Then let’s look at what would happen if we used the indefinite article, ‘a’ instead: ein altes Haus, eine alte Katze, din alter Hund. That means you write: die alten Häuser, die alten Katzen, die alten Hunde. Once you reach the plurals, you’d have to add an ’n’ to the adjective though. You would say: das alte Haus, die alte Katze, der alte Hund. We will use the German words for ‘house’, ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ so we can cover all three genders. We will continue to work with the adjective old, which is alte in German. Let’s work in the nominative case to start. For example are you saying ‘the house’, ‘a house’, or just plain ‘house’? Using the nominative case with German adjectives In German, you’d have to think about the article you’re using. Let’s say the noun is in the singular form. In German you would have to think about what to do with the adjective. In English you don’t have to do anything to the word ‘old’. For example, in English you have: an old house, an old cat, an old dog and the old houses/cats/dog, old houses/cats/dogs, etc. After all, in English if you have the adjective ‘old.’ It stays ‘old’ regardless of grammar and syntax. Whether the case is accusative, dative, genitive, and nominativeįor a native English speaker, it can be daunting to think about how to end an adjective before you construct a sentence.Whether the article is definite, indefinite or not used.Whether the gender of the noun that follows the adjective is masculine, feminine or neutral.So what happens to German adjective endings? A German adjective will change its ending depending on the following factors: Four things that decide German adjective endings German has masculine, feminine, neutral and plural forms of ‘a’ and ‘the’. English only has two indefinite articles (a, an) and one definite article (the). You’ll notice on the BBC chart that German also has more articles than English. The BBC has created an easy-to-use table of German adjective endings that help with these circumstances. We’re here to help make the journey a bit easier. When you study German attributive adjective endings, you can’t escape cases because grammatical cases are an integral part of the German adjective use. You’ll see that when you study German prepositions, you need to learn about how cases work. The four cases in German are: accusative, dative, genitive, and nominative. Because German is a language with grammatical cases, casus in German, you will need to tackle the intricacies of how German cases work. At some point you finally decide to dedicate some time to tackle the complexities what are known as ‘attributive adjectives’ and their endings. For example, the house is old das Haus ist alt. The good news is adjectives don’t change when you use what’s called a ‘predicate adjective’. Now it’s time to take on a bigger challenge in German. Then you build up a vocabulary of adjectives and you find you can describe thing in more and more detail in German. Then you move on to the most useful German phrases.Īs you progress, you take note of how Germans have several different forms of ‘you’ and you begin to get a feel for the top German pronouns. When you first start learning German, you should focus on the basic German words. German adjective endings aren’t the first thing you need to worry about when you learn German.
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