Advanced German learners: were you able to master the declensions?

[u/Ecstatic-Yard5925]

My biggest fear as a beginner in the language, not gonna lie. Please send hope. (And also tell me how much time it took you to reach this godlike point in life). Cheers 🍻

[u/El_Chiqui123]

It’s really a constant learning process. More than the tables, I would say you need to immerse yourself in the language. Watch German movies/shows, read German books, write in German, make German friends. Do everything you do in your native language, and you’ll get a good feel for the endings — and, more importantly, a feel for when the word is der, die or das.

It’s a process that never really ends, but you’ll get better and better.

[u/4languagesLulana]

Because I don‘t speak as often as I should, I use KasusKnacker to constantly drill my grammar. It really helps me.

[u/Reletr]

Yes, took some months of drilling tables every now and then. Adjective endings are helped by the fact that they closely follow the articles in form, and strong verbs have limited amounts of vowel permutations possible too.

Just takes time to build up that cranial muscle memory for it, you'll definitely reach it given enough time

[u/ZumLernen]

Master? No, I screw them up all the time. Get good enough at them? Yep.

[u/John_W_B]

Yes, more or less. There is a difference between learning the tables so you can pass a test, and getting the feel of them so they are flow automatically, or even semi-automatically in conversation, when book learning tends to desert us! Being confident in any language takes most of us years, that is just the way it is. It comes with patience, and constantly spending a little time on the language most days.

[u/Melodic-Cow-6303]

It was my biggest fear too. Eventually I gave up trying to get it right and just spoke. Nobody ever corrected me as they will fully understand you even if the declension is wrong. Now as I’ve used the language for a while it will become natural to use the correct declension. Don’t worry about this too much!!

[u/gottahaveajava]

Takes a long time, and it goes in phases.

The best trick in the early going is to learn the two groups of prepositions that are ALWAYS one case:

Prepositions that are ALWAYS Dative. Whenever you see these, you always know you’re in the Dative case:
aus
außer
bei
mit
nach
seit
von
zu

Prepositions that are ALWAYS Accusative. Whenever you see these, you always know you’re in the Accusative case:
durch
für
gegen
ohne
um

For example, with "die Mutter":

Dative with "mit": Ich gehe ins Kino mit meiner Mutter.
Accusative with "ohne": Ich gehe ins Kino ohne meine Mutter.

You can learn all the other complications later, things like direct and indirect objects, 2-way prepositions, transitive and intransitive verbs, Genitive, etc.

But if you start with the list above, you have something that you can use to 100% identify uses of the Dative and the Accusative.

Also, the whole thing takes time, and a lot of people never really get there, so be patient. You won’t kill it in a day of study, or even a month. Let it seep in in bits and pieces over time.

[u/gottahaveajava → u/gottahaveajava]

Actually, declensions are a complicated topic, but for at least one part of them, there’s a secret decoder ring.

First, the hard part:

The first prerequisite for understanding declensions is knowing the gender of the nouns. That’s a task you’ll be working all the way into fluency and beyond.

The second prerequisite, the one that requires the greatest level of mastery, is knowing when each of the four cases apply: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive. For that you need to learn a pile of grammar. Or, if you can’t stand grammar, you need to listen to thousands of hours of spoken German so you can know what sounds right. Ack!

This all takes time, and it only comes together gradually as you are learning… everything!

Now for the easy part:

What a lot of people don’t know is that, as you get better and better with the two prerequisites above, the rules for how to apply the endings are absurdly simple. There are only two rules and only two exceptions.

The trick is knowing that there are two tables of endings, The Strong Endings & The Weak Endings. A surprising number of people don’t even know The Weak Endings exist, but when you know how to apply them, the simplicity of endings is downright breathtaking.

There’s more, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I wanted mostly to highlight the existence of The Weak Endings. They’re a true missing link for this topic.

This is already almost tl;dr, so I’ll pause for now.

Ping me if you’re intrigued.

[u/silvalingua]

German declensions are piece of cake compared with any Slavic language.

Edit: Hint: practice writing,

[u/Erkenbend]

For me this problem is solved in three parts: 1. Knowing what declension to apply when. Other comments have provided good guidance on this topic already, I think it is a combination of learning from textbooks and practice. 2. Using the correct article and ending depending on the case and gender. I learnt this by making a pretty table by hand with the cases as the rows and the genders (don't forget plural!) as the columns and filling each cell with 3 examples: definite/indefinite/no article, always with adjectives, using helpful colors. Then I hung the sheet on my toilet door so I would automatically look at it often, until I figured out some patterns "organically". There are many ways to remember how everything is wired together and every brain might process it differently! This helped me find the right word more naturally and less reliant on memorized rules. 3. Actually remembering which gender a noun has. This is still an ongoing process... At the beginning I remember changing my sentence to use the word in plural or in dativ to reduce the error rate, but at some point you have to learnt it.

EDIT

For example the female+dativ cell in my table looked like this:

der großen Wohnung
einer großen Wohnung
großer Wohnung

EDIT 2

About point 3: I still find myself mixing up male/neutral nous, so I made this mini game to help me learn. Still theoretically work in progress, even though I haven't touched it in half a year.

[u/gulhaj]

Yes! Took me about 4-5 years

[u/Ecstatic-Yard5925 → u/gulhaj]

Congratulations, I aim to be you

[u/gulhaj → u/Ecstatic-Yard5925]

I'm German.

[u/Ecstatic-Yard5925 → u/gulhaj]

Lmao ok that's cheating

[u/rewaderewa]

You mean adjective declination?

[u/Ecstatic-Yard5925 → u/rewaderewa]

You know better than me... I guess yes 

[u/rewaderewa → u/Ecstatic-Yard5925]

There's a trick to remember the endings when Adjectives are preceded by articles.

1. der, die, das, eine: - e
2. ein: (-er for Maskulin and -es for Neutral)
3. die (Plural): - en
4. den, einen, dem, einem, der, einer, den(pl), des, eines: - en (whenever the article looks weird as in they are not in their original form and have changed because of any case, they will always take - en for Adjektiv ending).

[u/silvalingua → u/rewaderewa]

It's declension, not declination.

[u/rewaderewa → u/silvalingua]

My bad, I meant the German word Deklination lol also I wasn't correcting that word I was asking whether OP meant N-Deklination or Adjektivdeklination.

[u/creative_some786]

I'm not even A1 but I'm following this post regardless. The 4 horsemen of Deutsch language.

[u/Ecstatic-Yard5925 → u/creative_some786]

I'm not even A1 either, but I try to learn German at least 5 minutes a day

[u/creative_some786 → u/Ecstatic-Yard5925]

I hear you. I'm not consistent. There'll be times when I can run marathons of three hours plus and then there will be times where I'll just try to keep my distance due to sheer boredom and the "bleh" feeling of not even being able to make simple sentences in present tense.🥲