Grammar
German is a language full of inflections. If compared to Latin, it is even more complicated, as the inflection affects both the word ending and its stem and all this results in slightly more difficult conjugation.Noun inflection
German nouns inflect into:four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative case.
In the German orthography, unlike any other orthography, all nouns and most words that
take the syntactical function of nouns are capitalized.
one of three declension classes
one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Word endings indicate some
grammatical genders; others are arbitrary and must be memorized.
two numbers: singular and plural
Like the majority of Germanic languages, German includes left-branching noun compounds. This means that the first noun modifies the category given by the second, for instance, Sommerzeit (eng. summertime) or Hundehaus (eng. doghouse). A peculiarity of German (and of all German languages) is that compounds nouns are written as a single word, like Baumhaus (eng. tree house). This doesn't happen in English that for longer names often prefers separating spaces between the words. A similarity with English is that both languages allow arbitrarily long compounds, even if these are rare.
Adjective Endings
In the next section, we are going to show you a different approach to adjective endings in German, something which doesn't make reference to fixed rules or complicated charts to be learned by heart.The starting point is to separate thinking about CASES (nominative, accusative, etc.) from thinking about ADJECTIVE ENDINGS. Indeed, if you combine the two, you'll probably get confused. The method we are proposing won't magically make you sound like a perfect native speaker, but at least it would make German grammar seem easier.
First of all, ask yourself two simply questions.
QUESTION ONE: Does it exist a form of the article with an obvious ending in front of the adjective?
If the answer is positive, ask yourself the second question: Is the ending on the article the original "-r, -e, -s" (i.e., "der, die, das, eine" -- the gender as you find it in the "dictionary entry")? Can you "spot" the gender in the article? If the ARTICLE ending is ORIGINAL, then...THE ADJECTIVE ENDING is -e. If the answer to Question Two is NO, then you are in front of a changed article ending, such as "den, des, dem, eines, einem" or "die" in the plural. If the ARTICLE ending is CHANGED, then...THE ADJECTIVE ENDING is -en.
The third possibility is that the answer to Question One is NO ARTICLE ENDING AT ALL, (either because there is no article or because the article is "ein") In this case, gender and case are what can help you..Think about them and add the ending that "der, die, das" would normally have to the ADJECTIVE. This includes endings such as: -es (das), -er (der), -em (dem), -e (die, plural).
Verb Inflection
In German, there are about 200 irregular verbs. They decline according to:two genera verbi: active and passive; the passive being composed and dividable into static and dynamic.
three moods: Indicative, Conditional, Imperative
There are also a lot of ways to expand the meaning of a base verb through several prefixes.
one of two conjugation classes, weak and strong (like English).
three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
two numbers: singular and plural
no distinction between aspects (in English, perfect and progressive)
2 non-composed tenses (Present, Preterite) and 4 composed tenses (Perfect,
Plusquamperfect, Future I, Future II)
The word order is much more flexible than in English and it can be changed for subtle changes of a sentence's meaning.
Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, although there are significant minorities of words derived from Latin, French, and most recently English.