|
Which
words have you selected? Are there words like "politics,"
"Bundestag," "Berlin," "Parliament,"
"attraction," and "landmark"?
Even if you chose different words, you probably also noted some
of these.
They
are called nouns.
|
|
the
name of a:
specific person (Einstein),
specific place (Berlin), or
specific thing (The International Herald Tribune).
|
referring
to a:
nonspecific person (scientist),
nonspecific place (capital), or
nonspecific thing (newspaper).
|
|
Note
that a common noun may be astract, intangible, like "love,"
"freedom," or "idea."
In
German, nouns are especially easy to identify because
they all begin with a capital letter,
even when found in the middle of a sentence: Kind,
Hund, Haus,Liebe.
Nouns
often carry important information in a text. If you look for keywords,
you'll often select nouns, or word-groups built around them.
In some texts, however, verbs are more important. Imagine,
for example, a text about a baseball game. Because you'd want to
know what a player did in a game, how he acted, you'd
look for verbs. Many of the texts we are going to read in
this course are newspaper or technical articles that don't describe
much action, so that looking for nouns might be a good
strategy.
|
Politics: The German Bundestag in Berlin 
