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- "The woman is drinking the wa…
"The woman is drinking the water."
Translation:Die Frau trinkt das Wasser.
41 Comments
You're missing grammatical cases. They're expressed by altering articles and endings in German. 'den' is masculine accusative and plural dative case. Here's a list: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/die#Article_2 and more on cases: http://german.about.com/library/blcase_acc.htm
In the examples we've seen so far, 'den' is used on masculine objects like 'der Apfel' when the object is directly receiving an action like 'eats' (e.g. He eats the apple, or, Er isst den Apfel). These are accusative objects. So masculine accusative objects 'der' become 'den' - the object is 'der Apfel,' when it's being eaten by someone, it's 'den Apfel.' At least that's my understanding.
"The woman is drinking water" is a slightly different sentence from "the woman is drinking the water." With no article, the woman can be drinking any water from anywhere. With the article "the," the woman is drinking a specific unit of water. The (tap)water, the (cup of) water, the water (from the well), etc.
'sie' (with a lower case 's') can mean 'they,' 'them' and 'she.' With a capital 'S' (except as the first word of a sentence) it is the formal form of 'you.' (If it's the first word of the sentence, it will always be capitalized and the meaning is determined by the context.) 'Die' usually means 'the,' but can also be used to mean 'she,' 'it,' 'that' or 'which' (but that's it being used as a relative pronoun, which I wouldn't worry about if you are just starting).
"Den" is "Der" in the accusative case. It is used when a masculine word (a "der" word) is the direct object. I always found this type of table to be helpful, and it was one of the earlier things we memorized in my German class: http://german.about.com/library/blcase_sum.htm
Nope; "das" is for neuter nouns. If it were masculine it would be "der Wasser"