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German articles and pronouns in the genitive and dative cases directly indicate the actions of owning and giving without needing additional words (indeed, this is their function), which can make German sentences appear confusing to English-speaking learners.
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 ...
German adjectives take different sets of endings in different circumstances. Essentially, the adjectives must provide case, gender and number information if the articles do not. This table lists the various endings, in order masculine, feminine, neuter, plural, for the different inflection cases.
Many loanwords from English adopt the gender of their native German equivalent; the gender of other loanwords may be deduced by the word's form or ending. For example, nouns from English - ing forms are neuter when referring to actions, but masculine when not referring to actions e.g. der Looping , 'loop' esp. in context of a rollercoaster.
Students of German are often advised to learn German nouns with their accompanying definite article, as the definite article of a German noun corresponds to the gender of the noun. However, the meaning or form, especially the ending, of a noun can be used to recognize 80% of noun genders. [1]
Disyllabic nouns ending in -al, -ar and -an, with long stems, sometimes drop the -a-before an ending beginning with a vowel, e.g. masculine singular ackar "acre, field", genitive singular ackres. Note that in these cases, the -a- is an epenthetic vowel that was not originally present (compare Gothic akrs < Proto-Germanic *akraz ), and so the ...
Most nouns do not take declensions in the accusative or singular dative cases. A class of masculine nouns, called "weak nouns," takes the ending -n or -en in all cases except the nominative. Dative forms with the ending -e, known in German as the Dativ-e (dem Gotte, dem Manne) are mostly restricted to formal usage, but widely limited to poetic ...
The citation form of German verbs is the infinitive form, which generally consists of the bare form of the verb with -(e)n added to the end. To conjugate regular verbs, this is removed and replaced with alternative endings: Radical: mach- To do; machen. I do; ich mache; He does; er macht; I did; ich machte; He did; er machte