Guides

Explanations of the parts of German that actually cause trouble, written to be read once and used. Every example links to a word page with audio and a checked sentence.

• der, die, das — the endings that actually predict genderMost German nouns tell you their gender in the last few letters. Here are the endings that are reliable enough to trust, and the ones that aren't.
• Separable verbs — why the verb splits in halfGerman verbs that break apart and send their prefix to the end of the sentence. How to spot them, why they do it, and how to read a sentence where the meaning arrives last.
• The four German cases, explained by what they doNominative, accusative, dative and genitive without the memorised tables. What each case is for, how to tell which one you need, and why the article changes.
• Perfekt or Präteritum — which German past tense to useGerman has two past tenses that mean the same thing. The choice is about speech versus writing, not about time, with a short list of verbs that break the rule.
• German word order — the verb-second rule and what breaks itGerman word order is freer than English in one way and stricter in another. The verb's position is fixed; almost everything else can move. Here is the system.
• German adjective endings without the three tablesAdjective endings look like forty-eight boxes to memorise. They are really one question — has the article already shown the case? — plus a short pattern.

Found a mistake?

Every one of the 13,000 words was checked by hand — the sentence, its translation, and the word-by-word alignment between them. That is a lot of German, and some of it will still be wrong.

Every word page has a Spotted a mistake? box at the bottom, and the trainer has the same thing under each card. Use it. Reports are private: they go to the person who maintains the deck and no one else, they are not shown on the site, and reporting a wrong article or a clumsy translation is genuinely the fastest way to get it fixed. You do not need an account and nothing identifying is stored.