Even the famous writer Mark Twain in his work “Terrible German” made fun of the phenomenon of German adjective endings. He said:
When an adjective falls into the hands of a German, he begins to incline it in every way until he reaches the point of absurdity.
This topic really causes great difficulties in learning grammar, and it is difficult to find a student who would not experience them.
Using tables in teaching
There are three declensions in German - strong, weak and mixed. At first glance, it can be difficult to understand which of them the adjective refers to. There are a few rules to remember. Very often teachers give their students just 3 or 4 charts that they have to memorize. And textbooks in most cases do not contain good ideas on how to understand and remember the peculiarities of adjective declension in German. Many of them try to completely avoid any tables. Such textbooksas if by chance they talk about German adjectives and a few accompanying words. One gets the feeling - this happens in the hope that students practice and learn 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 written in such a way that they are difficult to understand.
Declination memorization technique
German adjectives usually come before the noun and are not capitalized. They decline when they are before a noun, with the ending depending on the gender and case in the phrase. At the beginning of training, it may happen that in the textbooks several tables with declension are given in order for the student to simply memorize them. But few people are able to study the declension of adjectives in German in this way. Students want not only to 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 defining and declensing adjectives, then learning German will be much easier. But first, let's look at the classic rules and try to understand them.
How to determine the type of adjective declension?
In order to understand what type of declension an adjective has, you need to pay attention to the words accompanying it. If there is no such word, then this is a strong declension. If there is, you should look at its genus,number and case. But in the event that the accompanying word unambiguously shows them, then we have a weak declension, but if it is difficult to determine these signs, it is mixed. Gender, number and case in a phrase must show either an adjective or an additional word. To determine the mixed declension, clues can be indefinite articles, possessive pronouns and negative pronouns that unambiguously show case and gender. The main rule of strong declension is the appearance of a generic / case ending in the adjective. But there are exceptions - this is Genitiv, the singular feminine and neuter. In this case, the adjective ends with en. In the weak declension, it will have the ending e in the Nominativ singular for all genders, and in the Akkusativ singular for the feminine and neuter genders. For other singular and plural cases, the ending is en.
First principle of adjective declension
Now let's try to use this rule and derive from it the first principle of adjective declension. In German, a noun is always used in a specific case. Grammatically, it is denoted by the definite article. From this arises the first of the two most important principles of German adjectival declension: case endings are almost identical to those of the definite article, but without the letter D. These endings are sometimes used also by other accompanying words. Such a case is called strongdeclension. Endings in the strong declension of adjectives in German always indicate action. Another rule exists for the plurals of 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 the definite article.
Second principle of adjective declension
But what to do when 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 is not there at all. For example, possessive pronouns do not always have case endings. But if it is not used as an accompanying word, the adjective must have it. In this case, it will be in strong declination.
Degrees of adjectives in German
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 stems. In the case of the comparative, this is er. In the superlative, the suffix st is added and the definite article is used. Also in this case, adjectives thatend in t, d, sch, s, ß, z e is added before st. The comparative degree is usually followed by the word als or wie. Many short words, when compared with adjectives in German, get an umlaut. The superlative degree is declined according to the same rules as regular adjectives.
