German Skill:Basics 2

Basics 2
Information
Language	German
Skills	156
Skill No.
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Basics 2 is the third (assuming left to right) skill in the German language tree. It contains three lessons that build on the basic skills in the previous two skills and teach a few animals.

Tips and Notes

Grammatical Gender, part 2

German's grammatical gender, completely unlike English, extends to all nouns. That means animals, things and places will have a grammatical gender as well (which, in the case of animals, might be different than their actual sex). Try to memorize the gender with the noun, as it's not always very obvious. On this wiki, we'll use the definite article (der/die/das,"the") to tell you what gender something is.

Speaking of, der is the masculine definite article (so der Vater) while die is the feminine definite article (so die Mutter). There are also neuter nouns that use das, but we'll see more of those in later skills.

Pronunciation Tips

Some German words have what they call umlauts, which are a pair of dots above the letter. They are pronounced slightly differently than regular letters:

• ä = like the name of the letter A (as opposed to a which is usually an "ah" sound).
• ö = round your mouth like an "oo" sound but then try to say "uh". It'll sound like a cross between an "oh" and an "uh".
• ü = round your mouth like an "oo" sound but then try to say "ee". It'll sound like a cross between "oo" and the ö sound from the previous point.

Lessons

Lesson 1

• der = the (masc.)
• die = the (fem.)
• der Junge = the boy
• der Mann = the man
• die Frau = the woman

Lesson 2

• der Hund = the dog
• die Katze = the cat
• jung = young
• der Elefant = the elephant
• schön = beautiful

Lesson 3

• die Eule = the owl
• die Maus = the mouse
• der Bär = the bear
• wo = where?
• oh = oh!

References

Duolingo Lesson: www.duolingo.com/skill/de/Basics-2