Basic knowledge of German

In addition to these 26 Latin letters, there are four other letters in German:,,? ü、?

Swiss German has been officially abolished? , all use SS; X and y are only used to spell foreign words; Before 1930s, the Latin alphabet was always used in German, and later it was widely used.

German has five single vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and three inflected vowels? ,? , ü, these eight vowels all have long and short sounds; There are three compound vowels: ei(ai, ey, ay), au, eu(u). The difference of vowel length is an important feature of German pronunciation. Long vowels and short vowels have distinguishing functions, such as Staat (country) and Stadt (city). The spelling marks of long vowels can be vowel overlapping aa, ee, oo, ie, or H can be added after vowels as long vowel symbols, such as ah, eh, ih, oh, uh,? H, is it? H, üh, or you can add a consonant letter after the vowel, such as Bad and gut. Short vowels are marked by overlapping consonants or more than two consonants after vowels, such as Bett and Bild. Vowel e is mostly weakened in unstressed syllables and prefixes, and completely weakened in suffixes and suffixes. Consonants are characterized by seven pairs of voiced consonants. The voiced consonants B, D, G play a role in clarification at the end of words. For example, the consonants at the end of lieb, Feld and Tag are pronounced as [p], [t] and [k] respectively. The vibrato can be pronounced with the tip of the tongue [r] or small tongue [R].

German words are classified into 10 categories according to grammatical functions: articles, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and interjections. The first six categories have morphological changes and are called variable parts of speech; The last four categories have no morphological changes and are called invariant parts of speech. The first letter of a noun in German must be capitalized. This rule also began with Martin Luther. Especially when using gerund, this rule often leads to mistakes, so when discussing the revision of orthography in the 1990 s, someone proposed to abolish this rule. Although this proposal was supported by some famous linguists and some authoritative newspapers and TV programs, it was opposed by most people, so it was not adopted. There are three genders of German nouns (masculine, feminine and neuter), and the genders of other words are often irregular except for the rules of gender comparison of nouns directly to people. German also has four cases (nominative, accusative and possessive) and two numbers (singular and plural). In use, apart from some changes of nouns themselves, the nature, number and case of nouns in sentences are mainly expressed by the changes of articles, pronouns, adjectives and some numerals before nouns. Verb inflections include person, number and time: including present tense (pr? Sens), past tense (Pr? Terium), future tense (Futur I), present perfect tense (Perfekt), past perfect tense (Plusquamperfekt) and future perfect tense (Futur II), voice (active voice, passive voice) and modality (direct expression, imperative mood, subjunctive mood).

Structural features of German sentences: Verb predicate is the core of a sentence, which needs the object of each case or preposition object and various complements. In ordinary declarative sentences, when the subject or other sentence components are at the beginning of the sentence, the predicate verb always takes the second place. If the predicate consists of two parts, namely, the changeable part (time auxiliary verb or modal auxiliary verb) and the immutable part (infinitive or verb second participle), the changeable part takes the second place (in some sentences, it takes the first place), and the immutable part takes the end of the sentence, which is a unique predicate "frame structure" in German. Another feature of syntax is that the verb predicate is located at the end of the sentence, and the order of sentence components is: conjunction or relative pronoun-subject and other components of the sentence-verb predicate.

The vocabulary of German is estimated to be 300,000-500,000. According to its origin, it can be divided into three types: 1, inherited words, referring to words handed down from Indo-European and Germanic languages, their derivatives and compound words; 2. Loanwords refer to words absorbed from foreign languages in history and assimilated by German; 3. Loanwords refer to words that are absorbed from foreign languages but still retain their original features. The stress of inherited words and borrowed words is mostly on the first syllable, and the stress of foreign words is on the last syllable or the penultimate or third syllable. Word formation is characterized by the extensive use of derivative and compound means, and compound word formation is the most common in German word formation. More than two words of different parts of speech can be combined into a new word. Capitalize all the first letters of nouns.