Hallo! Welcome to the first lesson of German. I'm so glad you made the decision to learn this amazing language.
Today you will learn:
1) Greetings
2) How to present yourself and express your likes
3) Be able to form sentences with sein and regular verbs.
Before we begin, if you see ß: this is a special letter in German that represents a double s sound. The two dots on top of a, o, and u are also present in German and are called umlauts; search them up on YouTube to get a hold of the pronounciation!
1) Greetings
These are the first things you will probably learn in a typical German class to get you started.
Hallo! - Hello!
Auf Wiedersehen! - Good bye! (LIT. Till we see each other again!)
Tschüß! - Good bye!
Guten Morgen! - Good morning!
Guten Abend! - Good afternoon!
Gute Nacht! - Good night!
These are some basic statements you will encounter often. Now, how do you say who you are and what you like?
The verb to be named is heißen, or heissen. As in English, verbs are conjugated depending on the subject for example, I eat, he eats; Ich heiße, er heißt.
heißen conjugations:
ich heiße ... | I am named ...
du heißt ... | You are named ...
er/sie/es heißt ... | He / she / it is named ...
wir heißen ... | We are named ...
ihr heißt ... | You all are named ...
sie / Sie heißen ... | They / You (formal) are named ...
As you can see, I paired the verb heißen with the different subject pronouns, which you should memorize. To say you, in an informal situation you would say du; in formal situations say Sie.
To practice:
My name is Kushal = Ich heiße Kushal.
Her name is Sabrina = Sie heißt Sabrina.
Their names are Joe and Steve. = Sie heißen Joe und Steve.
2) How to present yourself and express your likes
The verb phrase gefallen jemandem means to please someone and is used to express likes. If you have studied Spanish (me gusta) or Italian (mi piace), it is the same. For example:
Das Buch gefällt mir. = The book pleases me. = I like the book.
It will take some time to get a hang of this, but here are the different situations of gefallen:
es gefällt / sie gefallen mir : I like it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen dir : You like it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen ihm : He likes it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen ihr : She likes it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen uns : We like it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen euch: You all like it/them
es gefällt / sie gefallen ihnen: They/You formal like it
The verb mögen works as the verb to like as well and functions similar to the English verb.
ich mag : I like
du magst : You like
er/sie/es mag : He/she/it likes
wir mögen : We like
ihr mögt : You all like
sie/Sie mögen : They/You formal like
To practice:
Das Essen gefällt uns. - We like the food.
Wir mögen das Essen. - We like the food.
Finally, to express that you like doing an action, like playing or eating, you can attach the word gern to say that you enjoy doing it.
Ich spiele gern. - I like to play.
3) Be able to form sentences with sein and regular verbs.
If you can conjugate sein, to be, you will be able to create sentences of your own.
Ich bin
Du bist
Er/Sie/Es ist
Wir sind
Ihr seid
Sie/sie sind
You have seen four verbs above conjugated: heißen, gefallen, mögen, and sein. The last three verbs were irregular in that it did not follow the typical pattern for conjugations, which you can apply to almost all verbs. With a knowledge of conjugation, you can form sentences with any verb you want.
All verbs end in (ROOT)-en.
Ich -e
Du -st
Er/Sie/Es - t
Wir -en
Ihr -t
Sie/sie -en
Let's look at an application of this: spielen.
Ich spiele. Du spielst. Er spielt. Wir spielen. Ihr spielt. Sie spielen.
Congratulations on completing Lesson 1!
Lernst du Deutsch gern? Continue to Lesson 2 :)