Case system and word order

The subject of a verb is the person or thing doing the action. The object is the person or thing that is affected by the action. The indirect object answers question like 'to whom?' or 'for whom'. It may feel a little strange if you normally say 'to who' but we do have a case system in English and it should be 'to whom'.

In the main clause of a sentence the subject comes first and is followed by the verb, just like in English. I (the subject) drink (the verb) beer (the object). Ich trinke Bier. In German a direct object usually follows an indirect object unless the direct object is a personal pronoun. Ich gab meinem Freund das Bier, but the word order changes for Ich gab es ihm. I'm afraid that you just have to learn examples and keep practising.

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Das Wetter

Guess what der Wind is. OK you are right. So if you know that you can also guess what windig means. I will write a blog about the verb werden, but for now wird can mean 'will be'. In this case can you now guess wie wird das Wetter morgen sein?

Some answers could be es wird schön sein or it may be that es wird schneien. You do need to know your weather vocabulary if you are going to talk about the weather. You can’t guess that nebelig is foggy, although you could make an attempt at translating der Frost and der Regen.

You could always check the forecast and you may be able to say ‘am Vormittag wird es schön sein, but you could always talk in general terms and say ‘in Manchester regnet es viel’.

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A plump lie

Look out for the connections between German and English. Die Tür is a door. The link is that ‘t’ becomes a ‘d’, and it’s the same with das Bett. With the verbs kochen and machen you can see that ‘ch’ has been changed to a ‘k’. It’s is good to recognise patterns but do be aware of the falsche Freunde.

Chips aren’t chips they are crisps. There is an adjective arm which is nothing to do with arm but means poor. Plump means clumsy, but eine plumpe Lüge is a blatant lie. A Rathaus has nothing to do with rats but der rat means the advice, and even when you join Rat and Haus you still have to know what das Rathaus means . Wenn means if and Stuhl isn’t a stool it is a chair. There are lots of examples.

The moral of this story is that there are connections between German and English and many words are exactly the same, but you still have to learn the perfect cognates because it there are also many false friends.

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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!

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Is freitags a noun or an adverb?

You know that nouns in German have capital letters. This means that when you see the sentence 'wie ist das Wetter heute?' you know the weather is a noun and you also know that heute is not a noun. Any words that describe a verb are adverbs. You can run quickly and you will also notice that adverbs often end in ly. However adverbs of time come in all shapes and sizes. Afterwards, later, rarely, daily and yesterday are all examples of adverbs of time. If you cannot remember being taught about adverbs of time in English it is because we use them naturally as describing words. Now you know they are not nouns and it is obvious in German.

If you want to say in the evening(s), you just add an s to abend so you can say 'abends sehe ich fern'. Similarly you can say freitags or montags if you want to say on Fridays or on Mondays. Notice that I have added an s and Freitag no longer has a capital letter. It has gone from a noun to an adverb. Jetzt is another adverb of time which is a good word to learn. In fact learn it now. Gleich is the word for at once and it has a capital letter this time as you would expect because it starts this sentence.

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Es gibt

I like 'es gibt' because it is a very common phrase and it means there is or there are. So in English we have to think about whether something is singular or plural but in German you don't have to think about this. You can start an answer before you have thought about what you are going to say. Es gibt...keinen besseren Wein. And that's the other thing, after es gibt you always have a noun in the accusative case. OK it could be singular or plural but at least you have had chance to think about it.

Es gibt...in England (whatever you are talking about). Gibt es hier... (whatever you are talking about)? One expression that you easily use is was gibt's (was gibt es)? What's wrong? You can even use es gibt with expressions of weather. Glauben Sie es gibt regen?

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Der Himmel über Berlin,

Films don’t tend to keep their name when they are translated into English. One German film that was very well received was Der Himmel über Berlin, which became Wings of Desire. Set in '80s Berlin, the German title gives a clue to the story. It is about angels looking down on the city who become mortal and one of the stars of this film is Peter Falk, whom you may well remember as Columbo. He plays the part of an angel who becomes mortal and happens to be Peter Falk, so there is some English in the film. You will also hear a little bit of French.

What struck me when I watched it was the power of colour film. When filmed from the point of view of the angels it is in black and white, which struck me as melancholic. It was sad to see that the angels could not play a full part in life on earth, but the purpose of this blog is to give you the motivation to learn German. Well you are bound to come across words for colours. Revise them before you watch it and you won’t need the subtitles for at least one scene. Another theme that runs through the film is das Lied vom Kindsein. Listen out for 'als das Kind Kind war, ging es mit hängenden Armen...' You may even want to read the song before you watch the film. Just search the internet. There is also a bonus for Nick Cave fans as you get to see him sing. Enjoy the film.

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