German · Chapter 6 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Comparative superlative
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
German never says more interesting
English switches to more and most once an adjective gets long. German never does: every adjective takes -er, however many syllables it has. So more interesting is interessanter and more important is wichtiger. Mehr in front of an adjective is the quickest way to sound translated.
Die Geschichte ist interessanter als der Film.
Am größten after a verb, der größte before a noun
German has two superlatives and picks by position. After a verb it is am plus -sten: Er ist am größten. In front of a noun it is the article plus -ste plus the normal adjective ending: der größte Mann. Er ist größten, with no am, is not German at all.
Das ist das beste Buch.
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 article · 7 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. There are 17 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 6 in this chapter