Getting Acquainted with the German Language

Like everything else, knowing the background of the German language will help you appreciate it even more and possibly give you the desire to learn this language. Noteworthy is the fact that the German language departed from Indo-European languages. These languages are mainly regarded to be English, Dutch, Scandinavian and now the extinct Gothic. This effect has not departed significantly and can be see by a comparison of some German words to their English cognates. For example consider the following words in both English and German: pound pfund, apple apfel, cat katze, hope hoffen. Its clear that the rules of sound shift are the ones that have effected the move and can be seen from the conversions of k to ch, p to f, t to ss and so on. German dialects also seem to have the same sound shift and a 2-layered bilingual has developed in large cities. Well, lets delve into a little German and see if we can learn something.

The first you need to learn about the German language is the fact that articles are the key to understanding the gender nouns. This is because they are divided into the 3 genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. German language however has an exception. The gender does not depend entirely on sex. When reading German, it is easy to identify the nouns since they are all capitalized. For example the sentence:

Our son is driving to the city by car.
Unser Sohn fahrt mit dem Auto in die Stadt.

Nouns that take the masculine nature include male persons, months, seasons, dayd of the week and geographical directions. Alcoholic beverages and weather phenomena also take the masculine nature. Nouns that take the feminine nature include female persons, names of flowers, rivers, fruits and female animals. Pronouns on the other take the place of nouns and are used to very similarly to nouns. They change according to gender, number and case. Just to give an example, the sentence:

I see a woman

This sentence can be rewritten in the format:

I see her

In German, the same thing happens it can thus read:

Ich sehe eine Frau
Ich sehe sie

Weak verbs in the German language change the same way as in English. Strong verbs change the stem vowel while mixed verbs, very common in German, behave like both the weak and strong verbs. The German language is spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. So if you plan to visit Europe some day, then consider learning the German language.