German Grammar Practice Online

German grammar is the part of the language that punishes approximation. You can guess a noun from context. You cannot guess whether the article should be den or dem and be consistently right. Online grammar practice is useful when it forces that choice at a named CEFR level, then lets you retry the items you missed instead of rereading a table of endings until they feel familiar.

On My Path, grammar is one of four skills in the General German bank — alongside vocabulary, reading, and writing — across CEFR A1 to C2. This article is the grammar slice: what the skill is for, the kind of problem it targets, and how the Level filter plus a sitting actually work. The product overview is German practice test: CEFR A1 to C2. The sitting walkthrough is learn German with practice tests.

What "grammar" means as a skill filter

Grammar here is a closed skill on a practice card, not a course module with a syllabus you can screenshot. You pick General German on Education, you set Level to one CEFR band, and you set the skill to grammar. The bank then draws from that cell. You do not get a public itemised list of every construction in the cell, and this article will not invent one. What you get is a sitting whose items are grammar items at that band.

That is already a stronger object than "do some German." A mixed sitting can be survived with vocabulary and a feel for the passage. A grammar sitting cannot. The option that looks like English word order is often available, and it is often wrong.

Treat the filter as a diagnostic first and a drill second. If you do not know whether grammar is the gap, sit one 10-item grammar paper at the band you use for reading. If that score is clearly worse than your reading or vocabulary at the same band, you have a skill gap, not a mysterious "German is hard" problem. Then you lengthen the sittings.

The kind of thing grammar practice targets

German has a small set of systems that show up at every band and get more expensive as the sentence gets longer. Practice at this skill is aimed at those systems. The examples below are the type of demand, not a claim about any one item in the bank.

Cases. Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive. The article, the pronoun, and often the adjective have to agree with a role in the sentence, not with a translation of the English preposition you have in your head. A1 and A2 spend a lot of life on accusative versus dative after common prepositions and on the object of a verb you already know. Higher bands still fail here, just inside longer noun phrases, where the case is easy to lose because the noun is far from the article.

Word order. German is not free word order with cases as decoration. Verb-second in main clauses, verb-final in subordinate clauses, the finite verb and the participle or particle splitting around the middle field — these are structural. A sitting that asks you to complete or repair a sentence is often asking whether you still know where the verb goes when a weil-clause or a relative clause arrives. People who speak fluently in a classroom still write the English order under time pressure. That is a grammar miss, not a vocabulary miss.

Adjective endings. Strong, weak, mixed. The ending depends on the article in front of the adjective and the case and gender of the noun after it. This is the system everyone understands in a table and drops in a sentence. It is also the system that makes a C1 noun phrase look like C1 instead of like an A2 phrase with a fancy noun. Grammar practice at the higher bands is not "new grammar" so much as the old grammar applied to heavier phrases.

Other familiar loads belong in the same skill even when they are not named in the filter: tense and mood (including Konjunktiv in reported speech and polite forms), agreement, reflexive pronouns, da-/wo- compounds, and the difference between a separable verb and a prefix that does not separate. Again: kinds of demand, not a catalogue of our items.

If a construction is new to you, a grammar sitting is a harsh place to meet it for the first time. Learn the rule from a reference or a lesson, then use the sitting to retrieve it. Retrieval is the job. The table on the wall is not.

Why the CEFR band has to stay single

An A1 grammar item and a C1 grammar item can both be "about cases" and still not belong in one score. A1 is often a short sentence with one decision. C1 is often a decision buried in a clause that already asked you to do two other things. Mixing them produces a percentage that does not tell you which band you can actually write at.

My Path therefore requires one Level per sitting. The axis is labelled Level, not Grade. Multi-band pools are refused. Pick A2 or pick B1; do not pick both and hope for an average. The same rule runs through Education on the maths side — why grade bands matter in practice — because "easy" is not a property of an item in isolation. It is a property of an item for a named band.

A useful pattern when you are between bands: sit B1 grammar for a week, then sit one A2 grammar paper as a control. If A2 is not close to clean, you were practising above the band where the endings are actually available under a clock. Drop the pride, sit A2 until retry-wrong gets short, then return to B1. That is faster than collecting B1 scores that never move.

How to set the sitting for grammar

Size is 10, 20, or 60. Default 20. For grammar, 10 is enough to see whether this band is the right band. Twenty is the session you should be able to finish without your attention collapsing. Sixty is for volume after the error types have become familiar — not for the first time you meet adjective endings in a sitting.

Timer is off, relaxed, or exam mode. Grammar under a clock is a different skill from grammar with a pause. If your next real test is timed, sit exam mode at least some of the time. If you are still building the rule, turn the timer off so the miss is about the form, not about panic. Do not compare an untimed 90% with a timed 60% as if they were the same measurement.

Feedback is immediate or at the end. Immediate feedback is the right default while a system is still forming: you see the ending you chose, you see the ending that was required, you go on. End-of-sitting feedback is the right default when you want to know what you can do without a nudge after every item. If you only ever use immediate feedback, you will overestimate what you can do on a paper.

Navigation is free or forward-only. Free navigation plus flag is how you park a sentence that needs a second look. Forward-only is closer to a test. Skip ("I don't know") is allowed in both. Skipping a sentence whose structure you cannot parse is better than guessing for five minutes and poisoning the rest of the sitting.

The topic filter, when you use it, narrows inside the skill. It is a closed vocabulary, not an open search. If you leave it wide, you get the band's grammar mix. If you set it, you get a thinner slice. Use the wide mix to find the gap; use a narrower filter once you know which system is failing.

Review, retry, mastery

After the sitting you see score, correct, wrong, and skipped. Retry wrong is the grammar workflow. A miss on cases is not corrected by reading a new explanation and walking away. It is corrected by seeing the same kind of decision again while the previous miss is still in working memory, then again a day or two later.

Retry flagged is for the items you were unsure about even if you got them right. Those are often more valuable than the clean misses, because they are the items where the rule is not yet automatic. A full retake is for when you change band, size, or timer and want a clean paper, not for when you want to memorise item 14.

AI gap analysis can summarise a sitting if your plan and token balance allow it. Read it after you have looked at the wrong pile, not instead. A paragraph that says "adjective endings" is only useful if you then sit adjective-ending decisions. The sitting is the work.

Mastery on the hub is per-topic, complexity 1–5, with a topic master badge at 80%. Grammar topics will move slowly if you only sit mixed German. They move when you sit the grammar skill at one band often enough for the bar to mean something. Streaks and badges exist; they are not the point. The point is that B1 grammar this month is not a mystery percentage called "German."

Grammar versus the other three skills

Keep grammar from stealing the whole week. Written German also needs vocabulary and reading. A clean grammar sitting with a weak vocabulary sitting means you can decline words you cannot recall. A clean vocabulary sitting with a weak grammar sitting means you can name the noun and still miss the article.

A practical split: two grammar sittings and one reading sitting in a week at the same band, with vocabulary on the days you only have ten minutes. Writing items, when you draw them, are production-adjacent; they will expose the same case and word-order failures grammar sittings expose, with more context around them. You do not need a separate "writing course" on this platform to benefit from that.

Do not use reading as a substitute for grammar practice. You can understand a B1 text and still be unable to produce the subordinate-clause word order that text used. Recognition and production are related; they are not the same measurement. That is why the skill filter exists.

What this is not

This is not a Goethe-Institut paper, not an ÖSD paper, and not Abitur. My Path is not affiliated with those bodies, and Abitur is not in the live catalogue. A grammar sitting is practice against a CEFR-shaped bank. It will not issue a certificate and it will not match an official paper's exact task types.

There is no listening and no speaking. Oral case-marking and the grammar you can hear in fast speech are outside this product. If that is the exam you are sitting, add a source that has audio. Do not infer oral control from a written grammar score.

There is also no claim that completing our grammar filter gets you into a university programme or past a visa language hurdle. Those decisions use official scores. Use this to make the written grammar you already need more available under a clock.

Who should sit grammar on purpose

Sit grammar on purpose if your writing or homework comes back with article and word-order marks, if you freeze on adjective endings, or if you can read at a band but cannot complete a sentence at that band. Sit it if you are a returning learner whose vocabulary survived the gap better than the endings did — a very common pattern.

Skip it as your only mode if you are at true beginner and do not yet have a handful of verbs and nouns to hang the endings on. In that case sit A1 vocabulary first, then A1 grammar. Grammar without words is a crossword with no clues.

Teachers can set one band, grammar, 20 items, review at end, as homework. That is a discussable object. "Do some grammar online" is not.

Plans

Grammar sittings are Education, and Education is Student or Monthly. For Me and Around Me do not include it. Student is €9.99/month with no trial — Get Student — €9.99/month — and unlimited Education. Monthly is €19.99/month with a 7-day trial at €1.99. GBP and PLN mirrors exist. Details live on the Student plan and Education on My Path.

Sister languages use the same skill grid if you are maintaining more than German: English, Spanish, French.

A sitting you can describe

"B1, grammar, 20 items, timer off, retry wrong." That sentence is the whole method. Change one variable at a time. When the wrong pile shrinks, turn the timer on. When the timer is comfortable, consider B2 as a visit, not as a home, until B1 stays high.

Open Education and set the skill to grammar at one Level. See plans if you need Student or Monthly first.