My deustscher companion

Hi all, I have been learning German lately, and I have been spending some time researching and finding an easy-to-glance table or "cheatsheet", I could not find any specific and/or good one, thus I ended up making one.

This is not a german reference, this is more like a pocket book guide or reminder to some little neat things that helps to continue learning german. Just like I said, this is "easy-to-glance", which means that it is compact enough to take a look and information that I need. Note that "compact" can be quite subjective, in my case, it is a metric based on how much information I can see in a 14" laptop while using GNU Emacs (Fira Code 13).

Notice that almost all the time, there will be a trade-off. I could not make it compact without losing some readability, but it does not means it is unintelligible, it just means it has a bigger learning curve.

I know that German may be seen as a daunting language but it can be as easy as it is harder at the beginning. German paid its dividends once all the basics are known, and I meant the basics such as: direct and indirect object. I think German is a "Grammatical language", I.e. It is a language that depends on a better knowledge of grammar and syntax.

I am a native Spanish speaker, I never thought about genitive or accusative cases of the respective syntactical groups that have declension, because Spanish does not this kind of declensions. However, German does have declension for nouns, adjectives and some particles, which at the beginning did not make sense, but now it just makes sense, and it is much more cleaner to get rid of ambiguity than in Spanish.

I think Germans have internalized and fully dominated the process of declension, which makes them more knowledgeable speakers in general, but this also makes them more stricter about languages. German has some quirkiness, which share with a lot germanic languages, such as being a SOV type language but also being an SVO. Nonetheless, I think spanish can be harder, since it does not care about SOV (technically speaking it is a SVO language but it practice it does not care).

In the end, languages are just the tools, but are such tools that could leave you stranded if do not know how to use them. I am not by any means a puritan in languages, languages evolve and change, or are even different by region; but, there are certain things that I do care about languages.

The definite article is a foundation and reference in words declension in german. Almost all the words that have declension follow a pattern based on the article, and if not, it is a remained of how do decline a word.

This is how you have to decrypt each component in this table: Article [function word (AKA functors) declension¹] [weak adjective declension] [mixed adjective declension] [strong adjective declension].

There another conventions though. [--] stands for "use the same suffix as in article", i.e. all the definite articles share the same stem d-, thus the suffix is er for "der". E.g. [--] in Masculine nominative, der, means the following declensions: der [ein|kein] [schöne] [schöner] [schöner].

Some key points to remember or to know:

• all definite articles are also relative pronouns.
• Weak adjectives have definite article, mixed have indefinite article and strong adjetives are alone.

1. This may not apply to all functors, but it is a good starting point.
2. To use them as relative pronouns you must add -en.
3. It noes not apply for ein, but other function words may have declension.

• Perfect: haben / sein (present) … + past particle
• Pluperfect: haben / sein (preterit) … + past particle
• Future: werden (present) … + infinitive
• Future II : werden (present) … + particle + haben/sein
• Conditional clause: Wenn … + Subjunctive II. Bspl. Si fuese rico / if I were rich
• Conditional: werde (würde, subjunctive II) … infinitive
• Passive voice: … werde (present) … + past particle
• Imperfect: werden (past) … + past particle. Nonetheless, notice that this tense can also be created out implicitly from context with the past tense.

This is something that I have found quite difficult to learn, and it is because there is not such a thing in spanish or french, and though English have them (due to its germanic roots), it is rather uncommon to see them in the everyday language usage.

Well, this pronominal adverbs are usually form by "da/won/hier + preposition", it substitutes a noun/pronom + preposition. A pronominal adverb can be used when the pronom is:

1. A personal or demonstrative pronoun.
2. An interrogative pronoun.
3. A relative pronoun.

You can find a table at [3], where you can see many adverbs that are derived from prepositions.

This is a heuristic, which means it is not a 100% accurate mechanism to deduct the gender from a noun, however it could be very useful to start doing the guessing-work. Another great way, is finding the roots/suffix derivation from a proto-germanic (if you believe in generative grammar) or the greek/latin roots.

• "bereit" vs "fertig": "fertig" implies that the nominative object is already finish and there is no more preparation or steps. on the other side, "bereit" means that something is done but there may be more steps or it may be that that the thing itself is still not done. z.B. "Ich bin bereit für die Reise", meaning that I am ready (all the travel preparations are finish, the next step is the travel itself).
• "bezahlen" vs "zahlen": "[…] When the person being paid, or the items or services that are being paid for, are mentioned, then bezahlen is used." This was directly extracted from Wiktionary[1]
• "kaufen" vs "einkaufen" vs "ankaufen" vs "auskaufen": "einkaufen" is the only one that is intransitive, all the other ones need a direct object. "kaufen" can be used almost as a replacement of the others kaufen-verbs, thus I think is not a bad choice (remember that it is transitive). "auskaufen" has a specific usage, it is used something is bought entirely (like a corporate acquisition). and, "ankaufen", which it can be used for collection stuff or used things[2]
• "schlimm" vs "schlecht": "schlecht" involves certain objectivity, it could be use as in "bad work", while "schlimm" could be more subjective and with bad consequences in the subject.
• "schauen"
• "sondern" vs "aber": "sondern" is used when the previous clause is negative.

From time to time I help in wiktionary, and these are some words that I found that could be added to it. Although I am not sure if I should add them when they can be fully understood after dissecting these words:

• Gegenwelten
• Menchengestalten
• Urprinzipien

• An amazing reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_grammar
• German has well defined usages of functors: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_correlatives
• An amazing reference for Deutsch (it is in Deutsch): https://dict.leo.org/grammatik/deutsch/

• [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zahlen#Usage_notes
• [2]: https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1511/difference-between-kaufen-einkaufen-aufkaufen-and-ankaufen
• [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_terms_derived_from_prepositions