German grammar

The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages. Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.

German has retained many of the grammatical distinctions that some Germanic languages have lost in whole or in part. There are three genders and four cases, and verbs are conjugated for person and number. Accordingly, German has more inflections than English, and uses more suffixes. For example, in comparison to the -s added to third-person singular present-tense verbs in English, most German verbs employ four different suffixes for the conjugation of present-tense verbs, namely -e for the first-person singular, -st for the informal second-person singular, -t for the third-person singular and for the informal second-person plural, and -en for the first- and third-person plural, as well as for the formal second-person singular/plural.

Owing to the gender and case distinctions, the articles have more possible forms. In addition, some prepositions combine with some of the articles.

Numerals are similar to other Germanic languages. Unlike modern English, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese, units are placed before tens as in Early Modern English, Danish, Dutch, Yiddish and Frisian.

Gender
Students of German are often advised to learn German nouns with their accompanying definite article, as the definite article of a German noun corresponds to the gender of the noun. However, the meaning or form, especially the ending, of a noun can be used to recognize 80% of noun genders. For instance, nouns ending in the suffixes -heit, -keit, -ung, -schaft or -tät are always feminine.

Prepositions
Prepositions are designed to give some direction, location, intensity, etc. to a sentence. The way such is indicated in German may be different from the way it would be in English.

The following chart shows the cases associated with several prepositions in common usage.

* With the dative in colloquial style and most often with pronouns.

** May take the genitive.

*** As a preposition takes the genitive or a colloquial dative: entlang des Weges (dem Wege) "along the way", but as a postposition it takes the accusative with the same meaning: den Weg entlang.

German prepositions may form part of other parts of speech, forming other words by means of morphological derivation, composition and contraction, resembling sometimes processes of inflection (as with contractions with the definite articles).

"Unusual" prepositions, which exist in vast amounts in bureaucratic style, as a rule take the genitive. The nascent preposition Richtung (lit. "direction", as in ich fahre (in) Richtung München, I'm driving in the direction of Munich) takes the accusative.

Sentences
German sentence structure is similar to other Germanic languages in its use of V2 word order.