#german adjective declensions

[shabbytigers]

hurling myself into the sun goodbye

[deutschhaven]

Declension Of Adjectives In German

The most interesting thing about German Adjectives isn’t just that they are voluminous but that they may also be declined which in turn makes them complex irrespective of their forms i.e whether they are basic, comparative and superlative Adjectives or those that are derived from either Partizip I or Partizip II. This declension of German Adjectives usually follows a definite pattern which has…

[tanadrin]

The plural -s ending forming a noun out of an adjective is a fun little corner case in English morphology. "Politics" is explicitly patterned after Aristotle's τά πολῑτῐκᾱ��, "affairs of the state." "Mathematics" is from Latin mathematica, which is singular. "Physics" is attested as "physic" in older English, which conforms with its singular declension in Greek φυσική. I'm assuming this affix develops out of the truncation of a noun phrase, or the use of adjectives as substantives? Like, "Which candy do you like? I like red ones, I like the reds," type constructions. But it's fun that in the development of the -ics ending there's an English construction that's used in a way frequently parallel to the Greek derived -ology, or the older Germanic -craft. Seems especially suitable for big, complex fields like mathematics that have lots of subfields. Like, there's more than one mathematic! That makes a lot of sense to me. Though I guess American verbal agreement patterns still prefer a singular verb here, in contrast to the Commonwealth usage.

[german-enthusiast]

Scary scary German syntax... right?

The following sentence exhibits a typical mistake German-learners make: Heute ich gehe in ein Museum.

It's not conjugation ("ich gehe" is correct!), it's not declension ("ein Museum" is correct too!). The issue is "heute ich gehe". Correct would be: Heute gehe ich in ein Museum (or: Ich gehe heute in ein Museum.)

What's the rule here?

It's unfortunately not simply "there can only be one word before the verb"

German word order is so difficult be cause it is so variable. All following sentences are correct and synoymous (though emphasis shifts):

Der Opa schenkt seiner Enkelin zum Geburtstag ein Buch über Autos.

Seiner Enkelin schenkt der Opa zum Geburtstag ein Buch über Autos.

Ein Buch über Autos schenkt der Opa seiner Enkelin zum Geburtstag.

Zum Geburtstag schenkt der Opa seiner Enkelin ein Buch über Autos. All mean: The grandfather gifts his niece a book about cars for her birthday.

What do they all have in common, syntax-wise? There's only one phrase in front of the finite verb. What does this mean? A phrase is a completed (!) unit that can consist of one or more words (depending on the word class (-> noun, verb, …)) Typical word classes that can be a phrase with just one word are:

Proper nouns, plural nouns, personal pronouns, relative pronous (Lukas kocht. Busse fahren. Ich schreibe. Der Mann, der kocht, …)

Adverbs (Heute, Morgen, Bald, Dort, Darum, …) Most other word classes need additional words to form a full phrase:

adjectives need a noun and article: der blaue Ball, der freundliche Nachbar

nouns need a determiner (= article): der Mann, eine Frau, das Nachbarskind

prepositions need… stuff (often a noun phrase): auf der Mauer, in dem Glas, bei der Statue

…

A finite verb is the verb that has been changed (=conjugated) according to person, time, … All verbs that are NOT infinitive or participles are finite. ich sagte -> "sagte" is the finite verb ich bin gegangen -> "bin" is the finite verb The infinitive and the participle are called "infinite verbs" and are always pushed towards the end (but not always the very end!) of the sentence: Ich bin schon früher nach Hause gegangen als meine Freunde.

So: Before the verb (that is not the participle or infinitive) there can only be one phrase.

Since "heute" is an adverb (-> forms a full phrase on its own) and "ich" is a personal pronoun (-> forms a full phrase on its own), they can't both be in front of the verb "gehe" You have to push one of them behind the verb: Heute gehe ich in ein Museum Ich gehe heute in ein Museum.

Both of these are main clauses (Ger.: Hauptsätze), which in German exhibit "V-2 Stellung", meaning the finite verb is in the second position (after one phrase).

What happens if we push all phrases behind the finite verb?

Gehe ich heute in ein Museum? (Watch out: Gehe heute ich in ein Museum would be ungrammatical! The subject has to come in the second position)

It's a question now!

In German, question sentences (that do not start with a question word like "Was?", "Wo?", …) start with the finite verb (called "V-1 Stellung").

Questions, main clauses,… what's missing?

Dependent clauses!

The third type of sentence exhibits "V-letzt Stellung" or "V-End Stellung", meaning the finite verb is at the very end of the sentence. Ich bin gestern in ein Museum gegangen, … main clause -> V-2 Stellung … weil es dort eine interessante Ausstellung gab. dependent clause -> V-letzt Stellung If you want to practice this....

... determine if the following German sentences are correct. If not, what would be the right way to say it?

Der Zug war sehr voll.

Gestern ich war in der Schule.

Die Lehrerin mich nicht hat korrigiert.

Gehst du heute zur Arbeit?

Das Buch ich finde nicht sehr interessant.

To practice this further, translate the following sentences into German and focus on the order of words:

The boy gave the ball back to me.

I called my girlfriend because I missed her.

The girl saw her brother at the train station.

The horse, which was standing on the field, was white and black.

[ihopeinevergetsoberr]

my dearest fic writers who headcanon viktor as czech! i know you guys are struggling with google translate — and it indeed is awful (for slavic languages especially, cause it keeps messing up the adjective declension).

i have an amazing alternative: deepl and reverso context. i’m currently getting my degree (german translator) and i’m a fellow slavic fic writer — therefore, i use those A LOT for uni. and let me tell you — google translate is absolute shit compared to those two. reverso context even provides you qualitative example sentences??? how cool is that???

anyway i love love LOVE seeing czech viktor fics and headcanons and i just figured i might share those helpful little things with ya’ll so you don’t have to struggle with shitty ass machine translator.

live laugh love viktor <3

[skylandersbf]

Conlang Update 9

I finally busted out a nice chunk of my base grammar!! I’ve worked on the phonotactics, more orthography stuff, and did some reworking on the pronouns, verbs, noun declensions, adjective declensions, and definite articles!

Pardon my sloppy tables below. I am making a cute little journal for my conlang and it fits the vibe. Eventually I will digitalize this stuff, but it feels good to hand write 😁☀️

Orthography

I’ve decided to change some of the spelling rules and letters that are in my language. I also reworked the romanization. I opted to use the Icelandic letters, Þ & Ð, for their respective sounds. I reduced the amount of letters in the alphabet. What I did was halve the vowels in writing because I had originally selected the vowels to come in pairs: strong & weak.

Strong vowels are proceeded by one consonant, while weak vowels are proceeded by two (of the same) consonant, in spelling. This goes for the alphabet and romanization. The left sounds are the strong and the right the weak.

Pronouns

I decided to drop the 4th person pronoun I had and stick with 1, 2, and 3 person. I also took away 3 cases for the sake of having less. The remaining ones are NOM, ACC, DAT, GEN, INS, and VOC. There is still one pronoun for the 3rd person and it does not change based on the gender of the noun.

Definite Articles

I changed my articles so many times. I landed on having definite articles but NO indefinite articles and no plurality in articles or nouns. Clarification can be made with numbers and measure words, which I will be working on soon! I was heavily inspired by German articles when making my own!

[evolutionsbedingt]

Which language is the most beautiful and which one has odd, arresting glory?

Oh wow, what a question dear friend! Your time was impeccable too because I had just had four hours of language classes when I read your question and my brain basically went into overdrive. Thank you for rolling this particular apple of discord into my hands, I hope I did it justice! 💚💚💚

My immediate response was that Chinese indubitably is the most beautiful language and odd, arresting glory should belong to Old English.

But then I questioned my own assessment, because of course I would. I tried not to get lost in the 'well, it's not like you speak all languages, so how can you really say which one is the most beautiful - you know but a fraction of them!' But it also made me think about the languages I do know and whether they can even stand up to comparison.

You see, I know at least two languages only by their bible translations (Gothic and Old Church Slavonic), three only by short inscriptions and religious texts (Hittite, Old Persian and Avestan) and they, together with a number of others, are languages I speak only through the definitions offered to me by the dictionary. This also includes Chinese and Old English.

Then again, Chinese and Old English are the ones I've gotten most up close and personal with outside of English and German. I have translated a chunk of the Beowulf epos and read books translated from Chinese in a way that preserved the original language as much as possible, as well as trying my hand at translating a few of the Tang dynasty poems myself. Old English feels familiar because it's very closely related to German; something that is definitely reflected in my translation of it as well because sometimes I didn't bother translating at all - just adjusted the spelling or conjugation a little and we were good to go.

And Chinese despite it's often purported title of the most difficult language to learn is a language that makes terrible amounts of sense in my brain - so much so that I started picking it up simply by watching series and reading books and translation commentary. It has no declension of nouns or adjectives, it has no conjugation and tense and aspect are simply expressed through classifiers. Does one have to learn at minimum one thousand characters to be reasonably fluent? Yes. But how many words do you think I had to learn to be reasonably fluent in English and French? The only thing that differentiates characters from words in the grand scheme of things is that we are not familiar with a writing system like this. If I can learn to read and write Ancient Greek well enough to get a Graecum in 1.5yrs (with considerable effort) the same will be true for Chinese.

And yet I wouldn't be able to actually, fully understand either language because that would only come with practice, with seeing it used in real life and learning the many, many ways it can be and is used - both colloquially and in elevated contexts.

So how can I dare to declare it a beautiful language if - at the moment - the only access I have to it is through translation? How can I compare any language that I'm not fully (or at least almost) fluent in? How can I compare languages that I only know from translated, religious texts (and we know they chose to translate closely to the original, making it an imperfect reflection of the language) with a languages I know mostly from poetry and fantasy novels?

I can't. But I can say that, knowing as many languages as I do, not one does poetry quite like Classical Chinese and Old English. They are similar in their economy of words and simultaneously strong imagery. There's a playfulness to both languages that makes them incredibly well-suited for the type of poetry I like and which thus makes them my choices for 'most beautiful language'.

You will notice that this leaves the category of 'odd, arresting glory' open again (and I promise it won't take me another- let's not check how many paragraphs -to answer this). The description of odd and arresting glory made me first think of Old English, because to me as a German speaker Old English certainly odd and having translated a bit of Beowulf it's certainly glorious.

But I think the language most likely to leave me to stop and stare (at least in translation) is Russian in 19th century prose. It's the very opposite of the minimalistic Old English and Classical Chinese, with its long and elaborate descriptions but closer to German prose (and even poetry) of the time and I really admire the imagery wrought there - it's one of the reasons why I still would rather like to learn modern Russian instead of 'just' Old Church Slavonic which is often bound by the Ancient Greek and biblical writing conventions. I want to be able to see that beauty for myself, instead of through the thick lense of others' translations.

Phew.

That became a very long answer and I'll definitely have to put a read more but I thank you very much for making me think about this and subsequently put my thoughts into words! A delightful way to spend my time while cooking the stew for tomorrow! I hope you enjoyed reading this 💚

[onsomekindofstartrek]

Got my degree (German and Spanish with the capstone in Spanish) five years ago in December and in my head I’m still fighting the war over immersive second language instruction.

It doesn’t work, not as a holistic approach, and I think, but cannot verify, that this is a mostly-American folly.

You can’t learn a language without learning grammar, much as Americans in particular like to stomp their feet and whine about it. And most people cannot learn the subtleties of L2 without occasional or even fairly frequent use of L1 for clarification and explanations of difficult concepts.

Understand, I did five years of German with one professor who was in his seventies and eighties in that time span. English was the main language of instruction at first and he slowly transitioned the advanced classes to using German as the main language of instruction. It was NEVER 100%, because German grammar is actually really complicated and hard to grasp, especially in regards to the declensions of the adjectives and determiners. I learned the grammar by rote, but contrary to popular doctrine, I still learned it and can use it automatically and easily. The only reason I’m not well conversant in German now is because we never had enough students in the program to have conversation classes or clubs like with Spanish.

Whereas I did four years of Spanish and I’m decently conversant in it, improving all the time because I talk with Spanish speakers almost weekly. But that’s through no virtue of the immersive Spanish program. For one thing, they were under orders to have 100% pass rate, which is absurd, and for another thing, you still have to learn the grammar by rote, but hampered by the fact that you’re starting with people who do not speak the language at all, and instructing them entirely in the language! It’s not your first language! You’re not going to intuit the grammar! Of course it’s going to be by rote. Artificially adding a language barrier to that rote instruction is not a virtue. I learned Spanish grammar on my own time because I wanted to actually speak it and not just pass an un-failable class.

(Also L1 speakers of any language tend not to be effective at instructing speakers of other languages in the grammar, since it’s intuitive for them but not for the students. No, we can’t just “do what feels right,” we didn’t start when we were babies!)

And I think it gets into a lot of American hangups, like the idea that you should either be fluent in a language or not speak it at all, the way we treat L2 English speakers when they come here.

There’s no magic bullet for language and as my alma mater axes every language program except Spanish, and dilutes the Spanish program by requiring a guaranteed passing grade, that’s not going to get less true.

[mivolasvivi]

Tell us about your conlang! it's so cool and impressive that you've made one

I kinda do stuff on and off, I took a conlanging class that actually made me write up documentation for it, and a lot of ideas loosely come from that. But I’ve gone back and forth with it.

A lot of it is inspired by vulgar Latin’s transition into the modern Romance languages as well as the morphology of Old Norse. I’m really interested in verb tense/aspect/mood, as well as noun/adjective declension. So romance verbs and Germanic nouns/adjectives are a treasure trove of ideas!

I’ve played around with ergativity before as well but it’s just too much to keep straight on top of that all.

I enjoy phonology/phonetics too much to keep my phoneme inventory at a reasonable size, so i keep going back and forth with consonants, but have landed on a 6 vowel system (+dipthongs) with umlaut-like phenomena and extensive reduction (inspired mostly by EU Portuguese). Absolutely not realistic, but fun to play with!

[in--other--words]

German Cases

Week 3, day 6 of prepolyglot’s langblr reactivation challenge

Create a post explaining a grammar rule that you had/are having difficulties learning. If you’re currently having difficulties, do your best to explain and ask others to help you understand it better. Include example sentences in your explanation.

There are four cases in German: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.

Case is a property of nouns and pronouns, but also affects any adjectives, articles or numbers associated with the noun.

The case of a noun is determined by the role it plays in a sentence.

Roughly speaking, nominative is for the subject, accusative is for the direct object, dative is for the indirect object, and genitive is for possession. (If you're not sure, there's an explanation of what these roles mean with a simple example in this post.)

The use of a preposition before the noun also determines the case.

This page is a complete guide to declension in German.

So yeah... It's not like I don't understand German cases... I can tell you the rules... I just make a lot of mistakes when trying to speak or write! So I wrote the section below as a note to myself on what I need to do to improve lol

Tips for learning German cases

Always learn the gender of the noun along with the noun itself. This will make it easier to learn cases, because when you see or hear German sentences, you'll be able to spot the patterns more easily.

Listen and read a lot. With repetition, correct declension will start to become intuitive and you will get an instant feeling of what "sounds right".

Practise!!!! Probably goes without saying but output German sentences. There are tonnes of exercises online (e.g. x) that can help with this. Also, speak to native speakers on tandem, HelloTalk etc., post sentences on HiNative and write blog posts on Journaly. All of these platforms allow you to get corrections from native speakers so you don't create any bad habits and continue to improve.

[shabbytigers]

today in german we had adjective declensions 3: the thrilling conclusion to the trilogy: viz,. what to do when no article at all, definite or indefinite (generalities: “I like long walks,” adspeak: “lovely house for rent,” etc)

in the interests of fair balance, it is incumbent upon me to own up to the truth: when there are no articles in the immediate vicinity, German adjectives behave like sweet little lambs who have been particularly well brought up. it is all very straightforward

2 possibilities arise

1. the articles are evil and are corrupting influences. i don’t like this hypothesis, feels fash, next

2. some fell malevolent chemistry is at work whereby one and one suddenly synergistically makes eleven, like mixing klonopin and alcohol, thus catastrophe ensues. in this view, arguably, we could mitigate the whole craziness with a wee regulatory tweak establishing a contraindication and forbidding them to associate. like i’m sorry my dudes maybe you all just need to step up and muster the civic virtue to say “the jacket that is red” instead of “the red jacket,” what part of lives are at stake don’t you understand

[beforeiread-studies]

29.05.2023 || May is almost done. Exams are upon us. I realized that much of my exam-related stress was actually because "What if I pass all my exams but get terrible grades and they ruin my average and thus my final grade after I've worked so hard for this for last 3 years??". So I did some calculations and I should be fine. Even if I screw up spectacularly, my excellent grades so far won't just disappear in a puff.

So I'm feeling better now.

Things to do today:

Read every German text + create flashcards with useful vocabulary from it

Revise article and adjective declension (German)

Lunch.

Write email to internship in Berlin

Study flashcards

Revise article and adjective declension (German) again

BONUS TASKS: Edit first 5 pages of dissertation; Read emails.

[wellenklavier]

im taking (elementary) german for gen ed requirements/wanted to take something that wasnt spanish and i feel mildly proud that i can understand like. 10% of the words on your german posts without using a translator

OMGG that's aweome i love it... fair warning i'm far from fluent lol I try to keep my grammar construction consistent but I'm also definitely still learning ����

I remember my first semester of german, it feels like agesss ago. I think the hardest thing to grasp at first (learning from english) is article and adjective declension (Der graue Hund; Ich habe einen grauen Hund...) so it's very handy to have a chart nearby. I don't know when you start learning the dative case (if you havent already) so I'm going to hold off on a little grammar lesson i almost typed out 😭😭so I'll just say make sure you always learn the article with new words, and also quizlet is my great friend (writing mode for vocab memorization). Finally, if you don't know them already, the EasyGerman podcast and youtube channel is a good way to listen to the language and learn some grammar/vocab/etc!

Good luck with your studies!! it's a cool language I hope you have fun with it :)

[ingoampt]

Master prepositions and adjective declensions for the B1 ÖSD exam with practical examples and tips - day 38

Mastering Prepositions and Adjective Declensions for B1 ÖSD Exam Mastering German Prepositions and Adjective Declensions for the B1 ÖSD Exam Preparing for the B1 German ÖSD exam can be challenging, especially when tackling two of the most important grammar topics: prepositions and adjective declension. These concepts are crucial for understanding sentence structure and meaning in German. In this…

[dudaswelt]

some hot e some cold rainy days in nrw.

this trip was so reenergizing and refreshing. i’m so ready to go back to a routine.

today i got back to my workbook and made a little progress? anyway i read a couple of articles and got a structure/draft going on which is something.

i think the hardest and maybe one of the only annoying things about german are adjective declensions.

#studyblr

[shootfighting]

German is the same as Polish in that regard. We use diminutives to denote cuteness/smallness, they can also be friendly (not necessarily by calling a person them, but by using them in conversation like Czy chciałbyś spróbować szyneczki? (Would you like to try some "little ham"? - szynka = normal ham, szyneczka = little ham, which doesn't actually have to be small, it's just to be cute/friendly, szyneczki is the genitive case as Polish has declension - again like German but we have more cases)) or yes, sarcastic.

Some people find that friendly/cute use of them annoying though and it's very funny to see them being annoyed on twitter about that.

What's more, some people use diminutives a lot, not even trying to be cute, they just have that habit... to the further annoyance of diminutive haters.

Diminutives are very popular in Poland (you can make them out of most nouns, but also numerals, adjectives and adverbs even), and the city I live in is the capital of diminutives, we use them the most out of all Poles and haters gonna hate.

It is a real tragedy that English does not have a diminutive suffix. There is no way to properly translate that from Dutch to English and it's tragic because in many cases the diminutive adds a layer of meaning that you can only translate with like a dozen extra words