1. Welcome
[00:00:00] Hello! Welcome to the Better German podcast. This is Susi, and in this episode, we’re going to cover articles. I’m going to give you an introduction to articles. What are they, and why do we need them? How can we cope with them?
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2. What Are Articles and Parts of Speech?
First of all, an article is a part of speech in German. The word is “der Artikel” and “part of speech” is “Wortart”
[00:00:31] What is a “part of speech” or “Wortart” very shortly, because I don’t want to go into grammar, particularly. You will hear why I don’t want to cover so much grammar in an upcoming episode called How Much Grammar? You can already see the video on YouTube if you like. So Episode Eight is going to be that.
However, this one is something that you need to have an idea of. So, a “Wortart” or “part of speech” is simply what kind a word it is. What is the function of the word? What does the word do? There are a few words that are the names of objects or things. Like a table, a house, or a wall, or even love. Then some words describe things that we do, or actions, like running, singing, jumping, things like that. So an article on its own “Wortart” – “part of speech”. There are only a very few of them, in English, “a” and “the”. In German, there are a few more.
So, maybe you speak English, and it’s going to be a little easier. Maybe you come even from a language like French, that have relatively similar concepts of articles, but maybe your native language doesn’t have any articles. Then this could be a little getting used to what it is, and to wrap your head around this.
Because languages have different concepts of how they work, and I think that once you understand how they work, it can be very interesting to see the different aspects of languages.
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3. German Article Functions
[00:02:34] So, an article in German has a few functions. First of all, let’s just go into one of the meanings that is very paralleled to English. So I can say, “I need a new table,” and this “a” is the article. It means in this case it’s not sure, or we don’t know that there’s a specific table, just could be any table, “a” table. or “I need a glass of water”. I don’t care which glass or which water, “a” glass of water. The same thing works in German, too. We have “ein” und “eine”.
Then there is “the” in English, in German. It’s “der”, “die”, or “das”. I’ll go into it in a second, why we have several of them. When I say, for example, “The table is dirty”, I’m speaking of a specific table, it’s a table that either we have just talked about or a table that I’m standing in front of and both the speaker and the person who hears it, can see it it’s a specific table. “The table is dirty.” So, that’s the meaning, and we have that too in German.
So I can say, “I need a glass of water”. – “Ich brauche ein Glas Wasser”.
“ein” would be the same thing as “a”.
Oder (German for or).
“The table is dirty”. – “Der Tisch ist schmutzig”.
So “der” would mean it’s a specific one. That is the first thing – the meaning of these articles. Sometimes people forget that, but it’s an important point.
Grammar
[00:04:27] And now, we’re going into a grammar thing, even though I just told you we shouldn’t “learn so many grammar rules”. It’s not so much about a rule, it’s just something to give you an idea of why you’re learning it like this. So when you learn a German word, like. “Tisch” – table, wall, and so on, these are nouns – words that designate things. By the way, I’ve made Episode Three, where we’re going over keywords on a German course. So, you can go and listen to that episode. There is also a downloadable file of Keywords that is connected to that episode, but I’m going to link to it also in the show notes of that same episode. The definitions of all of these specific terms that I’m using, like “noun” and “article” and so on are in there. Anyway, every noun in German, every word that is like table, love, window, nose, you’re going to learn with an article, and we have three of them: “der”, “die” oder (or) “das”.
Sometimes students complain that it’s a pain and it’s unnecessary, or maybe they think that teachers are just torturing them. However, I highly advise you to learn them right from the beginning and not stress out about it. It’s very simple, you learn a new word, and you look at it, is it “der, die oder (or) das”? And you learn it. It’s just like in English, you would learn how to write the word. It’s just a part of the word, really, because you will not be able to make correct sentences if you don’t know this. German is a little particular regarding this. And also, when you learn them, it will make things so much easier to understand. There’s an article episode, part two, coming up. And in that one, I’ll give you more examples to give you an idea of why it is so helpful that you learn it this way, right from the beginning. This is so you don’t see it as just torture or something terrible that you have to do. But you will see that it’s an opportunity if you learn those well, right from the beginning. And if you understand why you learn them, it will make things much easier in the future for you.
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Three Categories
[00:07:05] At this point, what is left is to give you the basic idea – What are the three different categories? Every noun in German is basically put into one of three categories.
It’s considered to be either “male”. “Male” is the word that we use if we describe a man, or “female”. So “female” would be something that we associate with a woman or a girl. Or a noun is “neutral”. That would be neither female nor male, so neither of the characteristics of a man or a woman. However, I want you to understand that this is not a logical thing. There’s usually no connection because most of the words have to do with objects that don’t have any logical connection.
I have seen a lot of videos, books, and other sources with rules about which words have which articles. And I want to tell you, frankly, there are very, very, very few rules that make any sense.
As a German native speaker, basically, how we learnt these is, we just learned them. And we made mistakes, and it didn’t matter. And Mama would say,
“Yeah, I understand, but it’s “der Tisch” and not “die Tisch” or whatever. “Tisch” is a table.
And we just kept hearing it correctly, and then eventually, we would remember it correctly. And that’s the same way you’re going to do it.
[00:08:52] So, we have the male article: “der”,
We have the female article: “die”
And we have the neutral, or object article, maybe if you want to call it like that, it’s “das”.
What is important is that every noun falls into one of those three categories. We call this “gender”, and when you learn the noun, you just learn the article with it. How I do it and how most German courses do it, they just write the article next to the noun when you learn it, and you learn it together.
So please don’t ignore those and just learn them WITH the article. When you keep following my podcasts, I’m going to give you, very soon, some really good tips on how you can learn nouns. Because in the beginning, when you start learning German, you should focus very much on learning nouns. I’m going to give you some tips on how to learn them and how to practice them, so you can remember them easily.
[00:10:05] Just for now, understand that’s why you learn the articles with these nouns. You don’t have to make yourself crazy about it, you don’t have to learn them verbatim. We’re going to use a lot of repetition. I’m going to say things, and you will repeat them. You’re also going to have ways to practice them, so you come to a point basically where you don’t have to think for a long time about it, and you can actually use them. I’m actually going to make you use them very soon and very easily. It’s fun.
And I hope with this introduction, you can get rid of any protests you may have about these. That’s just the way the German language works, unfortunately. And this one is not a stupid grammar rule. There are plenty of things in many German courses I’ve seen where I think,
“Okay, maybe we shouldn’t worry about that so much in the beginning.”
But this one is a very good idea where you just learn these articles with their nouns right from the beginning, and then you’ll be fine.
So in a few weeks, I’m going to have a part two of this episode. I’m going to give you real examples of what’s happening if you learn these articles, and how it will make things so much easier. There’s another episode coming up on how to learn nouns. The next episode is a word list about body parts, and you’ll see right away the first part of how you can learn them, including the articles. I hope I’ll see you there. Let me know what you need. See you soon!
4. Thank You
[00:12:00] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can find a transcript of this episode at www.bettergerman.info and slash (/) and then the number of the episode (5). That is at: bettergerman.info/5.
See you there and see you in the next episode. Bye-bye!
