First Steps in German

The Sounds of German

To learn the sounds of German, search YouTube for "sentences Germans" or something similar. What you want is a video with a native speaker reading a bunch of (simple) sentences. Repeat after the speaker as carefully as you can to learn how to pronounce German. The orthography is pretty nice so this shouldn't be too difficult. If you want a written guide to pronouncing German, go learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Many dictionaries (e.g. those by Langenscheidt or Collins, which I use) will have IPA-based transcriptions for both German and English words. Note you can learn the IPA by seeing how the IPA transcriptions in a dictionary correspond to English words you already know how to pronounce.

When looking up words, make sure to pay attention to where stress falls—different dictionaries will have different conventions for marking this, so make sure to look through your dictionary's usage guide.

Resources

Purchasing any decent phrase book is highly recommended for inexpensive, portable learning. This is especially useful if you actually intend to speak German (not just read, listen, etc).

It is useful to learn how to use an actual dictionary as opposed to just relying on a service like Google Translate for quick translations. The main reason for this is that dictionaries contain useful grammatical information that you will need to understand in order to form your own (correct) sentences.

• WordReference.com Dictionaries

Grammar

The following information can be found in any grammar resource or (comprehensive) phrasebook. I'm putting this here so I have it conveniently available to refer to and study.

Articles

When memorizing nouns, do memorize their genders. e.g. remember die Kunst "art"—feminine nominative definite article with the associated noun. Learning phrases is a good way to learn multiple words at once in context. For example, having learned die Kunst, you can then learn a phrase like Techniken der Kunst "art techniques" which uses Kunst in the genitive case.

Definite Articles

When first learning these charts, it may be helpful to remember patterns spatially—which rows/columns look similar above? That is why some not-so-pretty but distinct coloration has been added above!

Indefinite Articles

Note that kein is the negative indefinite article, used in saying things like "I don't have a dictionary".

Demonstratives

Note the similarities between the endings of the demonstratives and the articles.