A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/
Page 30 of 151
12/8/2017
Points to remember:
1. Ein– words with no endings are always either nominative singular or accusative
singular.
2. The ending –em on both ein– words and der– words is unique to dative
singular.
3. The ending –es with the noun adding an –s or –es is unique to genitive
singular.
4. When euer has an ending, the stem changes to eur-. Examples:
Euer Kind bekommt gute Noten.
Your child gets good grades.
Eure Freunde kommen bald.
Your friends are coming soon.
5. Because German nouns are gendered, pronouns referring to them are also
gendered. Review Unit 1, section 5, note "b)" and keep in mind that sein/ihr
references might best be translated as "its."
Take the memorization advice from Unit 2 and expand your memorization task to
include possessive pronouns. You should be noticing that the possessive pronouns,
too, fit the general German spelling patterns for gender, case, and number
distinctions.
Unit: 3: Articles, simple past
4. Simple Past Tense of Verbs
Keep in mind that English’s past-tense complexity leaves you with a choice of
various English ways to translate German’s straightforward past tense. Given ich
hatte, you will need to consider context in order to choose from: “I had,” “I was
having,” or “I did have.” In any case, German past tense always indicates that the
action or status is completed and done.
Regular Verbs
Most English verbs form their past tense by adding the suffix –ed (example:
played), and German regular verbs behave similarly, by adding the suffix –t– (or,
when pronounceability requires it, –et-). However, unlike English verbs, which lose
their person/number verb suffixes in past tense (example: I played, she played)