German · Chapter 9 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer

Adjectival nouns

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

die Reichen needs a capital letter, English doesn't

German nominalises an adjective just by capitalising it and giving it an article, with no suffix added at all. die Reichen (the rich), die Armen (the poor) and die Alten (the old) all keep taking ordinary adjective endings; only the capital letter marks them as nouns.

die Reichen, die Armen

the rich, the poor

das Gute takes an ending; das Deutsch does not

Both look like a nominalised adjective, but they behave differently. das Gute (the good) declines like any other adjective noun, while language names like Deutsch and Englisch mostly stay bare, usually after a possessive: mein Englisch, closer to English my German than to das Gute. (The inflected das Deutsche, the language in general, turns up after prepositions: im Deutschen.)

das Gute daran, mein Englisch

the good thing about it, my English

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.

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Practice

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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 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 12 of 17 in this chapter

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