As you can see there are only 2 indefinite articles. Male and neutral nouns share "ein", while "eine" is used for female nouns only. Girls really like to be special, so they got their own article! Too bad that even potatoes and cucumbers are female in German while girls are actually neutral. (You can find further explanation concerning "grammatical gender" at the last half of this article)
You can also negate the indefinite articles which looks like the following:
Ich habe eine Katze. - I've got a cat.
Keine is not just used to negate female nouns, it's also required for negating the plural. Be careful, because the use of "kein" and "keine" is much more limited than the use of the English "no". There's another way you can put it.
I hope you'll enjoy your brandnew articles. Feel free to leave me a comment and have a nice day!
This is a wonderful blog! I'm a german 1 student in high school, and your blog helped me out quite a bit before finals!
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear that this blog helped you! :)
DeleteIf there are other topics you struggle with that aren't covered by the blog yet, feel free to ask me. I'll add content that addresses your needs then =)
ah, and sorry for the late reply - have been pretty busy lately but that's going to change next month.
What about Keinen for Der? I was taught that..keinen for masculine(der), keine for feminine(die) and kein for neutral(das)..same goes for einen,eine and ein respectively..is that true?
ReplyDeleteHi Steve, this is absolutely correct!
DeleteWhat you wrote is right for the accusative case.
What I showed in this post was based on the nominative case, which is the form that will be shown in a dictionary for example. (Although to be honest in the example with the cat, the cat is the accusative - but it didn't make a difference there) The case of the noun influences its articles, which is why there's not only der/die/das, but also word such as dem and den, or einem and einen.
The German cases are: accusative, nominative, dative and genitive.
I'm not a big fan of technical terms, but every now and then they're required. The least you'll usually have in a sentence is a (pro)noun and a verb. The verb usually describes what somebody/something is doing. This somebody is the subject of the sentence and the subject is always nominative. Pretty often there's a 2nd noun in a sentence, which is the object. The subject is doing sth. to the object.
Example:
Ich helfe ihm. / I help him. - Ich (subject/nominative) helfe (verb) ihm (object/dative).
I am the one that's doing something and he is the one that the thing I'm doing is done to.
Genitive is seldom being used, so most important apart from the nominative are the dative and accusative, while accusative is more frequently being used than the dative. Whether it's dative or accusative depends on the verb that is used in the sentence.
I'll stick to animals and give you one further example for the accusative. (ein/eine/einen)
der Hund / the dog
Ich habe einen Hund. / I've got a dog.
die Katze / the cat
Ich habe eine Katze. / I've got a cat.
das Pferd / the horse
Ich habe ein Pferd. / I've got a horse.
But sadly I actually don't have any pets.
I like and try to keep things as simple as possible and with the addition of those cases things get very complex quickly. But one day I should really add a full explanation of them here.
Sorry for the long reply ;) I'll try to keep things shorter next time. Let me know if anything is still not clear yet!
Greets
Alex