Forming adjectives • German Grammar • Chatterbug

Share this article with others:

German is well known for building compound words, and this is also the case for adjectives.

You can combine several different words to build a new adjective much like you could experiment with different ingredients when cooking! The outcome of these combinations is then known as a composition (“Komposition”)

There are a few standard ways to do this, let's call them recipes :)

Recipe 1:

The simplest recipe is to combine two adjectives. adjective + adjective. In English, the result might be achieved by using the two adjectives separately or in some cases joining them by using a hyphen. In German the result is a new compound adjective.

adjective	adjective	new adjective
hell bright	rot red	hellrot bright red
alt old	modisch "fashionable"	altmodisch old fashioned
süß sweet	sauer sour	süßsauer "sweet sour"

Recipe 2:

We can also combine adjectives with other words that are not adjectives. This is commonly known as a “derivation” (Ableitung).

To do this, we need a new ingredient: a prefix.

prefix	adjective	new adjective
ur "pre"	alt old	uralt ancient
un un (negation)	höflich polite/courteous	unhöflich rude/uncourteous
über over	qualifiziert qualified	überqualifiziert overqualified

Recipe 3:

We can also modify nouns or verbs to make them into adjectives. To do so, we need a suffix. There are various common suffixes to do this, but you don't need to know all of them, of course! The best way to go about this is to learn each adjective as you need it. In many cases, the results are very close to their English "cousins".

Here are a couple of examples of how you might turn a noun into an adjective:

noun	suffix	new adjective
Glück happiness	lich	glücklich happy
Witz joke	ig	witzig funny
Kind child	isch	kindisch childish

And for verbs:

verb	suffix	new adjective
misstrauen to mistrust	isch	misstrauisch wary
tolerieren to tolerate	ant	tolerant tolerant
essen to eat	bar	essbar edible

Adjectives are good fun! Be creative and try to combine two adjectives together or make one out of a noun or a verb. You'll soon be able to do it using awesome words such as blitzschnell (lightning fast) or fehlerfrei (error free) ! :D

Signup to study more!

Back to German grammar

Next grammar topic: Two-part conjunctions