Anonymous Wanderers

German grammar for KISS people

At school, I was made to take German as my first foreign language.
The postulate was that pupils who were good at German, were good at Maths too.
Yeah right.

Fast forward 40 years. I moved to Germany because I felt the wind pushing me there. And now I am seriously getting into learning the language. Yesterday I got a bit upset with the place of the subject and the verb in the sentences. No native speaker (even sticklers) could tell me why the verb would often come before the subject. I browsed the web and found a number of numbing explanations based on tables. This morning I woke up with a simple solution, that passed the scrutiny of a number of people around me, and I am very pleased to share it.

Most of the business with German sentence structure fits in 4 simple sentences:

  1. The verb is always in second position.
  2. ⁠Therefore the subject is in first or third position.
  3. The infinitive comes last, after the most informative adverbial. In German the most important information comes at the end of the sentence. This is the complete opposite of English.
  4. The rest of the adverbials come in the following order: when, why, how, where.

Auf Deutsch:

  1. Im Satz steht das Verb an zweiter Stelle.
  2. Dafür steht das Subjekt an Erste oder Dritter Stelle.
  3. Der Infinitiv steht zuletzt, nach dem wichtigsten Adverbial.
  4. TE-KA-MO-LO steht für die Anordnung des Adverbialen: Zeit - Kausal - Modus - Lokus

There are other details to take into account, but really that takes care of most of the problem.

Later today, I surfed on my earlier success and crafted a KISS declension table that provides me with a simple tool to decline the group article/adjective/noun in one shot instead of jumping between the 3 different tables I was taught at school that are still found everywhere on the web.

  1. Find the gender/number of the noun,
  2. Find the case according to the role of the group in your sentence,
  3. Locate the proper line in the table and Bob's your uncle.

Deklination Tabellen

The KISS solution for irregular verbs and irregular plurals: rote learning as they come.
Viel Spaß!