Die ganze Grammatik

English has cases too, but only on pronouns: he and him, she and her, who and whom. Everywhere else the job a noun does in a sentence is shown by where it stands. The dog bites the man and the man bites the dog use the same six words and mean opposite things, and the only difference is the order. German marks the job on the article instead, and having marked it, can afford to move the noun. That is the whole trade, and it is worth stating plainly at the start, because almost every difficulty in this section is a consequence of it: four cases exist so that word order can carry emphasis instead of grammar.

English nouns ask almost nothing of you: add -s and you are done, and gender is a fact about people rather than about words. German nouns ask two things at the point of learning and nothing afterwards — which of three genders, and which of nine plural endings — and both have to be learned with the word, because neither can be worked out from it reliably. The good news is at the end of this section. German builds new nouns by sticking old ones together, without hyphens and without limit, so a reader who can take a long word apart can often read a word nobody taught them.

English has three articles and they never change. German has two sets of forms, sixteen cells each, because the article is where the case system lives. It is not decoration in front of the noun; it is the noun's grammatical label. The two sets differ in one instructive way. The definite article marks every cell distinctly enough to be read; the indefinite one has three cells with no ending at all — ein Mann, ein Kind — and that gap is exactly what an adjective steps in to fill. Learning where ein says nothing is therefore also learning why adjective endings exist.

English pronouns are the one place where English still has cases: he and him, she and her. German pronouns do the same thing across all four cases, which makes them the easiest entry into the case system — the idea is already familiar and only the number of forms is new. Two pronouns have no English equivalent at all and are worth the attention. Man is a completely neutral impersonal subject, neither the stiff "one" nor the ambiguous "you". And es turns up as an empty placeholder in a whole family of constructions where English says "it" or "there" or nothing.

An English present tense has one ending to worry about, the -s of the third person. German has six forms and five distinct endings, which sounds worse than it is: they are the same five endings on almost every verb in the language, and they are regular enough that after a fortnight you stop thinking about them. What does need attention is elsewhere. Sein and haben are irregular and are needed on the first day. A group of strong verbs changes its vowel in the du and er forms and nowhere else. And separable verbs split in half, sending their prefix to the end of the sentence — a habit English has in pick it up and German has everywhere.

German has six tenses on paper and a much smaller working set in speech. The present does the present and most of the future. The Perfekt does almost all of the past. The Präteritum is written rather than spoken, except for a handful of verbs where the reverse is true. English speakers arrive expecting a distinction between "I did" and "I have done" and look for it in the German pair. It is not there. Ich habe ihn gesehen is both, and which English tense it corresponds to is decided by the English sentence, not by the German one. Letting go of that expectation early saves a great deal of searching for a difference that does not exist.

German has six modal verbs — können, müssen, dürfen, sollen, wollen, mögen — and they work almost exactly as the English ones do: the modal is conjugated, the main verb goes to the end in the infinitive, and no zu comes between them. Two things differ and both cost English speakers marks. The German modals conjugate, where "can" and "must" do not: ich kann, du kannst, er kann, with no -t in the third person. And müssen negated does not mean "must not" — ich muss nicht means "I do not have to". The word for "must not" is nicht dürfen, and mixing the two turns a permission into a prohibition.

German word order has a reputation for freedom it does not deserve. One position is fixed absolutely: the conjugated verb is the second element of a main clause. Everything else moves, and it moves for reasons — what is already known goes early, what is new goes late. Almost every word-order mistake an English speaker makes in German comes from one habit: putting the subject first because English always does. German does not have to, and when something else takes the first position, the subject steps behind the verb. That single exchange is the whole of what grammars call inversion.

A German subordinate clause sends its conjugated verb to the last position: Ich weiß, dass er morgen kommt. That is the whole rule, and it applies without exception to every clause introduced by dass, weil, wenn, ob, obwohl, während, by a question word or by a relative pronoun. The comma is not optional either. German commas mark clause boundaries rather than pauses, so a subordinate clause is always fenced off — which is convenient, because the comma is the signal that the verb is about to be a long way off.

In English a preposition is followed by a noun and nothing happens to it. In German every preposition governs a case, and the case is not negotiable: mit takes the dative always, für takes the accusative always. So a preposition is learned together with its case, in the same way a noun is learned together with its article. Nine prepositions take both, and which one they take carries meaning rather than being an irregularity. The dative says where something is; the accusative says where it is going. Ich bin in der Stadt against ich gehe in die Stadt — one preposition, two questions, and the case is the answer.

English adjectives never change: a good book, the good books, with the good book. German adjectives change when they stand in front of a noun, and the ending depends on three things at once — the gender, the case, and what article is in front. This is the part of German with no English counterpart whatsoever, and it is the last thing most learners get right. The good news is that it costs nothing at all in the other position: an adjective after sein, werden or bleiben takes no ending ever. Das Buch ist gut. Half of all adjective use is free.

German negates with two words and English with one, and choosing between them is the first question rather than an afterthought. Kein negates a noun; nicht negates everything else. Ich habe kein Auto, but ich fahre nicht. Then there is the second question, which English never asks: where nicht stands. It goes at the end of the middle field, in front of whatever closes the sentence — and if it is negating one particular word rather than the whole sentence, it goes directly in front of that word instead. The position is not style; it is what says how much of the sentence is being denied.

German builds its passive with werden, not with sein: Das Haus wird gebaut. That single fact removes most of the difficulty, because the English "is built" maps onto wird gebaut and not onto the German words it resembles. The words it resembles mean something else. Das Haus ist gebaut is a state — the building is finished — where wird gebaut is a process still going on. English uses "is built" for both and lets the context sort it out; German separates them, which is a distinction worth having and an easy one to get backwards.

German has two subjunctives and they do unrelated jobs. Konjunktiv II is the one every learner needs: it marks something as hypothetical, and it is also how German is polite. Ich hätte gern, könnten Sie, ich würde sagen — a beginner meets it in the first week without being told what it is. Konjunktiv I is the reported-speech form, and it is a reading skill rather than a writing one for most learners: it appears in news reporting and in minutes, and it marks a statement as somebody else's without saying whether the writer believes it. English has no equivalent and uses tense shifts and "allegedly" instead.

Everything up to here decides whether a sentence is correct. This section decides whether it sounds like German. Two things do most of that work: the modal particles, which carry an attitude that English puts into intonation, and word formation, which lets a German speaker coin a noun on the spot and be understood. Neither can be looked up easily. A dictionary will tell you that doch means "but", "yet" and "after all", which is true and no help at all, because in Komm doch mit it means none of them.