Feminine nouns - gender bending for starters

They're everywhere! You can see them on the streets, in offices, on TV ... and about 50% of the people even see them in the mirror: Women

No surprise that they are also part of the German language. In German basically all nouns that describe a person also have their female form. So a baker, a manager or a customer - all got a male and a female version. I'll show you how to do it first and then I'll explain things a little further.

Usually it's very easy: You add "in" to the noun... and it suddenly becomes female. For plural you simply add "innen".

be careful of umlauts!

But if there were no exception it wouldn't be German! You can see it up there. In "Ärztin" the a changes into an ä. Why does it change and how to predict? Well, if the plural form of the noun changes its vocal into an umlaut, the female form will usually do the same.
So how do you know that the plural form changes from vocal to umlaut?
That's the problem... I don't think there's a rule for that. (If there is, please let me know!)

There is (at least) one more exception. This one is pretty easy (and reasonable... yes... German can be reasonable at times!). There are some nouns that imply the gender.
Kaufmann (businessman) ends with "mann" for example. Since Mann means "man" it pretty much implies that the person is male. You can change the "Mann" into "Frau" (woman) and then it becomes a "Kauffrau", which would be the right word for a female person of the same occupation. There are several words that end with "mann". It's always the same there.

Kaufmann = businessman

The word "Krankenschwester" (nurse) (Schwester = sister) won't become a Krankenbruder (Bruder = brother) though. This occupation was typical for women for so long, that there's no male equivalent. So people had to make up a new word for it. "Krankenpfleger" is this new word. So how to make it be female again? Right! You can simply add "in" and you got a "Krankenpflegerin" which is totally correct too.

Female forms can be used for women only. The male forms are a bit more neutral, at least this is how I feel. You can sometimes use the male form to refer to a female person too but I recommend you to try to use the correct form.

You might wonder how to refer to a group that's not entirely male or female. Well... real grammar says that a group that entirely consists of women will be referred to with the female form. As soon as there's one male person among them, male form has to be used. It's the same in many other languages. For occupations that imply the gender it is much better to say sth. like "Kaufmänner- und Frauen" though, so this would imply both.

Sadly some people don't seem to care about grammar. There's this new habit in Germany to... "unisex" words. It's really annoying and looks and sounds horrible. This was a political decision that really gives me the shivers.
That's how you do it:

Studenten = (university) students

So you add an "Innen", the i has to be capitalized. Seriously... I am all for equal rights and stuff... but don't mess with my grammar! You even have to do that in scientific papers now. (well... there are ways to avoid that though) Once more to make it clear. The "male plural" form does not exclude females, it simply doesn't say clearly whether there are women among the group or not. I think it's similar in French, Portuguese, Spanish and even Chinese. I'm not sure if the "Innen"-thing exists in Germany only or in other German speaking countries too.

So now you got the basics for the grammatical sex change in singular and plural and even know the plural of political correctness. Use and share it as much as you like, it's all yours now!

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Conjugations

In German, same as in English, the form of a verb will change, depending on who is performing the action. That’s what we call conjugation. There’s one difference though: In German, verbs are shifting and changing way more often! I’ll give you a table along with two examples:

Ich gehe zur Schule. - I go to school.

Er geht zur Schule. - He goes to school.

 

      p.s. = person singular; p.p. = person plural

So while there are 2 different English forms to remember, there are 5 German ones. This word still looks pretty regular. You always have the "geh" part and then the ending of it changes. You will probably not find it hard to see that all those words are related since the "root"* always stays the same. (since they're all the same word).
*The first part that doesn't change is the "root" of the word.

When looking a word up in a dictionary, always go for the infinitive. I'm pretty sure you know that already, but many people make this mistake and end up complaining why their dictionary doesn't contain the word "geht".

Almost all infinitives are formed by adding "en" to the root.
So here it works like this: geh + en = gehen
Voila, that's our infinitive! There are exceptions where it doesn't work though, but most times you will be safe.

There's one exception that I want to show you right away because it's just... so important.




This one is as irregular as it gets. You will have to use it all the time, so it's really worth learning it. This is one of the things you should know so well that you won't even have to think about it for a second. Believe me, this will automatically eliminate a big source of frustration and is going to make your life easier. (and it will also make the world a better place... hopefully)

For additional tables you can either go to IKEA or check out the list of Conjugations that I made. Feel free to send me comments and wishes for verbs which you want to be conjugated.




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Indefinite Articles

Indefinite articles work similar to definite ones. The article you need to use depends on the gender of its noun. It works as the following:

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 keine Katze. - I've got no cat.
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!

Nouns

Nouns are a simple thing in German, there are just a few little things you should keep in mind.

1. Nouns have to be capitalized.
   Doing so will make the world a better place... probably. Gladly there are no exceptions here, so always capitalize the first letter of a noun. Please don't capitalize all letters, shouting nouns at people won't make your German sound more right. (really!)
   
   
2. Plural nouns often end with an e.
   Often does not mean always. Simply adding an "s" to form the plural grants you a 97% chance to do it wrong. Words that end with an "e" will often form their plural by adding an "n".
   
   
3. The grammatical gender usually doesn't make any sense.
   Each noun has its own grammatical gender, but it seldoms correspond with the real gender. The grammatical gender will determine the correct article for each word.
   
   

Want to know more about nouns and everything around them?:

• Definite Articles 
• Indefinite Articles
• Capitalization
• Plurals
• Female form
• Latest article about nouns

Umlauts - two dots that make a difference

Many love them, some fear them and few can type them. The German umlauts (Umlaute) ä, ö and ü are not the only ones I will show you. I will also present the ß to you. It might look like a beta, but actually it's pretty different. Umlauts can be pretty important because some konjugated forms contain them although the infinitive doesn't. This can also happen with plurals like in Maus and Mäuse (mouse - mice).



How to type them?
When using windows there  actually is a way for you to type them. Depending on your windows version it might differ a little, but usually you can find it in the regional and country specific options. You can change the language settings of your keyboard there and add German as the "language" of your keyboard. Don't worry, it's no problem to switch back. Just alt + shift will do the job and your keyboard is back to... whatever it was.

This is how a German (well... mine...) keyboard looks like.

You can see the location of the umlauts here, same as you can see that the ß is next to the zero. Location of z and y also differ.

Too much work? Well, there's another option for you.

That's how you can also do it:

ä -> ae
ü -> ue
ö -> oe
ß -> ss

Writing ae instead of ä is also totally correct. Writing a instead of ä is wrong though because... well... because ä and a are simply not the same thing. ;) When doing a German crossword puzzle this is how you do it too. (and please never use a "B" instead of ß... that's really odd. It's like using a P instead of an R. Just one stroke is missing but... well... still not really the same, right?)

Enough writing, let's go oral. So how to pronunce them?
Let's start with the ß. When actually saying "ß" you say "s-z" (es-zet - german pronunciation of course). The ß is a long hissing sound. Different than the ß the "ss" is a short hissing sound. (so using ss instead of ß is actually not always right... but it will have suffice in case you have no german keyboard). Still, when reading a text you will get a good hint about how things are pronunced when knowing that difference.

I will further explain the pronunciation in another post soon.

So for now... have fun with your brandnew umlauts!




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Capitalization

Nouns have to be capitalized. Always.
Well... that's about it, there is not much more to tell. ;)

I'll give you some examples anyway:

"The Table is in the Kitchen.
"The Cat belongs to Tom the Butcher."
"Tom is german."

This is how you do it in German. Names and nouns are written in capital letters, adjectives are not. The German language doesn't care about nationality, so adjectives that describe it are still adjectives and will be written in lower case letters.

At German elementary schools nouns are taught as "name words" (Namenwort), because they need to be written in upper case letters, same as in English. Take special care of nominalized  words, those are verbs or adjectives which have been transformed into nouns. They have to be capitalized too and can be a bit tricky.

Another English example that uses German style orthography:

"He is so strong. His Strength is amazing."

So why are we capitalizing nouns?
It all began in the early 12th century... well... ok, it didn't. Actually I think there is no reason to do so. Some people say it's easier to read texts then and that capitalizing nouns is adding some kind of visible structure. Well... I guess English (and basically all other languages) have proven this theory wrong. Probably people have simply gotten used to it and don't want to change. Since capital letters look nice in the written language let's be happy that we have a few more opportunities to use them. Hooray to the nouns!

Well... now you have the knowledge it takes to become a real capitalist and to capitalize everything you want. Have fun with this little piece of information and feel free to leave me a comment, preferably with capitalized nouns!;)




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Der, die, das - the definite articles! (The difference between der, die, das)

One article is not enough! At least for the German language. Der, die, das are the (in)famous German articles that make all langauge learnes tremble in fear. They even made it into the German intro song of the Sesame Street. There's no mercy, not even for children.

So why does the German language need 3 (definite) articles?  Let's make it quick and simple:

The use of the article depends on the grammatical gender of the noun. So you use "der" for everything that's male, "die" for everything that's female and "das" for everything that's neutral. So why is it called "grammatical gender"?

You're going to love this part: The "gender" and the "grammatical gender" (aka genus) often have nothing in common at all! Men are male and women are female, that's ok so far. But girls are neutral, tables are male and cups are female. It makes absolutely no sense!

But there must be a trick, right? Sure, there's a rule that always works and prevents any mistakes! It's... well... nah, there isn't. There's no such thing. There are many "rules" or "guidelines", but they tend to have one tiny flaw: They don't work. Well... they do sometimes work but most of them are not reliable and no native speaker ever uses them. (except for one that I'll show you at the end)

I strongly recommend you to learn the articles along with each new noun that you learn. So instead of remembering "Mann = man" simply learn "der Mann = the man". That's basically no additional work, and as you make progress, you'll automatically get a feel for the right  grammatical gender.

Articles are a common source of mistakes but they seldom lead to confusion. So, even if you always mix them up, it will seldom cause misunderstandings. But it would be really kind if you still tried to do it right! ;)
Oh, and I have one little surprise for you. Actually there is one way to know which definite article to use. When using the plural of a noun, the definite article "die" is always the right one. There are no exceptions here.

Pro tip:
There is one rule that can actually help you.

In compound words, the last "part" always determines the gender of the word.
(let me know if you know any exceptions but I personally can think of none)

German is full of compound words - words that are a combination of two or more other words. English on the contrary is far more likely to separate the words from each other. So while in English you say "swarm of bees", in German you it's Bienenschwarm. Bienen means bees and Schwarm means swarm - it's that simple.

So you don't need to remember the gender of every single compound word. In the Bienenschwarm-example you only need to remember the gender of "Schwarm" (which is masculine (der Schwarm)). The word Bienenschwarmbeispiel (swarm of bees example) is feminine (das Bienenschwarmbeispiel), because the word "Beispiel" (example) is female.

Got it? If not, the comment section is the right place to go!




Recommended: indefinite articles