German · Chapter 20 · Lesson 2 · Grammar primer

Word order

Prescribed by the AQA specification - revisited.

The short version

The German verb is always the second element

Start a sentence with heute, morgen or dann and the verb still comes next, with the subject pushed in behind it. Heute ich gehe is the classic English-speaker mistake; the verb holds second place whatever you put first.

Heute gehe ich nach Hause.

Today I am going home.

Weil sends the verb to the end, denn does not

Both mean because. After weil the conjugated verb moves to the end of the clause; after denn the clause keeps normal verb-second order. If a weil clause is tying you in knots mid-sentence, denn does the same job with the order you already know.

Ich bleibe zu Hause, weil ich krank bin.

I am staying at home because I am ill.

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.

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Practice

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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 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 2 of 6 in this chapter

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