Learning German Worksheets

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Learning a new language like German requires a lot of practice. Students need opportunities to listen to it, speak it, read it and write it. They need to understand the grammar and to remember the vocabulary. Worksheets provide an opportunity to practice these skills independently or in small groups.

1 Workbooks and Websites

Worksheets are available in many learning German workbooks. Some of the most effective are the Instant Immersion series and the Rosetta Stone series of books. A website filled with online worksheets is Languages Online, which has pages for beginners through experts.

Worksheets ask you to match English and German words, fill in German sentences with the correct words, choose the subject and the object of a sentence and choose the correct verb tense and word case to use in a phrase or sentence. Since all German words are categorized as male, female or neuter, many worksheets focus on agreement between articles and nouns.

Vocabulary Builder

2 Make Your Own

Create your own German worksheets to practice the language in different ways. Make word scrambles, word match-ups, crossword puzzles and word searches. All of these can enhance German vocabulary and spelling skills. Also use a writing program to create fill in the blank German sentences or paragraphs, multiple choice quizzes and reading comprehension paragraphs and questions.

3 Printables

Printable worksheets emphasizing vocabulary are available free online. They provide practice for associating German words with pictures of common items like clothing and food or with English phrases and their German counterparts. Most of the free printables are separated by category, so that one worksheet covers numbers and another covers colors and so on. To mix types of words, you will probably have to make your own or pay for worksheets.

For more advanced students, there are some reading comprehension activities available, either as paragraphs with accompanying multiple choice questions or as Cloze activities (many fill in the blank sentences put together into a cohesive paragraph).

Finally, there are many purely informational sheets. While these worksheets don't require students to answer any questions, they make excellent study guides. They give information on the German alphabet and pronunciation, verb conjugation, word genders, articles, word meanings and common phrases.

Jennifer Zimmerman is a former preschool and elementary teacher who has been writing professionally since 2007. She has written numerous articles for The Bump, Band Back Together, Prefab and other websites, and has edited scripts and reports for DWJ Television and Inversion Productions. She is a graduate of Boston University and Lewis and Clark College.

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