When you have finished this lesson you can:

• Tell the time

• Name dates

• Ask when someone is available to meet

Before he leaves, Steve asks Maria where he can buy a map of Vienna.

Touch the video to start it.

Arrange correctly: Click at the speaker-button on the right and drag them to the corresponding number on the left side.

Arrange correctly: Click at the speaker-button on the right and drag them to the corresponding number on the left side.

Austrians and Germans try to be punctual and rarely go anywhere without a deal. If they can see they arrive late, they call or send a text message.

The simpliest way to tell the time is saying what you see at a digital watch, for example: 7:42

! Note, that you have to say “Uhr” (o’clock) after the hour and before the minutes.

Of course, there are a lot of other ways and some regional differences how to telling the time.

It is the same for the specification of 5 minutes before or after the full hour.

In German, it is a little tricky when we have 30 minute left to the next hour. You use the word: halb but then you add the next hour!

                        Example: Es ist halb zwölf. ⇒ It’s half (way to) twelve.

Moreover, there are many regional differences how Germans tell the quarter hours. It does not make sense to learn all the different terms and meanings. The best way to exclude misunderstandings is to repeat the time you’ve been told with other words.

If you specify the time as indicated on a digital clock, we use 24 hours, for example we say 23:10 other than 11:10. At all other times we only use numbers up to 12 and understand the meaning (am or pm) from the context.

The names of the days come from planets visible to the naked eye of the geocentric world view (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn), which were considered at the time of naming themselves as gods. When the Germans got to know these names in the 4th century, they renamed them according to the names of the Germanic deities, who were roughly equivalent to the Roman gods. In the course of the Christianization it was tried to push back these pagan names, which succeeded in the German-speaking countries only on Wednesday and Saturday.

German has special future tenses but in the spoken language these are rarely used while talking about things you will do. You simply use a time specification to express the future (like "tomorrow", "in two days" ...).

It’s the same for the weekend:

In German, the past tense is rarely used in the spoken language. Instead of past, you use the perfect tense to tell something from the past.

„Auxiliary verb“ („Hilfsverb“) here means that at position 2 in the main clause there is a verb that helps us to construct the perfect tense in German grammar. The auxiliary verb does not have any meaning by itself, it has only a grammatical function. The real activity is expressed with the verb in participle II at the end of the sentence.

Verbs about Movement and Change of state use the verb „sein“.

All other verbs use „haben“.

The conjugation of “haben” and “sein”

Arrange correctly: Click at a verb on the left and drag them to the right pronoun on the right side.

Regular verbs builds the participle with the prefix “ge-” and  the ending “-t”

Examples for the perfect past:

ich habe gewohnt, du hast gemacht, ihr habt gekocht, sie haben gearbeitet

all verbs without movement ⇒ that’s why build with “haben”

Like the conjugation of irregular verbs you just have to learn the “irregular" participles.

You can ask in general about meeting times:

Or you can ask more directly:

When you want to thank something, you use  “danke für ….” + accusative