What is Your Nationality?

Learn how to ask about someone's nationality

Vocabulary

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Lesson Transcript

Hallo, ich heiße Laura. Hi everybody! I’m Laura.

Welcome to GermanPod101.com’s “Deutsch in 3 Minuten”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn German.

In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verb to be in German, sein.

We will also discuss how to talk about your nationality.

When you meet a new person in Germany, they might ask you:

Welcher Nationalität sind Sie? which is the equivalent of "Where do you come from?"

Welcher means "Of what?"

Nationalität is "Nationality"

Sind is a conjugated form of the “to be” verb sein.

You’re familiar with Sie, the formal word for "you."

All together it's Welcher Nationalität sind Sie?

[slowly] Welcher Nationalität sind Sie?

Answering this question is very easy! You just say Ich bin which means "I am", then your nationality.

For example: Ich bin Amerikaner

[slowly] Ich bin Amerikaner.

Just replace “Amerikaner” with your own nationality.

"I am Spanier" Ich bin Spanier.

"I am Italiener" is Ich bin Italiener .

"I am Brazilian" is Ich bin Brasilianer.

Be careful, because this is how you refer to your nationality if you are male. For the feminine form, you mostly have to add an in at the end of the nationality.

For example, if you are an American woman, you will say: Ich bin Amerikanerin.

Spanish women say:

Ich bin Spanierin.

For Brazilian women it is:

Ich bin Brasilianerin.

and so on.

To return the question you can simply say Und Sie? which is "And you?" in a polite way.

Now it’s time for Laura’s tips.

Be careful because in German, we write all nouns always with a capital letter! This differs from English where you just use capitals with proper nouns.

In this lesson we learned how to talk about nationalities.

Next time we’ll continue to study the verb sein and we'll see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in German? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Deutsch in 3 Minuten lesson.

Bis bald!

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