German is in the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages, and is most most closely related to Dutch and English. The alphabet is just the same as the English one, but there are four more letters that are used, but NOT really treated as part of the alphabet proper, which are of course a, o and u with an umlaut (�) on top (�, �, �), and also that beautiful letter � (ess-zet), which is used in some words to replace double-ess, but not all. Don't ask me the rules! It's so difficult to remember exactly. Look at http://www.rechtschreibkommission.de/ for the official thing, but you'll have to be able to read German. Maybe Germany should follow Swiss German and get rid of � altogether. I can understand both sides of the argument about this in Germany.
| 0 | Null | 10 | Zehn | 20 | Zwanzig | 30 | Drei�ig | 200 | Zweihundert |
| 1 | Eins | 11 | Elf | 21 | Einundzwanzig | 31 | Einunddrei�ig | 201 | Zweihunderteins |
| 2 | Zwei | 12 | Zw�lf | 22 | Zweiundwanzig | 32 | Zweiunddrei�ig | 256 | Zweihundertsechsundf�nfzig |
| 3 | Drei | 13 | Dreizehn | 23 | Dreiundzwanzig | 40 | Vierzig | 1000 | Tausend |
| 4 | Vier | 14 | Vierzehn | 24 | Vierundzwanzig | 50 | F�nfzig | 1040 | Tausendvierzig |
| 5 | F�nf | 15 | F�nfzehn | 25 | F�nfundzwanzig | 60 | Sechzig | 19876 | Neunzehntausendachthundertsechsundsiebzig |
| 6 | Sechs | 16 | Sechzehn | 26 | Sechsundzwanzig | 70 | Siebzig | 1 million | Million |
| 7 | Sieben | 17 | Siebzehn | 27 | Siebenundzwanzig | 80 | Achtzig | 2 million | Zwei Millionen |
| 8 | Acht | 18 | Achtzehn | 28 | Achtundzwanzig | 90 | Neunzig | 3 million | Drei Millionen |
| 9 | Neun | 19 | Neunzehn | 29 | Neunundzwanzig | 100 | Hundert | 9,005,001 | Neun Millionen f�nftausenteins |
You can see that things are getting a little ridiculous in the 19876 entry. This illustrates one crazy thing about German (and also Dutch apparently); that they do join their words together, to make other longer words. It's madness. You might find the odd word of 30 letters in places. You could in theory join any words and any number of words together to make a word. For instance, you may say "Studentenwohnheimfeuerl�sch�bung" meaning "student hall fire drill", even if this is not in the dictionary. But it's one word because it's got no spaces. But then again, is it one word? English speakers, at least, may think a word is a string of letters without a space, but maybe we should redefine what a word is. Is "Studentenwohnheimfeuerl�sch�bung" one word; or two, or three, or five, stuck together? Or both? What is a 'word'? Well, that would be going too deep into philosophy for a "small" webpage. It just makes you think.
To see a good online dictionary from TU Chemnitz, see http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/
To see quite a good page on grammar from the University of Winnipeg, http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~oberle/courses/review.html.
To see the homepage about Rechtsschreibung (official German orthography since 1998), see http://www.rechtschreibkommission.de/.
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