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Idiosyncrasies of the German Language

© Colleen Thomas Ryor

There are some nice things about the German language, but first I will talk about a few more of its idiosyncrasies. Although I am no linguistics expert, I have noticed that of the four languages that I am familiar with (English, Latin, French, and German), only German capitalizes all common nouns: It is necessary to capitalize all nouns, not only those at the beginning of sentences or proper nouns (i.e., place names, etc.). For example, the English sentence "The man sings loudly" in German would be "Der Mann singt laut." You must capitalize the "M" in "Mann." The English sentence "I have my book" would be "Ich habe mein Buch" in German, capitalizing the "B" in "Buch." Is there a nice side to this aspect of the German language that seems a little bit odd to native speakers of modern English? I say yes. You are never in doubt when a word is meant as a noun--there are some words in English that are used as both nouns and adjectives. In German you would never question the speaker's intentions in this scenario because of the capitalization of all German nouns.

Ah, perhaps the biggest obstacle to fluency for speakers of English when learning German would probably be the article "the," which in German has a plethora of forms: der modifies a masculine noun; die a feminine, and das a neuter. Like Latin, German has genders for its nouns, which you must memorize. To make matters worse, the feminine article die in the Nominativ (nominative) can change to der when used in the Dativ (dative case), which can be confusing, because der is the masculine form of "the" in the nominative! At least French only has two genders!

Finally, German has a peculiar trait that foreigners could find daunting if they let it--the famous word compounds! For example, in English we would call the famous chocolate cherry cake from the Black Forest region of Germany "Black Forest Cake," separating the words. How do you express this item in German? Schwarzwälderkirschtorte Yikes! Frightening, if you let it be. If you take the word apart, though, you will easily determine its meaning: Schwarz-wälder-kirsch-torte

schwarz means "black"; wälder stems from Wald, meaning "forest"; Kirsch is German for "cherry," and Torte means a special kind of German cake.

See? It's not so bad if you learn to take the words apart and not let their ferocious length scare you away. After you have been speaking German for a while, you can actually have fun with it and make some of your own up, which the German language allows---basically, anything goes, as long as the listener gets the speaker's meaning.

The author in München

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