Chapter 2: Focus on Nouns

Grammatical terms, why bother?

If you haven't studied another foreign language you may not be familiar with some of the technical terms used in this course. Unfortunately, grammar explanations are impossible without them.
That is, to understand German texts and their grammatical structures, you have to understand certain concepts. Specific terms are required to explain these concepts.

Let's demonstrate with an example.

You certainly know what a "noun" is. Now look at the following sentence:

Der Tutor korrigiert die Antworten.
The tutor corrects/is correcting the answers.

Why do we need grammatical terms?

	If you were asked the grammatical terms for the words Tutor and Antworten, what would you say?
	"They're both nouns."
	Correct! Very good. — We need grammatical terms to identify what is going on in a sentence. But there is still a bit more to learn about nouns...

Categories of words
	The term "noun" describes the category of the word. Other word categories include: verbs (to correct), adjectives (wonderful), adverbs (wonderfully), etc.

Grammatical function of a word
	So you see, we have different terms to describe different grammatical functions of words in a sentence. Now things become more interesting: Tutor describes the actor, the word therefore serves as subject. Antworten describes the target of the verb and therefore functions as direct object in the sentence. Understanding functions can help you to understand a sentence. In the above case, you see who corrects what: "Der Tutor korrigiert die Antworten." Q: Who? — A: Tutor! Q: What? — A: Antworten! At least this time, it can't be the other way round: The questions can't correct the tutor! However, other sentences are more ambiguous. Look at this one:
	Der Tutor korrigiert die Studenten.
	If asked: "Is the tutor correcting the students, or are the students correcting the tutor?"
	You'd probably answer: "The tutor corrects the students."
	Yes, that's right. As an English speaker you immediately guessed that the tutor is correcting the students because the subject in English almost always occupies first position. In German, however, it's not so easy. The sentence could also read:
	Die Studenten korrigiert der Tutor. And it still would mean: The tutor corrects the students.
	Q: Whom? - A: Studenten!

Importance of grammatical terms
	At this point, you don't have to understand the difference between category and function, between noun and direct object. But you should know that later on we need grammar terms to describe differences of grammatical functions.

Relax: Because we don't expect you to be familiar with grammatical terms, we'll explain them as needed.
If you already know what we're talking about, just skip the explanation. If you feel that the explanation isn't adequate,
you may want to consult a German grammar book or write an email to your tutor.