Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to correctly negate a German sentence using “nicht” and “kein,” and know when to use each one.

Lesson Explanation

German has two genuinely different negation words, depending on what’s being negated:

nicht — negates a verb, adjective, or specific statement:
Ich spiele nicht.  (I am not playing.)

kein  — negates a noun, replacing "ein/eine" (Part 1, Lesson 5) or an unmarked noun:
Ich habe kein Auto.  (I don't have a car.)

Kein takes the same gender-matching endings as ein: kein (masc./neuter), keine (fem./plural) — Ich habe keine Zeit. (I don’t have time — “Zeit” is feminine.)

A genuinely important, specific test for choosing between them: if the English sentence uses “not a” or “no” before a noun, use kein; if it uses “not” before a verb or elsewhere, use nicht. Using nicht ein instead of the single word kein is a genuinely common mistake for English speakers.

Practice Questions