Review: Determiners

This is a quick, but very important summary/review.

As you know: nouns come in three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative), and two numbers (singular and plural). Thus a full declension of a noun would have 8 different slots for different forms, and there are 3 different sets of 8 forms it might use, depending on its gender.

The changes that show gender, number, and case may involve the end of the word, or they may involve a change in the accented vowel (umlaut), or both.

You remember that we can't always guess the gender of a noun from its form or even from its meaning.

Also, the noun may not mark the case clearly; some forms are marked by a particular ending (the -s of genitive singular or the -(en) of dative plural in masculine and neuter nouns, for example), but many nouns use the same forms for 3 or all 4 of the 4 cases.

Of course, German children do not learn the gender of nouns by studying lists, nor do they know how to spot a plural genitive ending from school; but rather they pick up an understanding of gender and case and number from hearing nouns used in different contexts. As adults learning German or any other language, we must memorize the gender with the nouns and learn how to analyze a sentence to determine the case of the noun.

The class of words that gives the most information about the gender, number, and case of the noun is called DETERMINERS. To put it another way, determiners are the definite and indefinite articles, plus the "der and ein words" which are declined like the articles.

The determiners include:

definite articles (der)
indefinite articles (ein--singular only)
negative article: kein (declined like ein in singular, like der in plural)
possessive adjectives: mein, dein, sein/ihr, unser, euer, ihr (declined like kein)
demonstrative adjectives: dieser, jener (declined like der)
interrogative adjectives: welcher (declined like der)
quantifier adjectives: jeder, beide, andere, mancher, mehrer, viel, wenig (we will meet these in ch. 7)

Note that if you use one of the adjectives from this group, it replaces the article.

The declension of these words reflects to some extent the gender, number, and case of the nouns they modify, so they are important guidelines for the ear and eye.

All the adjectives from this group can also be used as pronouns or are closely related to pronouns, so one can think of them also as "pronominal adjectives."

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