German Grammar

While English and German may be historically related, there are many differences in the grammar of German that may pose difficulties for students of German. The Foreign Language Institute provides an overview categorizing the difficulty of learning foreign languages for native English speakers, and German is the only language in the "Category II" group, meaning it requires approximately 750 hours of study. This makes German easier to learn than languages like Russian and Indonesian, but harder than languages like French and Italian.

But what exactly makes German so difficult? Let's take a look at some of the major aspects of German grammar that differ from English.

Word Order

In English, our word order is relatively simple but very strict, meaning that if you change the order of the words, it changes the meaning of sentence. This is because in English the order of the words tells us how they function in the sentence. Other languages with a strict word order include Mandarin and Cantonese, while languages such as Russian, Greek, and Korean allow the words to move around more freely without changing the meaning of the sentence.

In German, the word order is somewhat strict, but in a very different way. While English word order follows the pattern of Subject + Verb + Object, the biggest rule for German word order is that the main verb must come second in the sentence. The other parts of the sentence can move around more freely, but the verb always has to be second.

For example, look at the word order in the following sentence. The main verb ("write") always stays in second position, while the other words can move around in the sentence. Unlike the English examples, in German no matter how you rearrange the other words in the sentence, the core meaning of the sentence stays the same.

The word order also gets more complicated when you introduce things like complementary infinitives, which must go at the end of the sentence, and subordinate clauses, which send the verb from second position to the end of the clause.

Ich	möchte	in	meinem	Bett	schlafen
I	want	in	my	bed	to sleep
"I want to sleep in my bed."
(complementary infinitive = "to sleep")

Ich	sagte	ihr,	dass	ich	große	weiche	Kissen	mag
I	told	her	that	I	big	soft	pillows	like
"I told her that I like big soft pillows ."
(subordinate clause in blue)

While these rules may seem straightforward at first, there are even more subtleties to German word order as you introduce more complicated constructions, and students of German must spend a lot of time practicing and getting used to this strange word order.

Noun Case

Another big part of German grammar is noun case. The idea of case might be unfamiliar to most English speakers, but it's actually quite common in other languages around the world such as Russian, Greek, Arabic, and Korean. Noun case is a way of indicating the role of a noun in the sentence (e.g. whether it's the subject, direct object, indirect object, etc.), and this is why German nouns are able to move around freely in the sentence without changing the core meaning of the sentence.

In German, there are 4 cases, and these cases are represented using different endings on articles (e.g. "the", "a"), adjectives, and sometimes the noun itself.

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	das Buch	die Bücher
Genitive	des Buches	der Bücher
Dative	dem Buch	den Büchern
Accusative	das Buch	die Bücher

Noun Gender

Every German noun also has one of 3 genders, either masculine, feminine, or neuter. The gender of the noun will change the case endings on the articles and adjectives that go with it. In German, grammatical gender is generally assigned based on how the noun sounds, and doesn't have a very tight link to actual gender. For example, we might expect "girl" to be feminine on the basis of the word's meaning, but in fact "Mädchen (girl)" in German is a neuter noun.

Can you find any patterns in the examples above that could help you figure out how to identify the gender of a German noun? Memorizing the gender for each noun is one of the big struggles for students of German, since there doesn't appear to be any obvious rule when you first look at them. Based on the examples above, could you guess the gender of the following German nouns?

As you can see, it's really difficult to guess the gender of a German noun without memorizing it! However, if you take a closer look you find that there do appear to be some general patterns you could use to guess the gender of a noun. Most of these patterns have to do with the noun ending. We'll take a closer look at these patterns later.

Noun Plurals

In English, it's (usually) pretty simple to turn a singular noun into a plural noun -- you just add an "s". "Cat" becomes "cats" and "box" becomes "boxes". There may be some exceptions like "goose → geese" and "mouse → mice", but for the most part you can reasonably rely on the "s" rule to form a plural noun. In German however, there are a variety of ways to form plurals, and students of German often find it very difficult to memorize which plural forms go with which nouns. For example, here are some common ways to form plurals in German.

Gender Patterns

Now let's take a look at what patterns we might find for determining the gender of German nouns. To do this, we identified a list of about 140 noun endings and plotted them to see which endings tend to take which grammatical gender.

Plural Patterns

We can also do a similar kind of analysis for different plural formations in German nouns. Using the same list of about 140 singular noun endings, we can see which singular endings tend to take which plural endings in the Sankey diagram on the left.

Using the tool above, we can see many of the common patterns found in German plurals. For example, if we click on the "e" singular ending on the left, we notice that most of these nouns are feminine and take the "n" plural ending. Similarly, if you click on the "ung" singular ending, we see that almost all of these words are feminine and take the "en" plural ending.