German adjective endings aren’t the first thing you need to worry about when you learn German. When you first start learning German, you should focus on the basic German words. Then you move on to the most useful German phrases.

As you progress, you take note of how Germans have several different forms of ‘you’ and you begin to get a feel for the top German pronouns. Then you build up a vocabulary of adjectives and you find you can describe thing in more and more detail in German. You’re feeling better about your German.

Now it’s time to take on a bigger challenge in German.

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German adjective endings

The good news is adjectives don’t change when you use what’s called a ‘predicate adjective’. For example, the house is old das Haus ist alt. At some point you finally decide to dedicate some time to tackle the complexities what are known as ‘attributive adjectives’ and their endings. Because German is a language with grammatical cases, casus in German, you will need to tackle the intricacies of how German cases work.

The four cases in German are: accusative, dative, genitive, and nominative. You’ll see that when you study German prepositions, you need to learn about how cases work.

When you study German attributive adjective endings, you can’t escape cases because grammatical cases are an integral part of the German adjective use. We’re here to help make the journey a bit easier. The BBC has created an easy-to-use table of German adjective endings that help with these circumstances.

You’ll notice on the BBC chart that German also has more articles than English. English only has two indefinite articles (a, an) and one definite article (the). German has masculine, feminine, neutral and plural forms of ‘a’ and ‘the’.
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Four things that decide German adjective endings

So what happens to German adjective endings? A German adjective will change its ending depending on the following factors:

1. Whether the gender of the noun that follows the adjective is masculine, feminine or neutral
2. Whether the noun is plural or singular
3. Whether the article is definite, indefinite or not used
4. Whether the case is accusative, dative, genitive, and nominative

For a native English speaker, it can be daunting to think about how to end an adjective before you construct a sentence. After all, in English if you have the adjective ‘old.’ It stays ‘old’ regardless of grammar and syntax. For example, in English you have: an old house, an old cat, an old dog and the old houses/cats/dog, old houses/cats/dogs, etc.

In English you don’t have to do anything to the word ‘old’. That’s not the case in German.

In German you would have to think about what to do with the adjective. Let’s say the noun is in the singular form. In German, you’d have to think about the article you’re using. For example are you saying ‘the house’, ‘a house’, or just plain ‘house’?
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Using the nominative case with German adjectives

Let’s work in the nominative case to start. We will continue to work with the adjective old, which is alte in German. We will use the German words for ‘house’, ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ so we can cover all three genders. You would say: das alte Haus, die alte Katze, der alte Hund. Once you reach the plurals, you’d have to add an ’n’ to the adjective though. That means you write: die alten Häuser, die alten Katzen, die alten Hunde.

‍Then let’s look at what would happen if we used the indefinite article, ‘a’ instead: ein altes Haus, eine alte Katze, din alter Hund. In the plural, you can’t say ‘a houses’ but since you can say ‘no houses’ you’d have the following: keine alten Häuser, keine alten Katzen, keine alten Hunden.

‍In the plural without the article you have: alte Häuser, alte Katzen, alte Hunden. In theory you could also have the singular without any article at all, giving: altes Haus, alte Katze, alter Hund.
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Accusative case with German adjectives

In the accusative case, you would refer to the noun as an object or action or movement. So let’s take the examples of ‘without the house, cat and dog’, because you’re doing some action without involving the the cat, dog or house. Along these lines we would say: ohne den alten Hund, ohne die alte Katze, ohne das alte HausIn the plural these would be:ohne die alten Hund, ohne die alten Katze, ohne die alten Haus.

As we mentioned earlier, if you switch to the indefinite article, the adjective endings will change as well. So for ‘without an old dog, an old cat and an old house’ we have:ohne einen alten Hund, ohne eine alte Katze, ohne ein altes Haus, If you want to say without any old dog, cat, or house you have: ohne keine alten Hund, onhe keine alten Katze, ohne keine alten HausIn the plural accusative, when you have no articles gives, ‘without old dogs, without old cats and without old houses’: Ohne alte Hunde, ohne alte Katzer, ohne alte Häuser
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Dative case with German adjectives

In the dative case, you would refer to the noun as an indirect object associated with something that is being received. So let’s take the example of ‘to the…dog, cat and house.’ To help you look at the adjective endings with a different perspective, let’s look at the dog first.

• To the old dog ..zu dem alten Hund
• To an old dog… zu einem alten Hund
• To the old dogs… zu den alten Hunde
• To old dogs…. zu alten Hunden

The same thing happens in the neuter form, which you will see below:

• To the old house…zu dem alten Haus
• To an old house…zu einem alten Haus
• To the old houses….zu den alten Häusern
• To old houses…zu alten Häusern

With the feminine form, you’ll also see the same forms:

• To the old cat…zu der alten Katze
• To an old cat…zu einer alten Katze
• To the old cats…zu den alten Katzen
• To old cats…zu alten Katzen

Genitive case with German adjectives

In the genitive case, you would refer to the noun as something that belongs to somebody or to something. In the genitive, you’ll see the adjective ending would be the same in masculine and feminine.Examples would be:

• The old dogs’ water - das Wasser der alten Hunde
• The old cats’ water - das Wasser der alten Katzen

If you’re looking for an overview and review of how German adjective endings work, check out this 11-minute YouTube video from ‘The German Professor’

Don’t sweat the German grammar too much. Sometimes its good to take a break from the hard stuff and take some time to enjoy some easy German songs. It’s good to balance the heavy German with the light German. You need some balance to keep motivated.