Introduction

Welcome to Practice On-line German

The bulk of the site is broken down into three categories:

These categories are explained in depth further down the page.

Other categories include:

These are ideas in progress. German stem verbs, like stehen and gehen, have many prefixes, which change the meaning of the original stem verb. There should be more of these to follow. The helpful tables are another form of language exercise. The ones featured here deal with vocabulary key to the TestDaf and further examples of the categories functional verbs and verbs with preposition.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your language progress!

German Idioms (Redewendungen)

This is a collection of German idioms, expressions, proverbs, and sayings with, if possible, their English equivalents, which I have gathered over the years since I started to learn the German language (June 2005). Learning idioms helps to gain a prospective on German thinking as it relates to English. It is also helpful to study the example sentences for sentence structure, article usage, and vocabulary building -such skills which could always use some refreshing.

Use the tags to sort through the German sayings according to an object or central meaning.

German Verbs with Prepositions

I began learning these things in Book 2 of the Grundstufe and hated them from the very beginning. The loathing goes away after a while but the list keeps growing. Reaching this point in my German studies almost turned me away from German, but do stick with it, it gets better over time. It helps to write your own sentences for each verb.

There is an word list at the right column of this page with all the words for you to download and start your own list. Listed in these verb and preposition posts are the correct verb usage and an example sentence to help you formulate your own practice sentences.

Look for a native speaker or German teacher to correct your sentences. You’ll find that what you come up with may be grammatically correct, but may make no sense to a native speaker.

Functional verbs | Funktionsverbe

This is a collection of German verbs that are used in conjunction with an accusative object to build a fixed meaning. For example: Sie trifft eine Entscheidung. She makes a decision.

Sometimes these German verbs and accusative objects are paired with a preposition to form a function verbal phrase. For example: Er bringt das Thema zur Sprache. He raises an issue.

These expressions are used in German quiet frequently. In essence, you are forced to learn at least three words at a time because it could be that the verb nowadays has no meaning on it’s own.

The following list is not comprehensive but a work in progress. Hopefully the most common German functional verbs and German functional verb phrases are illustrated here.

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