Using Grammar to Relax

What you need to know

The grammar lessons in this course make a lovely “Pausenfüller”. They shouldn't take you longer than 15-20 minutes. All instructions are in English to make sure that you’ll understand everything clearly. Any other approach would ignore the fact that you are an adult that has quite a lot of experience that you can use to your benefit when learning German.

About Grammar Exercises

You won't find many so called grammar exercises in this course as they are very inefficient despite what you might have experienced. Most such exercises are easily predictable and it is very hard to transfer the results from such practice into speaking and writing. Therefore you will practice every topic in this course with help of the learning cycle. The Preaching, the Secretary Technique and the Writing are excellent and highly efficient and effective ways to truly practice and ingrain grammar into your brain.
But learners will be learners and some of you will very likely feel the urge to please their old habits and do classical grammar exercises. For those among you, I can only recommend this page → online exercises of the Schubert-Verlag. You need to search a bit until you find the topics of this course there but I've usually named every grammar topic in the usual manner so that should help you with this challenge. You can look for exercises in A2, B1, B2 and if you are an adventure seeker, C1. I hereby explicitly again want to say that I DO NOT RECOMMEND WORKING WITH THEM.

In the next step you'll get started with the most painful of grammar-topics: how to learn the gender of German nouns for good. Don't skip that lesson (unless you come from my A1-B1 course) as I promise you it will blow your mind.

Rationale behind this Step

Grammar is a lovely time-saving tool. It helps you make use of recurring patterns in German. Instead of having to learn the plural of 3,000 German nouns, you can learn just two simple patterns once and you’ll have covered 2,400 of them. It will take you only one minute to learn the rule which you then can make use of for a lifetime.

There’s no need to learn fancy grammatical terms or to be afraid of them. You might not have to deal with more than 10 new words and I am certain that you can manage those. The grammar lessons of this course will also distract you a bit from the texts of this course so that the new vocabulary can sink in a while before you continue to work with it.

Just watching videos or reading through the explanations won’t be enough though. While you might understand certain aspects of the covered topic, it is by reviewing the matter that you make it stick. You could watch or read any explanation a hundred times and still might not be able to apply that information. You will be prompted to review everything after every fifth lesson. So don't worry. You won't miss the right moment as I'll have your learning structure fully covered.