der, die oder das?

Sometimes you don't realise how good you have things until you see what the alternatives are. This is mainly said of social observation, but I'm finding it's equally true of languages. In English when we have one definite article - 'the'. So when we talk of a specific object known to all in the conversation we say 'the' something; for example 'The woman threw the ball to the dog'.

So far so easy, and in my younger days I wondered what the point was of attaching a classification (definite article) to a word that has no equivalent. 'The' is in a set of one in English, and as such is the only thing you need to reach for when trying to accomplish its task. Of course when studying other languages you come to realise the meanings of classifications such as this. In German there is not a single definite article, but a number of them depending on the gender of the word  and its case.

Gender

If you are reading this in the UK there is a good chance that you were exposed to gendered nouns in French. They say either 'le' or 'la' if the noun is masculine or feminine, and use 'les' if the word is a plural. In German there are not just masculine and feminine genders, but also a neutral gender. These are represented by 'der', 'die' or 'das' respectively. It's important to note that it is the words themselves that possess the gender, and not the object being discussed. Some examples:

• Der Junge - The boy (Masculine)
• Die Frau - The woman (Feminine)
• Das Mädchen - The girl (Neutral)
• Der Hund - The dog
• Die Katze - The cat
• Das Pferd - the horse

So depending on the gender of the word you have three different definite articles. At this point you might think that learning the gender of the word would lead to you getting the right word for 'the'... Sadly though it's not quite as easy as that.

Cases
You'll have to bear with me here as I'm not fully 'down' with the cases in German. If you notice any errors please let me know in the comments.

In English we use cases in sentences all the time, however the differences are minor or non existent so we don't really notice them. Let's use the sentence above to briefly go through them.

"The woman threw the ball to the dog"

In this sentence, the word order tells us what is happening to who. If we were to switch the word order around, then (ignoring the twisted universe where such a happenstance may occur) our understanding of what has occurred will change. So something like:

"The dog threw the woman to the ball"

Still makes perfect grammatical sense, however the scenario described has changed significantly. The reason that the scenario has changed is that we have (by moving the words around) changed their case. The English we refer to these cases as the subjective and the objective, and further we can break the objective down into the direct and indirect objects. So in sentence 1:

• 'The woman' is the subject
• 'The ball' is the direct object; and
• 'The dog' is the indirect object.

Whilst in sentence 2:

• 'The dog' is the subject
• 'The woman' is the direct object; and
• 'The ball' is the indirect object.

More generally, the subject is the part of the sentence that is 'doing' the verb (which in this case is 'to

 throw' in the past tense), the direct object is the thing the verb is being done to, and the indirect object is the recipient of the direct object.

In German each of these states is conveyed in a sentence by a change in the form of the definite article. So if I had been specific in the section on gender, I would have pointed out that 'der' is masculine, 'die' is feminine and 'das' is neutral in the nominative case!

Before you panic about me mentioning a new case, nominative is just another way of saying 'der' is masculine if the noun is being used as the subject of the sentence. So to put the more formal case names to the example above.

• For the subject of the sentence we use the nominative case
• For the direct object of a sentence we use the accusative case
• For the indirect object of a sentence we use the dative case.

You have probably guessed what is coming by now. If we want to show the case of a noun, we have to change the definite article once again! I'm not sure how to do tables on here, so the below bullets are formatted with the case first followed by the masculine (m), feminine (f), neutral (n) and plural (p) forms of the definite article in each case:

• Nominative - Der (m), Die (f), Das (n), Die (p)
• Accusative -  Den (m), Die (f), Das (n), Die (p)
• Dative -        Dem (m), Der(f), Dem(n), Den(p)

So overall that's five different definite articles to use over 12 different permutations! You might wonder what the point is with all that variety, but it does serve a purpose. Let's have a look at the original sentence sentence now, but (hopefully!) translate it into German:

"The woman threw the ball to the dog"

"Die Frau hat den Ball dem Hund geworfen"  

So far so literal (roughly, the past tense is still at the edge of my understanding). The subject, direct object and indirect object are all in the order we would expect them to be in English, however if the sentence is instead written:

"Die Frau hat dem Hund den Ball geworfen"  

The meaning of the sentence is not changed! The definite articles that are attached to the nouns confer their role in the sentence, and as so the word order is less important.

The keen eyed among you would have noticed that there is one more German case (and English one too), called the genitive case which represents possession. However, I have read in a number of places that it is rather going out of fashion in spoken German, so I haven't yet taken the time to learn it!

Ok, that was a surprisingly long post. I hope you found it useful, and if any more fluent German speakers can see any errors, or if anyone has any questions, please let me know using the comments.