Why is German so different from other Germanic languages?
Why is German so different than most other languages? German is conservative, and retains the capitalisation of all nouns which other Germanic languages dropped a log time ago. This makes written German look a little unusual compared to Dutch, Danish, English, and so on.
How many grammatical cases does German have?
four grammatical cases
Unlike English, which has lost almost all forms of declension of nouns and adjectives, German inflects nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns into four grammatical cases. The cases are the nominative (Nominativ, Werfall, 1. Fall), genitive (Genitiv, Wes[sen]fall, 2. Fall), dative (Dativ, Wemfall, 3.
Why is German noun case so difficult to understand?
The second reason why German noun case is often scary to English speakers is because German is an inflected language. This means that the words that come in front of nouns require small changes that indicate which case the noun is in. For example, remember my story about der Stein?
Why are there so many Germanic words in English?
Norman and Latin words didn’t displace much vocabulary, or subtract anything, but rather they added to this early language. Even today, 80 of the 100 most common words in English are Germanic in origin. These most basic, most frequently spoken words in English and German are from the same roots, making them all extremely similar.
Why is the German language so special?
The beauty of German is that it enables the speaker to express an idea in its deepest complexity with only one word. Other languages might need a whole sentence for the same meaning. The following don’t have a word-by-word translation in English:
Does German have an extra case than English?
Not only does German have an extra case than English does, but German and English distinguish one case from another differently. In English, case is indicated primarily by word order. Both of these sentences use the exact same components, but the meaning is changed because the word order is changed: The man gives the child to the woman.