Chapter 2: Focus on Nouns II: Grammar 4

Grammatical structures show correlations, or relationships, within the sentence.
	If you were a chemist and read an article in a German chemical journal, you'd probably understand many of the words. Technical terms do not vary much, if at all, from German to English because most are Latin or Greek based. Nevertheless, it's still important to be able to analyze the grammatical structures as well, so as not to miss important correlations within the sentences and draw incorrect conclusions. Take this second example:
	Der Präsident gratuliert dem Minister für seine erfolgreiche Intervention im Jugoslawien-Konflikt.
	In this sentence you have the following elements: der Präsident gratuliert dem Minister für seine erfolgreiche Intervention im Jugoslawien Konflikt An English speaker with little knowledge of German will understand the content of most of the words because they're nearly the same as in English. But how would he/she know who congratulates whom and that the conflict is not a consequence of the intervention? The English speaker would probably correctly guess the meaning of the sentence because he/she would refer to his/her English knowledge of the verb "congratulate" ("gratulieren") and of word order in statement sentences: The verb "congratulate" always stands with an actor who congratulates and an object who is congratulated. The reason for the congratulation is also usually mentioned. If a single noun stands before "congratulates" and one behind, the English speaker will assume that the former is the actor, the latter the object of the act. This agrees with normal English word order. Unfortunately, this assumption doesn't always hold in German, where positions of actor and object may be inverted, mostly for emphasis:
	Dem Minister gratuliert der Präsident für seine erfolgreiche Intervention im Jugoslawien-Konflikt. The president congratulates the minister for his successful intervention in the Yugoslav conflict.

Importance of grammatical clues

You may have noticed that the only differences between this sentence and the first are slight changes in the articles.

These structural signs should not be disregarded but must be analyzed.

The big letters in the sentence
"Dem Minister gratuliert der Präsident für seine erfolgreiche Intervention im Jugoslawien-Konflikt"
indicate the case of the articles and, hence, identify actor and object of the verb.

You'll learn about the German case system in Chapter 12. Right now, you only need to appreciate that analyzing grammatical clues can give you important information for understanding texts. That's why in this course we'll teach you not only reading strategies and a basic vocabulary but also grammatical principles so that you can identify and understand grammatical signals.

If you've learned other languages you'll see that the grammar input in this course is structured differently:
The objective is not to produce grammatically correct statements but to decode grammatical structures, all in the service of understanding a text.