Some Christmas Stories...

That's because you have three genders and four cases in German (at least)

So we have

- der Mann (masculine) - the man
- die Frau (feminine) - the woman
- das Madchen (neuter with an umlaut over the a) - the girl

Hold on, why is a girl neuter not feminine? Well any noun ending in -chen is automatically neuter

In the accusative case where the noun is the object of the sentence, the masculine becomes 'den' for 'the' but neuter and feminine nouns don't change.

In the dative case where the noun is an indirect object i.e. usually with "to" in English, all nouns change and der-die-das becomes dem-der-dem

Also there's a genitive case expressing belonging where der-die-das becomes des-der-des but by all accounts it's avoided in spoken German using "von" with the dative instead.

BUT prepositions also take cases so if you use "wegen" (meaning "because of") the following noun takes the genitive case so you have to know it, other prepositions take either the accusative or the dative and sometimes both depending on whether action is involved i.e. being in a box uses IN + dative but putting something into a box uses IN + accusative.

Oh, and the there's plurals which are normally (maybe always?) "die", but remember the actual plural noun rarely adds "s" like English, as in der Baby - die Babys but can be -e, -er, -n, -en or nothing, and may also take an umlaut over the first vowel. "The" in the plural becomes "den" in the other three cases ( I think!).

Not surprisingly most Germans I know speak English fluently and 99% correctly but I've never met more than a couple of English speakers who've mastered German (and that's not me).

mobile_carrot

A good explanation! I like to think that I've mastered the language but have the advantage of being married to a German and spending half my time in Swabia in Southern Germany.

"Hold on, why is a girl neuter not feminine? Well any noun ending in -chen is automatically neuter,"

Any diminutive in German is neuter and the language (like the German people!) seldom bends the rules so Mädchen and Fräulein which are obviously female follow that rule. The problem comes when we refer to a Mädchen (young woman) as es (it) which is grammatically correct but sounds wrong to the German ear. This is addressed in the link below.

https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/2731/spricht-man-%C3%BCber-ein-m%C3%A4dche n-eine-frau-mittels-sie-oder-es

P.S. It seems you had a problem putting an umlaut over the a in Mädchen. Try alt+132

@Februs/flopsy, the above and preceding posts are off topic so you might like to start a separate thread if the correspondence is going to continue.