German · Chapter 17 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer
Imperative mood
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
German commands drop the pronoun, not the person
For most verbs, a du-command is just the du-form of the present tense with -st removed: du kommst becomes Komm! Stems ending in -t or -d keep an -e (Warte!), and a-to-Ă€ verbs lose the umlaut (Fahr!). Get the du-form solid first, since it covers every friend, sibling and pet you will ever tell to do something.
Komm her!
sein has its own three commands, learned as vocabulary
Only Seid matches the present tense (ihr seid). Sei cannot be built from du bist, and Seien Sie uses the subjunctive stem sei- rather than Sie sind, so there is no shortcut to deriving them. Learn all three together as a fixed set, and they stop being a trap.
Sei ruhig! Seid pĂŒnktlich! Seien Sie so nett.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 8 min readPractice
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 19 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 5 of 15 in this chapter