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KS3 · German · Year 8

A house move: adjective endings with definite articles (accusative)

New home: adjective endings in nominative, accusative and dative

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Your learning goal

I can describe the features and contents of a house using definite articles and nominative and accusative adjective endings.

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A house move: adjective endings with definite articles (accusative): slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.

Original teaching resources

The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.

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What you’ll learn

I can describe the features and contents of a house using definite articles and nominative and accusative adjective endings.

Key learning points

  • The sound-symbol correspondences [eu] and [äu] have the same sound, which is different from [au].
  • Cognates help you understand new words more quickly, since they look or sound similar to words in your own language.
  • It’s important to be aware of false friends - words that are similar in two languages but have different meanings.
  • German adjectives take endings before a noun — you need to know the noun’s gender and case to get them right.
  • The accusative case is used for the direct object, after most verbs and some prepositions.

Words to know

false friend
word that looks or sounds similar in two languages but has a different meaning
definite article
words 'der', 'die', 'das' meaning ‘the’
accusative
case used for the direct object in a sentence, after most verbs and some prepositions

Common mistakes

All German words that look or sound similar to words in English are cognates.

Similar looking and sounding words are only cognates if they share the same meaning in both languages. When the meaning is different, similar words are called false friends.

For parents, carers and teachers
  • Teachers could increase the written challenge in the final Task C3 task by using English adjectives in each gap. Alternatively, comprehension would be challenged by providing the base forms of all the German adjectives in jumbled order below the text.
IllumED Slides adapts “A house move: adjective endings with definite articles (accusative)”, German, by Oak National Academy ↗. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Slides and recall practice adapted by IlluminatED; no publisher endorsement. Restricted lessons have listing information only.