Please click here to listen to the adjectival nouns podcast directly on your computer.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, please click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, please click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, please click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast on your computer, please click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on you computer, click here.Laura

This podcast gives you a wide range of tips and tricks for learning a language. It focuses on German, but these tips and tricks could be applied to learning any language. To listen to this podcast on your computer, click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, click here.Laura

This podcast covers relative pronouns after prepositions and some other special cases. To listen to this podcast directly on your computer, click here.Laura

To listen to this podcase directly on you computer, click here.Laura

This episode is about more of the really practical stuff you need to know about the conditional. To listen to the episode directly on your computer, click here.Laura

The conditional basically means sentences with a would. For instance, if I were rich, I would buy a house. To download this podcast directly on your computer, click here.Laura

To listen to this podcast on your computer, click here.Laura

Word order has a highly complex set of rules in any language. So many, that I'm not convinced anyone has ever managed to write them all down for any given language. For pretty well every rule there is an exception, and there are even exceptions to exceptions. This podcast focuses on the most productive rules about exceptions to standard word order,…

German word order in a completely standard, neutral main clause is a follows: * nominative subject, * conjugated verb, * accusative then dative pronoun, * nouns with definite determiners, in the order dative, accusative * most adverbials * nicht – or other negation particles * adverbials of manner * nouns with indefinite determiners, in the order d…

The pluperfect is the ich hatte es getan or I had done tense. You make the pluperfect in German by taking the perfect tense (the ich habe es getan tense) and changing the auxiliary verb (the habe or the bin etc.) into the simple past version of itself (hatte or war etc.). So instead of ich habe ein Eis gegessen – I have eaten an ice cream you get i…

The simple past - also known as the preterite or the imperfect tense - is equivalent in form to the English I did form (ich tat es). The way that regular verbs form their simple past is by a or being inserted into the present tense ending. For instance ich kaufe - I buy becomes ich kaufte - I bought and du kaufst - you buy becomes du kauftest - you…

This podcast is about when to use the perfect tense. The perfect tense is the ich habe es getan tense and corresponds in form to the I have done it tense in English. But the rules on when you use the tense are rather different in German. The German one is often interchangeable with the simple past tense (the ich tat es tense), whereas in English, p…

The perfect tense is one of three German past tense forms. It's also the one that's most commonly used in spoken German, so very useful to learn. The perfect tense is a compound tense. This means it uses two verbs: an auxiliary (or helper) verb and a main verb. Most of the time, the auxiliary verb is haben, which means to have. But for some verbs, …

Hallo all, It's been longer than I intended yet again, but I've finally managed to finish another episode of German GrammarPod. This episode is about the future tense and also about the verb werden in general. The future tense is pretty simple in German. Most of the time you can just use the present tense form. But where this would be ambiguous, yo…

The present tense is pretty simple in German: there's only one. So where English has to choose between Sarah is walking to work and Sarah walks to work, German has only Sarah geht zu Fuß zur Arbeit. However, whereas English only has two different forms of each verb in the present tense (apart from for the verb to be), e.g. walk and walks, have and …

The genitive case is used to indicate possession, like of or apostrophe-s ('s) does in English. However, apart from in formal, written texts (and in its version of adding 's, which is just to add an s to the end of proper nouns), German tends to avoid the genitive. Most of the time in spoken German, Germans use a von plus the dative instead of a ge…

The dative case is used for the indirect object (that's the noun or pronoun which is impacted indirectly by the action, as opposed to the one to which the action is done directly). The classic example is he gives me the book (er gibt mir das Buch), where the direct object is the book and the indirect object is me. The dative also follows certain pr…

The accusative case is used for the direct object (that's the noun or pronoun to which an action is done). It's like the shark in Peter ate the shark where shark is the noun that gets eaten. It also follows certain preopstions (words like for, through and without). Only singular (i.e. not plural) masculine nouns change in the accusative. All the de…

This podcast is about cases, which are a way of showing what role the different words are playing in a sentence. German has four cases: Nominative Accusative Dative Gentitive This podcast describes how cases work in general, then goes on to look at the nominative case in more detail. To listen to the audio file directly on your computer, click here…

I finally have my first podcast up and running. You wouldn't believe how complicated publishing podcasts is, and I thought the long bit was going to be writing the podcast :) Anyway, I'm all up and running now, so welcome to the first episode. First of all in this episode you get a bit of an introduction to the podcast and who it's aimed at (basica…