![]() And the adjective ending is always the same too: -en. The plural article (“the”) is always die in this case, no matter what the gender of the word is. It also matters whether we’re talking about one man, woman or child, or if we’re talking about several men, women or children (or tables or stores or foods…anything, really).īut this isn’t so tricky, either. Seems straightforward, right? But wait, there’s more. (The clever woman speaks German.)ĭas nett e Kind spricht Deutsch. And we’d do the same thing for nouns with die and das, too, no matter what adjective we have.ĭie klug e Frau spricht Deutsch. So we’d say:ĭer alt e Mann spricht Deutsch. Imagine we’re talking about an old man-one who speaks German, perhaps. This is the first step in getting your adjective endings right: Always, always, always memorize words with their genders! You simply must know whether a word goes with der, die or das. This is why we say der Mann for “the man,” and die Frau for “the woman.” In addition to these masculine and feminine forms, German also has a third, neutral gender, which we see paired with words like das Kind (the child) or das Auto (the car). You were probably exposed to the idea of grammatical gender on day one when you first started learning German. German adjectives inflect (change) for gender The correct adjective ending, or Adjektivendung, depends on the specific combination of all four of these factors. I am tall.)īeyond that, though, there are four different factors that you have to think about every time you use an adjective within a German noun phrase. If you’re building a simple “ is ” sentence like “The book is red,” then the adjective doesn’t change. ![]() (Download) 4 Winning Factors for Catching Up with German Adjectives This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬlick here to get a copy. ![]() German adjectives inflect depending on articles ![]() 4 Winning Factors for Catching Up with German Adjectives.We’ll walk you through what you need to know. So how do you know which adjective form is right?ĭon’t panic. This actually happens for all German adjectives. It would, respectively, be rotes, rote, roter, roten and rot. The book is red.īelieve it or not, that single adjective “red” in each of those sentences will be different in German. Sooner or later, some tables are given all the same, – although most of the time they are very unmethodical.Īt the beginning of the intermediate level, it can happen that the textbooks simply provide 3 or 4 tables “to remember”.Febru4 Winning Factors for Catching Up with German AdjectivesĪ red car. Many textbooks try to totally avoid any tables and treat the adjective and several accompanying words only incidentally, in the hope that the students practice and learn the rules of the German adjective endings more or less unconsciously. And the textbooks most of the time don’t contain any better ideas. I’m not surprised! Very often we, teachers, give our students simply 3 or 4 tables, which they have to learn by heart. Every time I had to teach German adjective endings I was really happy that I had already learned it naturally as a child so, today I „just know“ how it works. This topic is one of the most difficult of basic German grammar, and I have never known a student who hasn’t struggled with it.
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