German vocabulary

Good to know about German

English and German are both Germanic languages, and everyday words show it: Haus (house), Hand (hand), Buch (book), trinken (to drink). German also builds long compound words: Handschuh, a glove, is literally a hand shoe.

Every noun is written with a capital letter and has one of three genders: der Hund (the dog), die Katze (the cat), das Haus (the house). Learn the article together with the word.

The articles change with the word’s role in the sentence, the four cases. Der Hund becomes den Hund when the dog is the object: Ich sehe den Hund.

Pronunciation is regular. ei sounds like the English word eye (drei) and ie like ee (vier). w sounds like an English v, ß is an s sound, and ä, ö, ü are vowels of their own.

The numbers 13 to 19 end in -zehn and the tens in -zig. From 21, the ones come first: einundzwanzig is literally one and twenty.