I had a breif grammar lesson from my father in law today as we passed on the stair case. I wanted to tell him that I had put a six pack of beer in the fridge, and he was welcome to them because I had taken a few from his stash earlier in the week.

I won’t bother writing the way I said it… I’ll just write down his response.

Nehmen – to take

Ich nehme

du nimmst

er,sire,es nimmt

Ihr nehmt

sie nehmen

Du hast genommen!

After a little research, it seems that abnything in the past tense is genommen.

Ich habe genommen

du hast genommen

er, sie, es hat genommen

etc. etc.

So what I should have said was:

Hallo, bitte nimmst du ein parr bier aus dem Kühlschrank, weil letzte Woche Ich habe zwei flaschen aus dein bier genommen.

Roughly translated: Hello, please take a few beers from the fridge because last week I took two of your beers.

Likewise, anything in the future tense takes the form; nehmen.

Ich werde nehmen – I will take

Du wirst nehmen – you will take

Once you get to the stage where you are starting to attempt to form sentences in German, you’ll start to need verbs.

Note: This whole page only covers present tense. If you are interested in some good resources on other tenses, you are in the wrong place. (… as of June 2009. Give me another 6 months.

The most useful thing that I have found to date is the consistency in the way that verbs change depending on the subject. Using the verb “haben” as an example, note the bold italic letters.

haben – to have (have, have got, own, possess, wield.. etc.)

This is worth memorising:

• Ich habe
• du hast
• Sie haben
• er, sie, es hat
• wir haben
• ihr habt
• sie haben

And this is the other bit worth memorising:

1. If you are using “du”, then the verb almost always ends in st. Eg. Du hast,  du laufst
2. If you are using “Ich” then they usually end in e. Eg. Ich habe, Iach laufe
3. If you are speaking about someone else specifically, it’s er, sie or es and you usually use t. Eg. er hat, sie lauft
4. Remember that all the Sie’s, (I.e. Sie – formal “you”, sie – she and sie – they) are the same, so you can go off the change for er, sie, es.

Obviously there is a whole lot more to it than this, but if you can remember these little hints as you speak, then you’ll guess about 70% right when you have to grab a new verb that you have just learnt and mash it into a sentence.

Google has a great little translation tool that you can install into your Google home page in seconds.

http://translate.google.com/translate_t#

Definitely worth checking out.

The thing that I really like aboutthe Google translator is that it remembers which language I want, so when I open my home page it is already set to English to German (or vice versa depending on which way I translated last time.)

Another simillar tool is Yahoo Babel Fish which is also very useful.

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt