Hallo! I’m curious if anyone has any tips and tricks to remember when to use certain words, remember syntax, cases, etc. If you don’t quite understand what you mean, let me give you an example.
The way my professor taught us to remember more common inseparable prefixes in German, was to remember the sentence “J’ai mis Cebère en enfer” (French for “I put Cerberus in hell”), for the prefixes “ge, miss, zer, be, er, ent, emp, ver”. I know there’s also “hinter,” “wider,” and more, but this is a small way to remember some of them.
Do you have a trick like this? I’m interested to know if anyone else does.
DysfuncNoodle
i remember czech verb endings by singing them!
In German there’s “He, she, it – das “s” muss mit!” – to remember third person conjugation in English. For German the most important rule (at least in elementary school) is “Wer “nämlich” mit h schreibt, ist dämlich” – to remember the correct spelling of the word “nämlich” , NOT “nähmlich“.
Native: German / Language preference: English
not a trick per se, but “aus bei mit nach seit von zu” (the list of prepositions that require the dative case) has stuck with me from high school XD it’s served me well, btw!
This is probably useless tho, it’s not a mnemonic, just the literal alphabetical list. My mind was young and nimble and/or i was quizzed and drilled on it again and again, and somehow it stuck forever. anyway here it is =3
RequiredInput 01/05/2025 12:53 am
@milu One of the German courses I took in college had us sing “Aus außer bei mit nach seit von zu” to the tune of the Blue Danube Waltz. Certainly a funny way to remember that still sticks with me today!
A mnemonic I still recall from school for remembering that wer means who, since wer sounds a lot like where, is the vacuum brand Hoover — Who-wer. It’s quite silly, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Verb conjugations I just sort of had drilled into me by rote. The only other tip I can think of is the one I share with every German learner, which is: always learn the article with the noun. German’s gendered nouns aren’t always implicit, and you have to know the gender in order to change cases.
