german grammar

Guten Morgen Grammar: Relative clauses are about togetherness

You know that guy who lives down the road and always parks his car across the zebra crossing? The car which has a lovely vinyl sticker of a soft-pornographic silhouette on its bumper? Well it doesn’t matter whether you know him or not, the second clause in each of those previous sentences were relative clauses: clauses which refer back to a noun which was mentioned in the previous clause, i.e. ‘..who lives down the road…’ (the guy), ‘which has a lovely sticker…’ (the car). We use them in English and German all the time; if you don’t believe me, try...

Guten Morgen Grammar: Weak masculine nouns, and other life truths reflected in grammar

You guys: first of all, I am sorry for the delay in posts at the moment. As I’ll explain in an upcoming entry, life has taken an unfortunate u-turn and I haven’t had much time to blog. But more importantly, this post has been a long time coming because I have been working on a very special present for all of you. At the end of this post. Now you just HAVE to read on. Today in Guten Morgen Grammar we’re going to talk about a special kind of noun in German which tends to catch a lot of people...

Guten Morgen Grammar: Let’s talk about bzw

Boy howdy, German loves abbreviations. Particularly in emails and official municipal writings, the writing is peppered with odd little fragments like bzw and usw and z.B….omg, it’s like fml, seriously wtf. ANYWAY, enough whimsy. Let’s look at some of the most popular ones, and how to use them properly.   usw Stands for: und so weiter – etcetera This is probably the easiest one to use – just throw it in there wherever you would use etc in English, for example at the end of a list or extended description. Just remember that with usw you don’t put a full-stop/period...