German Grammar

German grammar is the grammar of the German language. While some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.

German has retained many of the grammatical distinctions that other Germanic languages have lost in whole or in part. There are three genders and four cases, and verbs are conjugated for person and number. Accordingly, German has more inflections than English, and uses more suffixes. For example, in comparison to the -s added to third-person singular present-tense verbs in English, most German verbs employ three different suffixes for the conjugation of present-tense verbs, namely -st for the second-person singular, -t for the third-person singular and for the second-person plural, and -en for the first- and third-person plural. In addition to being more numerous, German inflections are also less regular than those of English. For instance, while most plurals in English are formed simply by affixing an -s, in German plurals can be formed by adding -e, -en, -er, or -s, by adding an umlaut to the stem vowel, or both.

Owing to the gender and case distinctions, the articles have more possible forms. In addition, some prepositions combine with some of the articles.

Numerals are similar to other Germanic languages. Unlike English, units are placed before tens (as in Dutch, Slovene and Arabic).