See the end of Reference section 1. Learning German adjective endings is crucial to speaking German well … but it can feel so random, nonsensical, and overwhelming. Even after seeing this for the 2nd time now, this chart might seem crazy-intense. Each system declines in 3 genders and plural. There are only FOUR possible determiner / adjective declension combos and knowing which you’re using is essential to picking out the right endings for your words. Earlier, I said you need to know 3 things in order to pick the correct declension for your adjective (or determiner) every. the roles nouns play in a sentence. 60iF܀%���-B�28��e���W�?/���pw ڦ )|�Ԓ-�61�G�6&����ޫ}2�p����B�}7쌡��/��v~�5���}��E�O�� ,���0 y�_� But then we’ll just keep shifting down to the different rows for the 3 other cases. All you need now is to learn how to use it. Make sense? Are you ready to absolutely nail adjective endings? The last thing we need to settle before we can launch into examples is this: Before adding the listed declension to your base adjective (or determiner), you need to first add an ‘e’ (<– as filler/glue) if the declension itself isn’t an ‘e’. And that’s because of the noun’s case. We’ve touched on that a good bit already. the nominative & accusative cases are identical. last. That’s nice’, you say … ‘but I thought we were talking about adjectives?’. 1? It’s the noun’s case that tells us what role the noun is playing in the sentence. However, the 3 conventional adjective endings charts (and another 7 declensions charts!) Why do we have to put -m, -n, -r, -s, -e onto the ends of adjectives? The only step that really needs some brain work is the last one. There are some other special ‘oddball’ details such as some nouns requiring declensions! FREE (16) Rovena Pets powerpoint extended. The adjective describes some feature of the noun — is it heavy? And the 2nd step is working with my All-In-One German Declensions Chart. And then, there are additional declensions charts for determiners (which, like the charts for adjectives, also get over-categorized into … single. [non-ein-word, non-rulebreaker-plural] determiner & adjective → declension pattern #1. Let’s actually keep working with the same noun phrase from above: this big dog. What are adjectives and adjectival endings? (The four cases, the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive, are discussed elsewhere). When neuter adjective nouns follow the undeclinable indefinite pronouns etwas, nichts, viel, and wenig, they must take the strong adjective endings because these pronouns do not carry any case information. But then, the declensions in the dative & genitive are unchanged from the previous example. So far, things were simple. Why does the noun in the genitive case have the strong declension, too? Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive. Only the genitive case is different in the masculine and neuter cases. They are making your life much harder than it needs to be. In short: you can’t make sense of German or make sense speaking/writing German yourself if you don’t use the case system. . Most of the time, when the adjective needs to be declined, it’s just ‘e’ after after … You get the same results for literally 10% of the effort you’d otherwise have to invest in 10 charts. You can see that with these examples of ‘these big … dogs/cats/pigs’: nominative: diese großen … Hunde / Katzen / Schweineaccusative: diese großen … Hunde / Katzen / Schweinedative: diesen großen … Hunden / Katzen / Schweinengenitive: dieser großen … Hunde / Katzen / Schweine. NICE! In order to put the correct declension on your selected adjective (or determiner), you need to know …. the declensions for the nominative & accusative are identical. Does it really matter if we say, e.g. (so, sentences wouldn’t make sense). H��W[o�6~����@�,^E E��V�C�vև�. Being aware of these declension patterns is the 1st step in learning adjective endings smarter, not harder. Note the significance of adjective endings on number words. 5 Participles as adjectives In English, the present participle is a verb form ending in -ing , which may be used as an adjective or a noun. The German word for 'car' is neuter and is the direct object of the sentence, so the accusative case is used. But now, we’re going to put it into the three other cases. Sġ_ҽ��E���Y��kz��v����$F�k/�kl�͌0U����꾶��C/`\�֧����vq������Y=���᭠��3�p[�ױ�8���h���m� 139 0 obj <> endobj OK, now we’re going to take the feminine noun Milch (milk) and talk about ‘cold milk’ in each of the four cases. BUT it’s not the noun itself that tells us which case it’s in … it’s the words coming in front of the noun that tell us the noun’s case! If you haven’t read it, then do it. Do you see the no declension on ‘ein’ in the nominative & accusative? The table provides an overview of adjective endings for the declension\inflection of German attributive adjectives. The dog is big and brown. Determiners: a, the, some, few, this, etc. -e, -e, -er, -er. To use this one chart to pick the right declension for your adjective (or determiner) every. So → strong declension goes onto determiner (, and → weak declension goes onto adjective (, the nominative & accusative are exactly the same, both the strong & weak declensions in the nominative & accusative are just an ‘e’, both the dative & genitive are exactly the same, too, (but with different strong vs. weak declensions). Well, for starters, you need to know that it’s not very useful to talk about just adjective declensions. Only the first sentence truly makes sense, right? It doesn’t have to be that way! And the results are more reliable because this system is (believe it or not) significantly less confusing. In the plural, it makes no difference what gender the noun has in its singular form. : sauer: der Apfel adjective + e: ein Apfel [a sour apple]|With the indefinite article, we add an er to the adjective for masculine nouns.|To note: for adjectives ending in er/el, we remove the e in the attributive form. FREE (3) Popular paid resources. Sometimes, the same strong & weak declension combo is shared by 2 different genders in the same case (e.g. ‘Sure. The adjective endings - en, - e, and - es correspond to the articles den, die, and das respectively (masc., fem., and neuter). Again, this is the end result for the nominative: diesEr große Hund. There are 4 German cases for the different roles a noun might have: These cases are like ‘slots’ in a sentence that get filled in with nouns. Strong declensions: more varied, better indicate the gender/case of the noun. And we’ve gotta know that! German adjectives that come after the noun are not declined/inflected and often separated from the noun by a form of sein (to be) like: ist (is) if the noun is in a singular form or sind (are) if … If you're already familiar with the German cases, you'll recognize that strong endings follow almost the same declension patterns as der, die, and das. *Adjectives that come after the following words are declined exactly the same as after the definite article: derselbe, dieser, jener, mancher, solcher, welcher, alle. Let’s do it! For example, in English: 'The lovely house'. The conventional way to learn German adjective endings is with separate charts for strong, weak, and ‘mixed’ declensions (<– don’t even ask! You might also know that every German noun has a gender attached to it (masculine, feminine, neuter, or plural; listed across the top of the chart). If the article is ein or eine then the ending is like in Strong declension. Declension patterns #1 (the standard, default pattern) and #3 can be used with any gender or in any case. Seriously. big, small, round, flat, blue). that tell us how many of the noun or which one. "Strong" endings are used in contexts in which the adjective itself needs to provide case information because there is no article proceeding the adjective or the article does not provide that info (i.e. 0 In German grammar, the correct inflection of adjectives depends on the case, number and gender of the noun phrase, as well as what kind of determiner (if any) introduces the noun phrase.. Like articles, adjectives use the same plural endings for all three genders.. ein lauter Krach ("a loud noise") der laute Krach ("the loud noise") der große, schöne Mond ("the big, beautiful moon") And how the adjective then has to take the strong declension (-s)? Other resources by this author. the plural genitive is identical to the feminine genitive. pink? The conventional way to learn German adjective endings is with separate charts for strong, weak, and ‘mixed’ declensions (<– don’t even ask! it’s dumb). German Adjective Endings Explained – 2; This step should get you 70% to 75% correct answers. Gotcha covered! You’ve got this! Check out these scrambled English sentences: The kind man gives the sad dog a big bone.The sad dog gives the kind man a big bone.A big bone gives the kind man the sad dog. Trying to learn the German case system off of 10 different charts makes the whole thing seem so haphazard and overwhelming — it reality, there is a lot of logic and consistency behind it. So the adjective behaves as if it were the definite article itself. In part 2 (find it here) we learned to add an extra -n to that whenever the article looks weird. it’s dumb). Strong endings are also used after particular words when not preceded by an article, for example, ein bisschen, ein paar, wenig and after possessive adjectives. The imperative has four forms: du, ihr, Sie and wir. I’ve never seen anything else like it, but it works like a charm and I hope it takes over the German-learning world. This kind of declension of German adjectives is called strong declension and can be shown with the following spreadsheet: —— OK! The Endings of Declined Adjectives There are three declension systems in German, Type I, stark (strong), Type II, schwach (weak), and Type III, gemischt (mixed). There are two types of declensions: strong and weak. the declensions for the feminine nominative & accusative are identical). German cases and adjective endings chart Posted on March 9, 2015 by TheGermanProfessor — 5 Comments ↓ Diese Woche hat TheGermanProfesser auf Facebook die 5.000-Fan-Marke und auf Twitter die 1.000-Fan-Marke überschritten! -word with no ending), but there is an attributive adjective accompanying that noun, the adjective must take the STRONG ENDING (the ending that the definite article would take if it were there). The adjective always takes a WEAK ENDING. And you still didn’t have to think about cases or weak or strong or all that crap. ; Any vowel change in the stem of a strong verb also occurs in the imperative, except if it involves adding an umlaut. I’ll italicize the determiner/adjective, bold the declensions and CAPITALIZE the filler ‘e’s so you can see the different components more clearly: Do you see how we need a filler ‘e’ with dies- before adding the -r declension? endstream endobj 140 0 obj <>/Metadata 4 0 R/OCProperties<><><>]/OFF[158 0 R]/Order[]/RBGroups[]>>/OCGs[158 0 R]>>/PageLayout/OneColumn/Pages 137 0 R/StructTreeRoot 11 0 R/Type/Catalog>> endobj 141 0 obj <>/ExtGState<>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]/XObject<>>>/Rotate 0/StructParents 0/Type/Page>> endobj 142 0 obj <>stream Once you notice the parallel and the agreement of the letters n, e, s with den, die, das, it makes the process a little clearer. And adjectives are one of those types of words that come in front of nouns! Occasionally, a given gender has the same set of declensions in 2 different cases (e.g. der kleine Mann vs. den kleinen Mann vs. dem kleinen Mann?! Using the case system is all about putting those endings on adjectives (and determiners) so we know which noun is doing what. It’s those adjective endings (declensions) that signal the case of the following noun. You probably assume you need to know the case of the noun (nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive; listed down the right side of the chart). noun phrase: this young dog (nominative ← randomly assigned), ‘this’ = dies-‘big’ = groß–dog = Hund (masculine), So this is where we’d need to be on the chart: the masculine nominative. You can get reliable results in a fraction of the time and no longer be held back by adjective endings seeming too complicated. That’s because, in English, we know who is who in a sentence because of rigid word order. 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