About the Podcast

The podcast is aimed at explaining the world of German grammar. Its aim is to be accessible to all levels of learner, but on its own it's not intended to be enough to teach German - in fact very little German is used in the podcast. That's because I figure there are plenty of places you can find content in German, from elsewhere on the web to schools, evening classes and university. What tends to be in shorter supply is a thorough and easily accessible explanation of German grammar.

Grammar itself provides an understanding of a language that takes you from being able to parrot phrases someone else has given you to being able to use the words you've learnt as building blocks to create new sentences.

About Me

So who am I to be making the podcast? Well, I am a lover of grammar. The stuff really makes sense of language to me. I learnt German at school and hated it - no one wanted to explain the structures to me. I could see that there were structures in English that made it easier to work out what was going on. I knew you could form a past tense by adding -ed to most verbs, I knew you added an -s to make a plural, and I thought that there couldn't be any structures in German, otherwise people would explain to me how they worked to save me a lot of time and effort. So I gave up German.

Fortunately, I ended up doing my gap year in Germany as an au pair, learning German in classes for foreigners, and then I ended up studying German at university. And finally, people wanted to teach me grammar. And German turns out to be a good language to learn the grammar of. If you learn a rule in German, it applies to most of the language - maybe there are a couple of exceptions, and OK, some verbs are annoyingly irregular, but basically, German grammar will get you a long way when you're trying to produce German sentences and understand the language. So I was lucky, I get grammer, it stuck in my head, and I graduated with a first class degree with distinction in the spoken and written language.

Since then, I've worked as a translation checker, and now have a job where I get to translate financial documents. I've also had a go at teacher training, but quit, partly because 30 11-year-olds in a room really give me stage fright, but partly because teaching theory at the time dictated (and as far as I know still dictates) that language teachers focus on speaking the foreign language to their pupils and avoid teaching them what was for me the interesting bit: the grammar. So now, I'm making the German GrammarPod, to try and pass on the love and understanding of grammar that motivated me to want to teach in the first place, but without the bit where I need to stand up in front of 30 11-year-olds to deliver it.

Below is a picture of me and my husband:

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