Ch 1 · Lesson 5German · Chapter 1 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer
The alphabet: 26 letters plus four
Three umlauts and an eszett, and the handful of spelling rules that make German pronunciation predictable. Read this once and German spelling stops surprising you.
The short version
German capitalises every noun, not just names
.
Why?Hide
This looks eccentric for about a week and then turns into a genuine reading aid. Every noun in a German sentence starts with a capital letter, wherever it sits, so you can pick the nouns out of a long sentence at a glance. Given how long German sentences get, that is a feature rather than a quirk.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full guide (optional) · 6 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 5 of 38 in this chapter