Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For example, in the sentences Der Ball ist rund. ("The ball is round.") and Es ist rund. ("It is round."), the verb is in the same form: third-person singular. In German, the first-person and third-person plural and second-person plural-polite forms are identical for all verbs in every tense.
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
German verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation ().Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise; however, textbooks for learners often class all strong verbs as irregular.
German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. German is an OV (Object-Verb) language. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [note 1] uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.
German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of ...
The gender matches the receiver's gender (not the object's gender) for the dative case, and the owner's gender for the genitive. Dative: Ich gebe die Karten dem Mann – I give the cards to the man. Genitive: Die Entwicklung unseres Dorfes – The growth of our village. For further details as to the usage of German cases, see German grammar.
German pronouns are German words that function as pronouns. As with pronouns in other languages, they are frequently employed as the subject or object of a clause, acting as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases , but are also used in relative clauses to relate the main clause to a subordinate one.
For example, in German, "the dog" is der Hund. This is the form in the nominative case, used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German – Der Mann sieht den Hund (The man sees the dog).