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Can anyone help with the rules on the strong, weak, and mixed declension of nouns in German? I am particularly interested in those not mentioned in most textbooks.

Also, most people say that there are 4 classes of declension for nouns. Which are these 4 classes?

I have read the rules below, but I am not sure if they are correct, especially with respect to the feminine words:

A. Masculine / Neuter

  1. Strong declension: The genitive singular ends with (-e)s, the nominative plural ends with -e/-er/-s.
  2. Mixed declension: The genitive singular ends with (-e)s, the nominative plural ends with (-e)n.
  3. Weak declension: Except for the nominative singular, all other cases end with (-e)n.

B. Feminine

  1. Strong declension: The genitive singular without special ending, the nominative plural ends with -e/-s.
  2. Weak declension: The genitive singular without special ending, the nominative plural ends with (-e)n.
Björn Friedrich
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H.Wong
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    Nouns start with capital letter only on German, on English they don't. – peterh May 22 '18 at 02:59
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    Strong and weak declensions are terms for the inflection of adjectives, not nouns. The nouns themselves inflect according to their own class, and there are a lot more than 4 of those. You're better off just learning vocabulary items together with their plural ("Rad/Räder") before worrying about general rules. – Kilian Foth May 22 '18 at 06:04
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    You might find an answer here https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/25357/same-noun-same-case-same-adjective-different-ending-what-are-the-rules-behi – c.p. May 22 '18 at 06:27
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    I'm not allowd to comment yet but this is only a comment: Perhaps what you heard was 4 cases (N,G,D,A) and not 4 classes? – Tom Jun 15 '18 at 20:18

1 Answers1

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German Grammar has 4 cases, not 4 declension classes - These are much more.

A case is nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, a declension class is how those four cases are formed.

Declension classes are generally distinguished into strong and weak (and mixed, some even state a class of none) declension, and further subdivided in many more subclasses.

A full explanation on declension beyond this point is probably too exhaustive for this format. Also note that declension of substantives, adjectives and pronouns can further vary, which makes a full answer even more difficult.

Declension classes are normally used to, well classify words into exemplary groups based on empirical systematization of vocabulary - they would normally not help you much with actually learning the language

tofro
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