German has a system ofcases, and when helping verbs are used, the main part of the verb must be moved to the end of the sentence. For example, "Someone has stolen my car" isJemand hat mein Auto gestohlen ("Someone has my car stolen"), and "Someone called me last night" isJemand hat mich letzte Nacht angerufen ("Someone has me last night called").
In writing, everynoun must start with acapital letter. German is the only language that still has that rule, but Danish and English did so a long time ago.
Standard German is an official language in Switzerland, but the Swiss dialect of German is difficult to understand for native speakers from Germany and even for Swiss who are not native to speaking German.[5] One reason that the dialects are still so different today is that even if Switzerland adopted Standard German, mostly as a written standard, German Swiss inWorld War II wanted to separate themselves from theNazis by choosing to speak dialect over the Standard German.[6]
Swiss German also has some differences inspelling, for example, the letterß, which is used only in German, is replaced byss.
German numbers are similar to their English counterparts. Like most languages, the German number system is based mainly on the first 10 numbers. They occur over and over throughout all the higher numbers. However, there is one big difference. Numbers like 21, 45 and 98 have the single digit first, withund ("and") connecting it to the tens as individual words, for example,einundzwanzig, fünfundvierzig und achtundneunzig (literally, one-and-twenty, five-and-forty, and eight-and-ninety).
