Learning German The Basics

I do not know your reasons for learning German but there are a number of good reasons I can think of for learning this language. It may be that you want to communicate with your friends and relatives more fully, you may be traveling to Germany on vacation or on a business trip and you want to prepare yourself so that you can converse with the people, even if it is saying a simple greeting. Consider also the fact that German is the most widely spoken language in Europe. With 83 million inhabitants living in Germany, this is hardly surprising. In fact it is the official language in Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and of course, the mainland Germany. A significant population in the Netherlands, northern Italy, eastern France, Denmark and parts of Poland, Roman, Czech Republic and Russia also speak German as their native language. And with German companies accounting for about 700,000 jobs in the United States, acquiring German speaking skills will put you ahead of the competition right here in the United States. This is great. Now let us go straight into learning German.

German nouns are very easy to spot. Why do we say that? Because German is the only language that capitalizes all nouns. All German nouns begin with a capital letter. German nouns also tend to have an element of gender whether it is a he, she or it. This is clearly seen by the ending letters for each article or pronoun. Thus, ensure that while learning German, you learn the nouns with their genders. The definite article is an important element in German than it is in English. The use of Der, die and das is the same as the definite article the in English. Knowing what article becomes even more important. For example the sentence Nature is wonderful in English would read Die Natur ist wunderschon. Notice the definite article Die used in the sentence.

The indefinite article a or an is ein or eine in German. Like the definite article the indefinite article indicates gender of the noun it is used with. For a feminine noun the article eine is used while masculine nouns use ein. This is also reflected in the use of possessive adjectives where his is replaced by sein(e) and my with mein(e). This is a very important aspect to grasp while learning German. Gender is sometimes natural in German. The sun, for example, is feminine in German die Sonne, a table is masculine der Tisch. However, it makes little sense to worry about this. Concentrate on learning the genders and simply memorize what is feminine and masculine. This is actually not that hard when you think, for example, of Mother Nature. Thus, when learning German, try to learn a noun and its gender together. In time, this will become increasingly important as you continue to advance.