German Lessons Abandoned

On day four of my German class, the teacher asked us our professions, and one student replied a chef.

If you are learning English, chef is pretty easy, like most nouns. Plurals and definite/indefinite articles follow basic rules. That’s it. Just like German . . . almost.

The German word for chef is der Koch. Simple, right? Except in German there are 8 different ways to make a word plural, so we had to learn that as well. The plural is die Köche. But only for the nominative case. The accusative, dative, and genitive case are slightly different, as shown in this chart.

I hope you noticed that there are also multiple correct ways to spell the singular in the dative and genitive case.

The student who said a chef was, however, a female, so that changes everything. The nominative case is now die Köchin and the plural nominative (two or more female chefs) is die Köchinnen.

At the very moment in class, as I sat there contemplating how many permeations I would have to memorize just to be able to use the word chef correctly, I decided not to continue German class. Instead I spent my remaining time in Berlin wandering around and having a wonderful time.