German has three genders and a plural. This means that all nouns which are not plural are either masculine, feminine or neuter. Sometimes this makes sense, like "Mann" (english: man) is masculine and "Frau" (english: woman) is feminine, but sometimes, it doesn't seem to make sense, like "Maedchen" (english: girl) which is neuter. Sometimes, there is really no apparent reason: Messer, Gabel, Loeffel (knife, fork, spoon) are neuter, feminine and masculine respectively.
Each gender has its own word for "the": "der" is masculine, "die" is feminine (and plural) and "das" is for neuter nouns. To make things really complicated, they sometimes (but only sometimes) change when they are the direct object and change again when they are the indirect object:
example: "Der Mann sah den Mann mit dem Mann gehen." "The man saw the man go with the man." In English, 3 times "the", but in German, "der", "den", and "dem" for the same word.
Until about more or less 1000 years ago, Old English (which, for the sake of argument, we date as beginning around the 5th century) had similar forms to those that modern German has, but over the few hundred years after the Norman (French) conquest of England when the French Duke, William the Conqueror, beat the English King Harold at the battle of Hastings in 1066, the English language was made more simple, becoming the language we label "Middle English" and finally developing into "Modern English" which is now very different from its cousin, the Modern German language. There are, though, a few "left-overs" like how "who" changes to "with whom" - the German "wer" (who) changes to "mit wem" (with whom) - the similarity is no accident.
Unlike English, in German, nouns are capitalized: "man" in English, but "Mann" in German.
German has the same letters that English does plus a few more like the "sharp s" which looks like a capital "B" with a tail. It can also be spelled "ss". More here.
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| "sharp s" or "ss" |
The "sharp s" has been removed from the modern German language's spelling with the recent language reform. All words which had been spelled with this letter now use "ss".
There are also 3 additional vowels which are called "umlaut" and means changed sounds. They are "a, o, u" with two dots over them. They can also be spelled "ae, oe, ue" and this is how I will spell them in my texts. More here.
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| umlaut |
