Grammatica Tedesca Duolingo: Lezione 1.0/en.

↓B. Home. Lezione en.0: 00 ↔ 02.

Welcome to German :)

Welcome to the German course! We will provide you with tips and notes throughout the course. However, be aware that these are optional. Only read them when you feel stuck, or when you are interested in the details. You can use the course without them.
Often, it's best to just dive into the practice. See how it goes! You can always revisit the Notes section later on.

Capitalizing nouns

In German, all nouns are capitalized. For example, "my name" is mein Name, and "the apple" is der Apfel. This helps you identify which words are the nouns in a sentence.

German genders are strange

Nouns in German are either feminine, masculine or neuter. For example, Frau (woman) is feminine, Mann (man) is masculine, and Kind (child) is neuter.
While some nouns (Frau, Mann, …) have natural gender like in English (a woman is female, a man is male), most nouns have grammatical gender (depends on word ending, or seemingly random).
For example, Mädchen (girl) is neuter, because all words ending in -chen are neuter. Wasser (water) is neuter, but Cola is feminine, and Saft (juice) is masculine.
It is important to learn every noun along with its gender because parts of German sentences change depending on the gender of their nouns.
For now, just remember that the indefinite article (a/an) ein is used for masculine and neuter nouns, and eine is used for feminine nouns. Stay with us to find out how "cases" will later modify these.

gender	indefinite article
masculine	ein Mann
neuter	ein Mädchen
feminine	eine Frau

Verb conjugations

Conjugating regular verbs

Verb conjugation in German is more complex than in English. To conjugate a regular verb in the present tense, identify the stem of the verb and add the ending corresponding to any of the grammatical persons, which you can simply memorize. For now, here are the singular forms:
Example: trinken (to drink)

English person	ending	German example
I	-e	ich trinke
you (singular informal)	-st	du trinkst
he/she/it	-t	er/sie/es trinkt

Conjugations of the verb sein (to be)

Like in English, sein (to be) is completely irregular, and its conjugations simply need to be memorized. Again, you will learn the plural forms soon.

English	German
I am	ich bin
you (singular informal) are	du bist
he/she/it is	er/sie/es ist

Umlauts

Umlauts are letters (more specifically vowels) that have two dots above them and appear in some German words like Mädchen.
Literally, "Umlaut" means "around the sound," because its function is to change how the vowel sounds.

no umlaut	umlaut
a	ä
o	ö
u	ü

An umlaut change may change the meaning. That's why it's important not to ignore those little dots.
If you can't type these, a workaround is to type "oe" instead of "ö", for example.

No continuous aspect

In German, there's no continuous aspect. There are no separate forms for "I drink" and "I am drinking". There's only one form: Ich trinke.
There's no such thing as Ich bin trinke or Ich bin trinken!
When translating into English, how can I tell whether to use the simple (I drink) or the continuous form (I am drinking)?
Unless the context suggests otherwise, either form should be accepted.

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