As mentioned in lesson 13, there are four cases in German. The cases refer to the very specific ways we must speak about anything in German. The four cases are the Nominative, the Accusative, the Dative, and the Genitive. In German, these cases are called Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ und Genitiv.

It's easiest and least frustrating when you learn them one at a time, and we're even going to leave one of them out because you don't need it as a beginner. The Genitive is the case we're going to leave out completely.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/15/transcript

The simple past tense has several additional names: the Präteritum (preterite) or the Imperfekt(imperfect). Use whichever name works best for you. Here, we'll use the Präteritum.

This is a form of the past tense that is used somewhat in spoken German, somewhat in news articles, and frequently in literature. There won't be a lot of this for you to learn until you reach a high-intermediate level and start reading German literature.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/14/transcript

To keep things manageable for this beginner's course, we're going to work with the Possessivartikel (the possessive articles) in the Nominative case only. (The Nominative case is one of four cases in German, and these are the only four ways anything can be expressed in German. We'll cover that in the following lessons.)

Seeing as there are 36 possessive articles per case, that makes a total of 144 possessive articles for you to learn (36 articles x 4 cases = 144 articles). So you can see why we're only going to cover them in one case.

This is also why we heartily recommend you only work on them in one case at a time.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/13/transcript

You learned kein, keine, kein, keine back in lesson 7.3 as answers to Ja-/Nein-Fragen. You can also simply use them in sentences to say everyday things like "There is no bread in the house" or talk about the fact that "Serena Williams will play no more professional tennis matches."

This is how you negate information.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/12/transcript

Now that you can see the direct relationship between people, things, pronouns, and definite articles, it's time to branch out one step further to the indefinite articles.

If you haven't yet, you'll begin to see even more in this lesson why it's imperative that you work to get a handle on which nouns belong to which der/die/das/die grouping, because that is foundational information for your German learning.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/11/transcript

In lesson 1 you learned that we can replace someone's name with a pronoun. You may specifically remember that we talked about Gisela (sie): Gisela liest die Nachrichten und trinkt Tee. Here we'll work more on replacing names with pronouns and we'll take that one step further.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/10/transcript

In this lesson, we're going to build upon what you learned about the articles in Lesson 3 and add one more layer. We'll also cover a bit of the rules of der/die/das groupings and a couple of techniques to help you learn which article goes with which noun.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/9/transcript

Now that you've got a handle on Positions 1 and 2, you can start working with questions that will help you acquire more information than only a Yes/No answer. These are called W-Fragen, or W Questions, which are frequently referred to as open-ended questions.

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In lesson 6, we used the verb in Position 1 to create the Imperativ. You also need to utilize Position 1 to ask a question for which there is a Yes or a No answer.

So, first be very clear in your mind that we've now switched to asking questions.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/7/transcript

The command form or Imperativ in German is used differently and much more frequently than it is in English. So, this lesson is as much a cultural lesson as it is a grammatical one.

Review the transcript, study the lesson and do the quizzes: www.newsinslowgerman.com/series/guts/6/transcript