Hint: forget "order"
Read the article here.
One of the greatest struggles people encounter when picking up German is the notoriously unintuitive word order.
Recently, I've picked up German myself and decided that sentence structure might be a good place to start learning the grammar from since
knowing it would help me both understand and generate new sentences more easily,
it would provide a framework where I could fit every other grammar rule.
Plus I wanted to try analyzing syntax using that interesting theory I'd just read about in my introductory linguistics textbook.
So I did I brief search and found an exhaustive article on German sentence structure, drawing X-bar structures of the example sentences under every rule.
Sweet Chomsky, the article (and others on the topic) was full of "it's difficult to define but" and "it's hard even for the natives" and, my favourite, "it's more of an art than a science" for something that, given the right tools, was indeed simple science. As I drew the trees, I realized that whole lists on where to put what type of word in what situation were actually describing the same single structure. Reading all the rules and exceptions, I could only exclaim in a half-excited, half-exasperated, eager-to-help voice to the obviously listening article, "But guys, that's just the same thing over and over again!"
Of course, I couldn't blame the writers. It's not their fault they didn't know about generative grammar. I'm not even sure if most linguists have good understanding of it. But here, knowing just the basics, I could learn all the complexities of the rules in a few days by transforming them all in just a single rule, or rather a tree:
At first, it may look weird and complex, but that's just because you haven't tried it out yet. I promise it's easier than any other method I've seen. Unless, of course, you don't care about understanding and prefer to drill the correct sentence into your head through consuming content made by natives, which is great but perhaps not as effective as when combined with a little practical linguistics.
In this article, I share my framework so that you could learn German word order the easy way, too:
https://vocal.media/education/how-to-learn-the-german-word-order-using-the-x-bar-structure
