Key learning points

1. Knowing the German sound-symbol correspondences well supports pronunciation and understanding of new words.
2. Some famous German city names are different from English and need good pronunciation for recognition and clarity.
3. The nominative case identifies the subject in a sentence, i.e., who is doing the action of a verb.
4. Words for 'the' and 'a' change according to the grammatical gender of the noun.
5. 'Wie sagt man das auf Deutsch?' is a key question to ask the meaning of unknown words.

Keywords

• SSC - stands for sound-symbol correspondence, refers to the relationship between letters and their sounds

• Nominative case - used to describe the subject of a sentence, i.e., who or what is doing the action of the verb

• Grammatical gender - way to categorise all nouns as either feminine, masculine or neuter

Common misconception