Random Language Adventure #2 - German

In today's episode of Random Language Adventure, we’ll be talking about German! And of course we'll have German learning resources at the end!!

So, German is a West Germanic language which means it's very closely related to Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, Scots, Yiddish and Luxembourgish. Being a Germanic language, it's also closely related to North Germanic languages such as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic, although not as much as the others.

These languages evolved from Proto-Indo-European over thousands of years. We’ve managed to discover a couple of sound shifts that were key in the formation of modern Germanic languages: Grimm’s Law and the Germanic umlaut. Grimm’s Law is the sound shift that differentiated Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European. It consists in voiced aspirated plosives becoming voiced plosives and then becoming voiceless plosives and lastly turning into voiceless fricatives. For example: dʰ → d → t → θ (that is the “th” sound in modern english)

The Germanic umlaut is an important vowel shift that consisted in the fronting of back vowels and the raising of front vowels. These sound shifts occured over millennia of language evolution and resulted in all of the modern germanic languages mentioned earlier.

But what is German like today? German is a gendered language, that uses feminine, masculine and neuter pronouns, that’s why students learn new words together with the definite article, to memorize the gender. German also has different verb moods, which are Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, Participle and Infinite. The Indicative mood has 6 tenses: Präsens, Präteritum , Perfekt, Plusquamperfekt, Futur I, Futur II

It also uses cases, there are 4: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, which indicate a subject, direct object, possessive and indirect object respectively, within the sentence. Each of these has suffixes for each gender (and for singular/plural)

This is a very basic explanation of German grammar, which doesn’t cover everything, but here are some resources you could check out!

https://learngerman.dw.com https://www.easygerman.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://youtube.com/@germanpod101?si=fSVjj6xaqqqZovWc https://a.co/d/dmMEtCv

See y'all next week!