"The girl reads the newspaper."
Translation:Das Mädchen liest die Zeitung.
54 Comments
I am begining to understand that certain articles can have masculine and feminine properties, but i haven't been taught yet how to tell whether or not the noun is feminine.
me either! and is really difficult, can someone explain this to us please?
I've seen some native speakers post elsewhere that words ending in '-ung' or '-tung' are often feminine - this has helped me.
You simply have to learn the noun's gender along with the definition of new words. There is no way of telling whether a noun is masculine or feminine. Sometimes they are obvious (ex, "man" is going to be masculine) but most times its rather random. "Zeitung" (newspaper) for example is feminine.
Why is Madchen considered neutral when it means girl? Why isn't it feminine?
-chen means a small version (ex: Brötchen - a hard roll aka small bread) and it automatically makes a word neutral
These are properties of a language, in this case the German language. Ex: The nose: In French is masculine "le nez" In Spanish is femenine "la nariz". In English, no gender.
Thank you. I actually knew this but I focused on choosing which one was correct (They offered both 'die' and 'eine', making both correct sentences) but the question was to translate the phrase they gave, so only one of them worked.
Correct. But the grammatical gender of a word is not necessarily related to the natural gender of the thing the word refers to.
Das Mädchen liest die Zeitung = The girl reads/is reading the newspaper
Die Mädchen lesen die Zeitung = The girls read/are reading the newspaper
For those who are confused about gender, what everyone else is saying is true. You do have to learn the noun's gender as well as the translation, but they aren't all random. For instance, all words that end in "ung" are feminine (Die Zeitung, die Bedienung, die Rechnung) . In this lesson, Mädchen is neuter. Why? Because any noun that ends in "chen" is neuter (Das Mädchen, das Brötchen, das Hähnchen).
der Sprung, der Kuchen :)
Admittedly, in those word, -ung and -chen are not suffixes, but it does make things a little trickier because you have to know when a sequence of letters is used as a suffix and when it's part of the stem.
sie means "she" (subject) or "her" (direct object) or "they" (subject) or "them" (direct object).
Yes. Because it's just one girl.
- das Mädchen liest = the girl is reading
- die Mädchen lesen = the girls are reading
Why can't we say "Das Madchen liest DER Zeitung" ? I know it's feminime, but because it's after lesen, why is Zeitung still nominative ?
Okay thanks, but I read just before that when it was accusative der > den and die > der ?
My German teacher put it to me like this: Mäd means maid, which is what girls were called long ago. The chen part means little. Anything that has chen in it is automatically neuter, and uses das.
Why is it, "Das Mädchen liest die Zeitung" and not "Das Mädchen liest 'Das' Zeitung"
No. One is Mädchen, many are also Mädchen.
If there is a definite article before them, then you can tell the difference by the article: das Mädchen (the girl), die Mädchen (the girls).
What's up with all the "THEs"? I always get confused where to use Das, Die, Der.
Das madchen is not correct, nor is ordinung.
It's Mädchen with capital M and with ä. (And in Ordnung.)
Both are wrong -- Mädchen has to be capitalised and has to have an ä, not an a. (Or write Maedchen if you can't write Mädchen. But don't just leave the dots off entirely.)
das Mädchen is "the girl".
die Mädchen would be "the girls" -- plural.
The noun Mädchen is grammatically neuter, not feminine.
Its not that the person doing the action is a female, but that the thing thats receiving the action. Zeitung is a feminine word.
If you use the US-International keyboard layout, you can use an umlaut by typing " before the vowel you want to add the umlaut to.
