6/13/2023 0 Comments Introduction to german grammarGerman also has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but they are grammatical genders, meaning it's often difficult to tell the gender without memorizing it. German does this more, so, for example, while English has a single "the", German has der, die, das, des, dem and den, all inflected forms of a single word.Įnglish has three genders, male, female and inanimate, and they are 'natural' genders, meaning you can easily tell the gender of something: male/female for people and animals, inanimate for everything else. In other words, German tends to make changes to words according to the function of the word and the meaning of the sentence as a whole. German is more highly inflected than English. These are some differences between and English and German grammar that often cause confusion for learners. (German has gone through changes as well, but in different directions.) This means that while comparisons between English and German are often helpful, just as often they lead to confusion and it's just better to think of German as having its own way of doing things.Ī comparison of English and German The bad news is that, over the centuries, many of the features that made English a Germanic language have been changed, drastically simplified, or eliminated entirely. Also note that the word order is nearly the same, except gelesen ("(have) read") is at the end in German. Note that many of the words are cognates, that is similar sounding words with similar origins, between the languages: "I" vs. Let's compare the English and German versions of a simple sentence: English is, at it's core, a Germanic language so English and German have many fundamental similarities. Speakers of English have certain advantages and disadvantages as learners of German, so the trick is to leverage the similarities between German and English while avoiding being confused by the differences. This reputation is not totally undeserved, but the challenges are not insurmountable. Compared with other European languages, German grammar has a reputation for being, let's say, challenging.
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