Proverb: Aller Anfang ist schwer

Aller Anfang ist schwer — "every beginning is hard" — is the German proverb you reach for when someone is daunted at the start of something: a new job, a language, a diet, a first day at school. It is four words long, and almost every one of them teaches a grammar point that English speakers routinely get wrong. The word aller is not the word all you already know; the adjective schwer carries no ending precisely because of where it sits; and the present tense ist is doing the special job that German (and English) reserve for timeless truths. Read this proverb closely and you have a portable model for three rules at once.

The text

Four words, one timeless claim, and a built-in pat on the back: nobody is good at the start, so keep going.

Grammar in context

aller — the strong der-word meaning "every / all"

The trap is the spelling. English speakers see aller and read it as a comparative ("aller" ≈ "more all"?) or assume it is just the plural alle with a typo. It is neither. Aller is the masculine nominative singular form of the der-word all-, and here it means "every". Aller Anfang = "every beginning / each and every beginning".

Why does all- end in -er here? Because all- belongs to the family of der-words (words that inflect like the definite article der/die/das). The masculine nominative ending on der is the -r you hear in der. So all- copies it: aller mirrors der, just as dieser, jeder, and welcher all take -er in the masculine nominative. Anfang is a masculine noun, it is the subject (nominative), and so the der-word in front of it must show that masculine-nominative -er.

Note the near-synonym jeder Anfang in the second example: jed- is another der-word and takes the very same masculine ending -er. The two are interchangeable in meaning here, which is the clearest proof that aller is functioning as "every", not as a quantity word.

Anfang — a masculine noun built from a verb

Anfang ("beginning, start") is a nominalization of the separable verb anfangen ("to begin"). German turns verbs into nouns constantly, and these deverbal nouns are very often masculine: der Anfang, der Beginn, der Versuch, der Gang. Capitalizing it is not optional — all German nouns are capitalized, which is why the proverb has a capital A on Anfang in the middle of the sentence.

schwer — the uninflected predicate adjective

Here is the point competitors skip and the point most worth your attention. In Aller Anfang ist schwer, the adjective schwer has no ending at all. It is bare. And that is not a quirk of the proverb — it is the single most important rule about German adjectives.

German adjectives come in two jobs:

• Attributive — the adjective stands in front of a noun and modifies it directly. Here it MUST take an ending: ein schwer*er Anfang ("a hard beginning"), der schwer**e Weg* ("the hard road").
• Predicate — the adjective comes after a linking verb (sein "to be", werden "to become", bleiben "to remain") and describes the subject. Here it takes no ending, ever: Der Anfang ist schwer, Der Weg wird schwer, Es bleibt schwer.

In the proverb, schwer follows ist, so it is a predicate adjective, so it is uninflected. There is genuinely no exception to this: a German predicate adjective is always in its dictionary form, regardless of the gender, number, or case of whatever it describes.

This is exactly the opposite of what English speakers expect, because English does the reverse: English never inflects an adjective for the noun's gender or case at all, so learners arriving from English tend to add an ending where German wants none (ist schwere) or, worse, treat schwer as a comparative and write ist schwerer ("is harder"). Burn the proverb into memory and you have a permanent reminder: after ist, the adjective is naked.

ist — the present tense of timeless truths

Why is the proverb in the present tense and not the past? Because German, like English, uses the simple present for statements that are held to be true at all times — general truths, aphorisms, scientific facts, and proverbs. Aller Anfang ist schwer is not a report about one beginning that happened; it is a claim about beginnings in general, valid yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This "gnomic" present is the default tense of every proverb language.

Note also what German does not do here that English does: there is no progressive form. German has no -ing tense, so "every beginning is being hard" is impossible — the simple present ist covers both English's "is" and any progressive reading. For more on this, see the present tense and the missing progressive.

The pragmatics: encouragement, not complaint

Although the words say something discouraging ("beginnings are hard"), the proverb is used to encourage. The logic is consolation by universality: of course you're struggling — every single beginning is hard, for everyone, so your difficulty is normal and temporary, not a sign you should quit. A speaker typically says it to a learner who is frustrated, or about themselves to stay motivated.

It pairs naturally with a forward-looking follow-up, because the unspoken second half of the thought is "...and it gets easier":

Related encouragement proverbs

German has a small toolkit of motivational proverbs that work alongside this one. Learn the cluster and you can comfort, push, and praise:

• Übung macht den Meister. "Practice makes the master." — keep at it, skill is built. (See Übung macht den Meister.)
• Ende gut, alles gut. "All's well that ends well." — used to wave away a rough middle once things work out. Note again the bare predicate-style gut and the absence of any verb.
• Wer wagt, gewinnt. "Who dares, wins." — a push to take the risk.

Vocabulary

Common mistakes

Key takeaways