German

German is one of very few languages that capitalizes every noun, not just proper nouns. Der Hund (the dog), das Haus (the house), die Liebe (the love) — all noun, all capitalized. The convention has been standard since the 17th century and helps readers spot nouns inside long compound words and complex clauses.

German main clauses put the conjugated verb in the second position regardless of what comes first. Ich gehe heute (I'm going today), Heute gehe ich (today am-going I), Heute, mit meinen Freunden, gehe ich (today, with my friends, am-going I) — the verb stays in slot two even when the subject is bumped around. Subordinate clauses send the verb to the end.

Nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), dative (indirect object), and genitive (possession, fading in spoken German). Articles, adjectives, and pronouns all change form depending on case and gender. The case system feels like the steepest part of the grammar, but it stops feeling foreign sooner than learners expect once enough patterns settle in.

Yes, both West Germanic. They share thousands of cognates (Hand/hand, Wasser/water, gut/good, Mutter/mother) and core grammatical structure. English lost most of its case system and its three-gender distinction during the medieval period; German kept them. Reading German with no study, an English speaker can often guess about half the meaning from cognates alone.

Standard German is shared in writing across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Austrian German has its own vocabulary (Erdäpfel for potatoes, Jänner for January) but spoken Austrian is largely intelligible to other German speakers. Swiss German is much more divergent — the spoken dialects of Switzerland are often unintelligible to non-Swiss German speakers, even though Swiss writing follows Standard German.