German Lessons
Here are several beginner lessons which will have you speaking basic German in minutes. These are words, phrases and pronunciation tricks that give you the building blocks to being able to speak real German in less than half an hour from now:

Pronunciation
Being able to speak and understand the sounds of German words is crucial to learning the language. Fortunately, German pronunciation is actually much simpler than it seems. Once you nail down a few basic rules, it is easy to properly read German out loud, and even have an intelligible conversation with a native speaker. Here is a helpful guide to German pronunciation.

German greetings
The BBC provides an excellent starting point to learning conversational German. The interactive lessons include audio pronunciation along with the written words, and plausible scenarios that not only make it easy to follow along, but provide you with real-life German phrases that you will use immediately upon touching down in a German-speaking country.

Numbers in German
Here is where you can learn how to count in German. We use numbers in our daily life more often than we realize, and so do German speakers. Not only is this a key part of learning a foreign language, but it’s really easy. After all, it should only take eight, maybe nine minutes to get the first ten numbers down.

Cognates
Cognates are words that have the roughly the same meaning and pronunciation in two languages. Native English speakers have a head start when learning German, because there are so many German cognates in English. For example, the German word Vater (pronounced FAHT-air) is "father" in English. Kalt means "cold," and so on. Here is a list of 1300 English and German cognates, for starters.

But beware of false cognates! Also called “false friends,” these are German words that look like English words, but mean something else entirely. Thorough study of real cognates versus these imposters will quickly put you ahead of most students in the classroom.

German verbs
Here are ten essential verbs and their English definition. Knowing the meaning of these German words in English will help you get ahead right away.

haben - to have
sein - to be
tun - to do
kommen- to come
sehen- to see
werden- to become
gehen- to go
essen- to eat
machen- to make
lieben - to love

Conjugating verbs in German is actually quite easy. Whereas romance languages have a distinct variation on each use of the same verb, German somewhat mirrors English in that a verb only rarely and even then moderately changes its form depending upon what or whom is being talked about.

Here are conjugations for three of the most fundamental verbs in German. Note the irregularity of sein:

haben
ich habe - I have
du hast - you have
er/sie/es hat - he/she/it has
wir haben - we have
Ihr habt - you (pl; frml) have
sie/Sie haben - they/you (frml) have

sein
ich bin - I am
du bist - you are
er/sie/es ist - he/she/it is
wir sind - we are
Ihr seid - you (pl; frml) are
sie/Sie sind - they are

kommen
ich komme - I come
du kommst - you come
er/sie/es kommt - he/she/it comes
wir kommen - we come
Ihr kommt - you (pl; frml) come
sie/Sie kommen - they come

Need more? Here is an online German verb conjugator for both regular and irregular German verb conjugations.

German grammar
German differs from English in that words much more commonly change their form according to something called "case." German has four cases which are important to learn about. They are called nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.

These cases also exist in English, and sometimes English words change according to case. For example, the pronoun "I" becomes "me" when the case changes from nominative to accusative. But word forms change much more commonly in German, and it's important to understand what's going on.

Before you get overwhelmed, however, there are two pieces of good news. First, while it is important to learn the four German cases correctly, you don't have to know them to start speaking German right away. And while you won't learn the cases overnight, a native speaker will understand perfectly what you are trying to say even if your cases are not 100% precise.

The second piece of good news is that the unique changes applied to the genitive case are increasingly being replaced by the dative form, making life easier for everybody. Still, it’s good to know about the genitive, especially if you want to study literature and/or older texts.

Here is an explanation of German cases.

More online German lessons.

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