses are dependent clauses that are introduced by the subordinating conjunction wenn. They express that an action will only take place under certain conditions. Conditional clauses can…

The German future tense occurs far less frequently than it does in English because German often substitutes the present tense for the future, especially when…

A German dative verb is one that normally takes an object in the dative case—usually without any other object. Yes, there are more lists to memorize, but…

The following two-way prepositions are called Wechselpräpositionen in German (from the verb wechseln, to change). They’re accusative when they express motion/direction, and dative when they express only location. There…

A few verbs have characteristics of irregular and regular verbs: their ending (-te- + personal ending) is regular but they have a vowel change. We call…