10 Summary of Week 1

How did you get on with this first week of the course? You learned about some common but irregular verbs (essen and nehmen) forms. What about regular verb forms? Can you remember all the endings needed in the present tense or do you need to revise them before moving on?

There was a lot of new vocabulary, too. What about the vocabulary learning strategies you have tried this week. Were they helpful? Make a note in your language notebook. Whichever method you decide to use to memorise vocabulary, remember to always learn the gender (der/die/das) with a new noun and any irregular endings with a new verb.

When learning lots of new vocabulary you will find that you can be selective and focus on language that is important to you. For example, if you are a vegetarian, you might be less interested in the varieties of cold meat available at a German breakfast table. Start with what is relevant to you and then build your pool of vocabulary slowly.

Next week, you will start expressing opinions – saying what you like or don’t like to eat or drink. You will also be working more on your pronunciation skills. Before moving on though, reflect a little on what you’ve been learning. In the box below, note down what you’ve found easy, useful or fun, and what was more difficult this week.

You can now go to Week 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .