German · Chapter 1 · Lesson 2 · 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
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.
Der Mann und das Kind.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why. Read it through once, then come back and continue with the next lesson.
Read the full article · 2 min readLesson 2 of 24 in this chapter