Ignore the genitive if you’re just starting out That’s right I just said you should ignore a whole case. But, apart from grouping the article forms according to their similarity, there is one other thing you can do to make your life easier – DROP THE GENITIVE CASE.
If you’re a German beginner, this table might seem quite daunting. For example, the nominative/accusative cases for feminine and plural nouns are the same, and the same goes for the masculine and the neuter dative and genitive. Since German is a language that has cases, these articles change according to the grammatical case:īut, as you can see, there are similarities across genders and not all cases require different article forms. German definite articles table: der, die, das according to case and gender The article DIE is also used to for the plural, irrespective of the singular gender, so In German “chair” is masculine ( DER Stuhl), “book” is neuter ( DAS Buch) and “apartment” is feminine ( DIE Wohnung). Therefore, in German, the words from the above example also have genders, even though they do not originate from the characteristics of the object, but are assigned somewhat randomly. nouns (both tangible, like “chair”, and abstract, like “freedom”) have a gender, either their natural, biological, gender (woman, man, daughter, son, etc.), or their grammatical gender, which means that the thing that the article refers to does not have a natural (biological) gender, but that the language assigned a gender to it nevertheless. In German, words that refer to things, i.e. What’s this “grammatical gender” thing, you ask? German nouns have a gender chair, book, apartment ) have different grammatical genders. In English, you would use the same definite article “the” in all three sentences. “I want the apartment with the stunning rooftop view.” “I want the book that the cute guy with the blue shirt is reading.” “I want the chair with the fluffy pink unicorns on it.” You will, without thinking twice, be able to say It doesn’t matter if that thing you want is a specific chair, book or apartment. Since when are articles a problem? In English, life is easy if you know what you want, you just use THE, and if you don’t know what you want, you use A/AN. What’s an article?Īnd then you come across a little something called ARTICLES (cue dramatic music). 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”.When you first start learning German, you might feel quite upbeat and optimistic, thinking “Ok, this doesn’t look that hard, some of it is quite similar to English, like “ Good morning ” = “ Guten Morgen ” or “ Monday ” = “ Montag ”, I can do this!”. 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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