Questions & Answers about Guten Abend! Wir trinken Tee.
Why doesn't the German sentence have a word for 'are' like in 'are drinking'?
In German, there is no separate 'am/is/are doing' form. The present tense verb trinken means both 'drink' and 'are drinking'. So, wir trinken perfectly translates to 'we are drinking' all on its own.
Why is Tee capitalized?
In German, every single noun (a word for a person, place, concept, or thing) is capitalized, no matter where it appears in the sentence. Since Tee (tea) is a noun, it must start with a capital letter.
Why is it Guten Abend and not just Gut Abend?
Greetings like this are actually short for a longer sentence, like 'I wish you a good evening.' Because Abend (evening) is a masculine word, the adjective gut (good) takes the special ending -en here. As a beginner, it is usually easiest to just memorize Guten Abend as a fixed phrase!
Why does the verb trinken end in -en?
German verbs change their endings depending on who is doing the action. When you use the pronoun wir (we), the verb almost always takes the -en ending, which is the same as the basic dictionary form of the word.
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