The famous writer Mark Twain, in the work “Terrible German,” made fun of the endings of German adjectives. He said:
When an adjective falls into the hands of a German, he begins to incline him in every way, until he bends to the point of absurdity.
This topic really causes great difficulties in studying grammar, and it is difficult to find a student who would not have experienced them.
Application of tables in training
In German, there are three declensions - strong, weak and mixed. At first glance, it can be difficult to understand which adjective refers to one of them. There are a few rules to remember. Very often, teachers give their students just 3 or 4 tables, which they must memorize. And textbooks in most cases do not contain good ideas on how to understand and remember features of the declension of adjectives in German. Many of them try to completely avoid any tables. Such textbooks seem to accidentally talk about German adjectives and a few words accompanying them. It creates a feeling - this happens in the hope that students practice and study the rules of declension of German adjectives more or less unconsciously. Sooner or later, some tables are given anyway. But most of the time they are designed so that they are difficult to understand.
Declination Technique
German adjectives are usually placed before a noun and are not capitalized. They bow when they are in front of a noun, and the ending depends on the gender and case in the phrase. At the beginning of training, it may happen that in the textbooks several tables are given with a declination so that the student simply learns them by heart. But few are able to thus study the declension of adjectives in German. Students want to not only learn something by heart, but also to understand how it works. And this is very easy to do if you use a good mnemonic technique. If you learn two important principles for the definition and declension of adjectives, then learning German will be much easier. But first, consider the classic rules and try to figure them out.
How to determine the type of declension of adjectives?
In order to understand what type of declension an adjective needs to pay attention to the words accompanying it. If there is no such word, then this is a strong decline. If there is, you should look at its gender, number and case. But in that case, if the accompanying word clearly shows them, then we have a slight decline, but if it is difficult to determine these signs, it’s mixed. The gender, number and case in the phrase should show either an adjective or an additional word. To identify mixed declination, clues can be the indefinite articles, possessive pronouns, and negative pronouns that uniquely show case and gender. The basic rule of strong declension is the appearance of the adjective patrimonial / case ending. But there are exceptions - this is Genitiv, the only female and middle gender. In this case, the adjective appears ending en. In a weak declension, he will have an e ending in Nominativ singular for all genera, and in Akkusativ singular for feminine and neuter. For the remaining cases of the singular and plural, the ending en is used.
The first principle of declension of adjectives
Now let's try to use this rule and deduce from it the first principle of adjective declension. In German, a noun is always used in a specific case. Grammatically, it is denoted by a definite article. From this arises the first of the two most important adjective principles in German: case endings are almost identical to the endings of a certain article, but without the letter D. These endings are sometimes also used by other accompanying words. Such a case is called strong declination. Endings in strong declension of adjectives in German always indicate action. Another rule exists for the plural words viele, einige, wenige, zweie, dreie, etc. They have a generic / case ending, and these words do not affect the endings of adjectives. In this case, they have an ending from a certain article.
The second principle of declension of adjectives
But what to do when the accompanying words and adjectives use strong endings? This brings us to the second principle. In the pair "noun and adjective" there is always only one case ending. This means that the definite article does not always precede the noun. Sometimes this is another accompanying word, there are times when it does not exist at all. For example, possessive pronouns do not always have case endings. But if it is not used by the accompanying word, it should be with the adjective. In this case, it will be in a strong declination.
Degrees of Adjectives in German
High-quality German adjectives have three degrees of comparison. They are called positive, comparative and excellent. In order to form degrees of comparison of adjectives in German, certain endings are added to the basics. In the case of the comparative, this is er. In superlative, the suffix st is added , and the definite article is used. Also in this case, adjectives that end in t, d, sch, s, ß, z before st are added e. After a comparative degree, the word als or wie is usually found. Many short words, when comparing adjectives in German, get umlaut. Superlatives are inclined according to the same rules as ordinary adjectives.