Guide to German language course

Introduction

German course on this site contains grammar and vocabulary related to A1 and A2 levels (beginner levels). The course will allow you, if you have no prior knowledge of the German language to understand key concepts of German grammar and to build basic German vocabulary. After finishing this course you should be able to consume German content intended for learning and should be able to create your own lessons in the Lessons section and to continue your learning process.

How you use the course is up to you. The course is simple but it provides you with all the key elements of any language course.
You will have a text in German which is your main focus of attention accompanied by audio for the text.
After the text, you have a list of key phrases and in the end a small test.

To be able to use this course with all the features, I recommend that you log in, but you can use the course without logging in. Anonymous users cannot add words to their dictionaries.

I suggest you use this course is the following way:

• Play the whole audio recording for the course lesson (playback is available right below the title of the course lesson)
• Read the text, look at the translation, and play the whole audio recording again, this time reading the text at the same time
• Click on all the "?" buttons to see information about the particular elements of sentences - this is crucial since these explanations will guide you in your learning process
• Add the unknown words to your dictionary (available to logged in users)
• Try to read the whole text in German, and if you have some doubts about pronounciation you can play just a specific segment of the lesson text to hear that segment in German
• Read the key phrases and do the small test at the end of the course lesson
• Practice the words you have added to your dictionary using the Practice section of this site (available to logged in users)

A single lesson should take you around half an hour to finish, so if you do one lesson per day, in 40 days, you should have a solid foundation for continuing your German language study.

Course lesson basics

When you click on "Course" in the menu, you will be taken to the course lessons list page. I suggest you start from the beginning and move one course lesson at a time in the course lessons list.

You can view the course without logging in, but your experience of going through the course will not be as good. When you log in, you will be able to mark a course lesson complete, so you know which course lessons you finished and which course lessons are next on your path. Another important benefit of logging in is the ability to add words to your dictionary. Building your dictionary is the key focus of this site and is a crucial element of success in your plan to learn German. After you add words to your dictionary you can practice your unknown words in the Practice section of this site. Examples displayed in this text will be displayed for the logged-in user.

Course lesson page overview

Take a look at the following screenshot for the first lesson in this course (you can click on the image to view the whole image):

At the top, you have the button to mark your lesson as completed or to mark it as still in progress. When will you mark the course lesson as completed is up to you. You can quickly go over all the lessons in this course, but you won't learn much by doing the course that way. Take your time, go over the sentences several times, you might even learn the text by heart.

I have tried in some cases to adjust the English translation to the German text, which means that the English translation at times might look funny. The idea is to understand the German text, not the other way around, and sometimes, by using "literal" translations from German to English, you will see how the German language works.

Let's look at the text now.
The first thing you can see in the image is that most of the German text is black letters on a white background. These are the words I already have in my vocabulary and the words that I know. But some of the words in the German text in the image are highlighted in two specific ways. A word with a blue/purple background is NOT in my vocabulary. If I click on this word, I can add it to my dictionary, and I can mark the word as known or unknown. We will see shortly how to do that. An example of such a word is the word "müde" close to the end of the text. The second markup is a yellow background for a word. This means that this word exists in my dictionary, but I still don't know it. In the example in the image, the word "Müller" has a yellow background. This word is a common last name in Germany.

Another important element of the lessons are the question mark buttons displayed within the text. To finish the lesson, click on each of those buttons and read the description displayed in the pop-up that will appear. The description is related to an element of the sentence where that button is located, and might explain the word just before the button or some grammar concept introduced in this sentence. Take a look at the screenshot below to see one such description:

Let us now see how to manage words.
A more detailed description of this process is described in the instructions related to lessons, so please check that information too. Let us see how to add the word "müde" to my dictionary. The first thing to do is to click on the word "müde". This will open a slider on the right side where you can edit the information for this word.

As you can see, at the top of the slider, I can see the word in lowercase. This is the "key" for the word item. All keys are lowercase. Below is a text box labeled "Word". Here, I can edit my word. If you want to have a solid, well-defined dictionary (and you should want that, because it will help you later), you enter the proper form for the word. You might know that nouns in the German language are always capitalized. On the other hand verbs are not. But the verb can be capitalized if a verb is the first word in a sentence. So if, for example, you click a first word in a sentence that is a verb, you will typically want to change the value of the word in the first text box (the value is a word as it appears in the text) and convert, for example, "Lesen" (to read) to "lesen" because verbs in German don't start with the first capital letter. You don't have to do it. But if you want a well-built dictionary, you must pay some attention to the first text box. There is a bit more you can do here, explained in more detail in instructions related to lessons but in this discussion related to course lessons, this is enough. I believe you will soon get the hang of it.

The next field is the translation, which is self-explantory. I suggest you enter short translations, don't write too much here if you don't need to. The reason for this are practice excercises which use this translation, and the user interface for practice questions might look a bit messy if you write too much here. So, the best translation for "müde" would be "tired". A less adequate translation would be "a person that worked a lot is not lacking energy". Notice how you get suggestions for the translations. You can just click on the suggestion and use that instead of typing in the translation. Your translation might also appear as a suggestion to someone else, so please, use this site as intended, for learning German. If inappropriate data is entered (check the "Terms of use") your account might be deleted.

The next text box is lemma. This is a "core" word for the word you are adding. For example, for a conjugated verb, this can be the infinitive version of the verb. You can read more about lemmas in the instructions related to lessons.
If you want to keep things simple and don't want to use lemmas, that is fine. Lemma is an optional field.

Comment is anything you want, but for nouns and verbs I typically enter the key information for these words.
For example, for the word "Tag" I will put for the the comment, "der Tag, Tage" (gender, word, plural).
For the word "geht" I will put for the comment, "gehen, geht, ging, gegangen" (infinitive, 3rd person singular, preterit, past participle).
This information is displayed while you practice your vocabulalary, so it is a nice way to learn all the important details about a word.

Phrase is a sentence that illustrates the usage of the word. You can type anything you want.

This is how my word form looks after I enter the data:

After I click "Save", the slider will hide itself, and the text will reflect the fact that the word "müde" is now added to my dictionary. The yellow background indicates that I still don't know this word.

Finishing your course lesson

After you add unknown words to your dictionary, read all the information available, finish repeating each sentence multiple times, go and read key phrases, and take a self-test. In the questions section, you can see how many letters the answer has, and you can also check the answer by clicking on the question mark button.

Adding words to your dictionary doesn't mean you know them. But adding words to your dictionary is a very good thing, because now, in the Practice section of this site, you can train your recently added words. The practice section helps you learn, so my advice is to practice as much as you can.

After you answer the questions and are done with the lesson content, you can mark the course lesson completed, and you can move on to the next lesson.