On the first day of Christmas, Angelika gave to me
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A dumb question - hmm - how often do you think you may have one?
I read this quote this morning and instantly was transferred back to my childhood: at the end of a lesson, the teacher would ask if everybody understood and EVERYBODY nodded their heads, so I didn't dare ask a question, as it surely would be a dumb question.

Of course, later I would then find out, that  actually, some of the others didn't understand either, but they also didn't want to be seen as dumb. Result: we didn't have a clu...
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So, you've started learning German and it's going well. You even understand that there are three words for 'the', der, die and das. No problem you think, and you have learnt that the German word for cookie is 'der Keks'.

And then you find this video on youtube and you hear 'Ich esse den Keks'. So you ask your teacher why it says 'den' instead of 'der' and your teacher says:"It's the accusative case, because the cookie is the direct object."

Accusative? Direct object? What's that all about??...

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As I said in my last blog, there are 3 ways of saying 'the' (actually, there are lots more, but we ignore that for the time being!). Whether you need to say der, die or das depends on whether the word is masculine, feminine or neuter. 'How can a thing be masculine, feminine or neuter?' I can hear you ask.
Well, it's not the item, it's the word, for example, the table = der Tisch, that doesn't mean the table is masculine, it means the word for table is masculine.

So how do we know?
Are there rul...
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