German rules

There are a lot of consistent rules in German. You will always find exceptions but there is a strong tendency to follow German grammatical rules. There are rules of word order, gender, adjectival agreements and pronunciation, but today I am going to have a look at some of the rules for capital letters.

In German you have capital letters at the start of a sentence like English, but in German you also have capital letters to start every noun. It may take a little longer to type a German sentence because of these capitals but you can see the nouns and the difference between Montag and montags is much clearer than in English. In English there is an anomaly for the pronoun I. It is also an anomaly in German because you don’t use a capital letter for ich. The formal ‘you’ Sie does have a capital letter.

If you think this is difficult just think of all the rules in English (capital letter for English) and then think how you would teach these rules to a German!

Bis bald