Writing and Typing: Lesson

But German also capitalizes EVERY noun:

• Die drei Freunde sitzen in der Küche, trinken Kaffee und warten auf den neuen Mitbewohner.

Freunde, Küche, Kaffee, and Mitbewohner are all written with capitals because they are nouns.

In English, the pronoun "I" is always capitalized, but German "ich" is capitalized only at the beginning of a sentence.

• Morgen ziehe ich ein.

On the other hand, the formal German second person (you, singular or plural) is capitalized. This is the pronoun you use to show respect for the person to whom you are speaking:

• Gehen Sie mit mir auf den Markt?

German also uses some letters which English does not use:

• the ß in Feuerbachstraße
• the ü in Küche
• the ä in Musikpädagogik

The ß is called "ess-set" and stands for a double "s"; in some German now, it is simply spelled "ss" but we will use the ß character in our course and work.

The ü is called "u-umlaut" and stands for a sound that is pretty close to the name Americans give the letter "u" in reciting the alphabet. Sometimes it has been transcribed as "ue" in cataloguing names, and so on, before the days when wordprocessing made it easy to type such characters, but it is always spelled ü if the character is available.

You will also encounter ö and ä in German words. We will discuss why and where German uses these letters and the sounds they stand for.

You should practice writing these symbols by hand and get used to including the umlaut on the letters involved.

When typing on an electronic device, there are various ways to produce these letters. In many word processing programs (such as MS Word) you can use the Insert Character or Insert Symbol function. If you use an Apple device, you can easily produce these characters using the option key. If you use a Windows device, you can install the U.S.-International keyboard Links to an external site.. Alternately, if your keyboard has a number pad, you can turn on the number lock, hold down the Alt key, and use the number page to type in the following codes: