German Learning Resources

The previous lesson demonstrated how to correctly order verbs in a sentence and showed that comprehension of a German sentence relies more on understanding and recognising the cases rather than word order. Word order is much more flexible in German: elements can be moved around in a German sentence (excluding the finite verb) without affecting the overall meaning of a sentence.

The word order ( Wortstellung ) is the order that the elements of a sentence are placed in, and are used to derive meaning from the sentence. Word order plays a very important role in correctly discerning the meaning of an English sentence. In German, however, it is more flexible, as this lesson will demonstrate.