Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to correctly add basic adjective endings to a descriptive adjective following an indefinite article.

Lesson Explanation

German adjective endings are a genuinely complex system that depends on gender, case, and which type of article (if any) precedes the adjective. This lesson covers the pattern following an indefinite article (ein/eine, from Part 1, Lesson 5) in the nominative case:

ein guter Mann     (a good man — masculine, -er)
eine gute Frau     (a good woman — feminine, -e)
ein gutes Kind     (a good child — neuter, -es)

A genuinely important, specific reasoning: since ein itself doesn’t clearly signal gender the way der/die/das does (recall that ein is used for both masculine and neuter, from Part 1, Lesson 5), the adjective ending takes on the job of showing the noun’s gender instead — the ending genuinely carries grammatical information the article alone doesn’t provide here.

Practice Questions