"The child drinks milk."
Translation:Das Kind trinkt Milch.
41 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
It's a conjugation thing. In present tense, English only conjugates "to drink" two ways:
- Drink (I, you, we, you (plural), they)
- Drinks (he/she/it)
German, French, and I'm sure many, many, many more languages have multiple endings for verbs. In this case, "trinkt" is used in present tense for he/she/it, and you (plural) (er/sie/es, und ihr). "Trinke" is used in present tense for I (ich). So in this sentence, "das Kind" is an it (neuter) so the verb is written "trinkt". Here is the conjugation table for "trinken". I suggest you bookmark the website and use it often; not only for verbs, but it also helps with word forms (like when you start to wonder "Why is it Elefanten when it's obviously singular?"). When you do look up a word, click on "word forms". That's most likely what you're going to be using/looking for.
Hope that helps! If you have any further questions, the door to my office is always open. :)
I'm not a native speaker, just a learner, so feel free to research on your own.
A girl (Mädchen) has a feminine biological gender, but the grammatical gender is neuter. Any noun ending in "-chen" is a diminutive form (little blank), and automatically becomes a neuter noun (grammatically). In this case, "little maid". The version for boys would be Bübchen (little boy), but to my knowledge it really isn't used in daily life and der Junge (masculine grammatically) is the common word for boy. So little boys and little girls are still male and female, but grammatically they are neuter. Hope that helps a little and I didn't make it worse!
2485
You are wrong assuming that "Kind" is masculine. It's neuter - das Kind. There is no rule saying that only masculine nouns have plural form with -er.
2783
Ich trinke = I drink
Du trinkst = you (singular) drink
Er, sie, es trinkt = he, she, it drinks
trinkts doesn't exist.