Chapter 3: - Grammar 1

GRAMMAR 3

NOUNS — Part 1

Learning new words

As you've seen, it's easy to find nouns in a German text. And when they're international words or cognates, you can also understand them easily.
Unfortunately, typical German nouns don't fall into this category, and you can't look up every new word in the dictionary without getting a headache! So, you have to find other ways to decipher nouns.

We'd like to provide you with some useful tips.

Learning new words
Study with a focus on your personal interests and likes.
Learn not only the words given in each chapter's vocabulary list but also others not mentioned that are interesting to you. This is one way to quickly expand the group of words you understand.

Learn patterns of word formation
Try also to learn German patterns of word formation. This can help you make educated guesses about unknown words.
For example:
Imagine you already know the adjective "wahr" ("true").
You then learn that in German there is a suffix for forming nouns out of adjectives, "-heit."
The next time you read a text and find the noun "Wahrheit," you might guess that it means "the truth." And you'd be right!

When you learn patterns of word formation, you'll even know that "Wahrheit" must be feminine (i.e., "die Wahrheit") because the suffix "-heit" always creates feminine nouns.

Do you see how you can make learning easier for yourself?

The trick also works the other way around: Let's say that you first learned the noun "Wahrheit" and then read the adjective "wahr" in some text.
Knowing that "-heit" is just a suffix with no particular meaning of its own, you can easily deduce the meaning of the adjective from your knowledge of the noun and word formation pattern. Elementary, as Sherlock Holmes would say.

Ok, with which word formation pattern do we start?

In this chapter we'll introduce you to the word formation pattern of compound nouns.