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German adjectives take different sets of endings in different circumstances. Essentially, the adjectives must provide case, gender and number information if the articles do not. This table lists the various endings, in order masculine, feminine, neuter, plural, for the different inflection cases.
German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of ...
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
Old High German is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension.
The same endings are used for the negative indefinite article-like word (kein-), and the adjectival possessive pronouns (alias: possessive adjectives, possessive determiners), mein-(my), dein-(your (singular)), sein-(his), ihr-(her and their), unser-(our), euer/eur-(your (plural)), Ihr-(your if addressing an authority figure, always capitalised).
The citation form of German verbs is the infinitive form, which generally consists of the bare form of the verb with -(e)n added to the end. To conjugate regular verbs, this is removed and replaced with alternative endings: Radical: mach- To do; machen. I do; ich mache; He does; er macht; I did; ich machte; He did; er machte
Unlike English, the German language distinguishes adverbs which qualify verbs or adjectives from those which qualify whole sentences. For the latter case, many German adjectives form a special adverb form ending in -erweise, e.g. glücklicherweise "luckily", traurigerweise "sadly" (from Weise = way, manner).
In German, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine definite article and one of the German words for "sailor".