News — Reading and Grammar

German Grammar

Articles and Nouns When starting to read German texts, apart from a basic vocabulary, it is nice to have a basic understanding of the grammar. It will not demand much study time, just read this blog or a wiki page and see what you can encounter. The most basic difference is that German nouns start with a capital, but there is more complex stuff about articles and nouns. For example, the English article and noun combinations "the village", "the city" and "the state" translate in German to "das Dorf", "die Stadt" and "der Staat". The first one as the neuter, the...


The Steps To Learn A Language Fast & Easy

Step 1: Get A Basic Understanding Maybe you already have a base vocabulary of the language that you want to learn. You might have picked it up at school, but we all know that after language education at school where not everyone is very motivated most of us end up with just that. A basic understanding. If you don't know anything about the foreign language you want to learn, get yourself any second hand coursebook from which you can pick up the highest frequency words and some basic grammatical lessons. Or see if there is a Blog article on our website already...


Dutch Grammar

Dutch Nouns Dutch grammar is similar to German grammar and to a lesser extent English grammar. For Dutch nouns, like with German, there are different definite articles ("de" and "het" both meaning "the") for which the correct article has to be learned by experience (it is "het dorp (the village)" but "de stad (the city)"). For this, extensive reading is perfect. Words and their articles are assimilated naturally. When you read a lot of Dutch texts you will only encounter the correct combinations of nouns and their articles, and as such it will become part of your memory. For the...


French Grammar

Verb or Adjective Inflections There's no need to cram all French grammar before you have done any reading. The best way to acquire new knowledge is to experience it. So start reading and when you run into a peculiar verb form in French just look it up on a chart. Before starting to read French, it is useful to distinguish between language components and be able to recognize for example verb or adjective inflections. The main component of French grammar is conjugation of the verbs. For verbs in the present tense this is the same as with the English difference between...


The Need For Grammar

Learning Grammar In natural acquisition theory, grammar is not learned but acquired by long term observation of the language patterns. That means you hear your native language only used according to certain rules, which together make up the grammar. Accordingly you use it the same way. Grammar governs the composition of words from roots, and sentences from words in a language. When learning a second language, there is often much stress on the notion to acquire it artificially. Bits of grammar will be combined with new words and a short text where both the new words and the grammar are...