German lessons for Owlet: 3 ("Mein kleiner grüner Kaktus!")

I feel like I'm falling behind in my endeavour to provide free German instruction for caitalainn (and anyone else interested in picking up some of the language). Three days ago she asked me about adjective endings and only now am I getting down to drafting a decent answer.

Every language has some bits that seem inexplicably complicated, as if they were created just to confound learners. What the hell are the rules for the use of the articles in English? For the perfective marker in Chinese? For por and para in Spanish? For many learners, German adjective endings represent just such a thing. So let's ease in slowly, shall we?

Basically, there are two sets: strong and weak. The strong endings are used when there is no article. In fact, you'll see some resemblances to the definite article in them. Let's use mein "my" to illustrate them:

der Bär "the bear" mein Honigbär "my honeybear"
die Eule "the owl" meine blonde Eule "my blonde owl"
das Gespenst "the ghost" mein Schreckgespenst "my spectre"
die Kinder "the children" meine liebe Kinder "my dear children"

Note the last example: All adjectives proceeding the noun have to have some sort of ending, though it's not always the same ending. Cf.:

dein großer schwuler Honigbär "your big gay honeybear"
meine kleine grüne Kaktus "my little green cactus"
ein neues Schreckgespenst "a new bugbear"
viele unglückliche Kinder "many unhappy children"

Note the resemblance between the underlined masculine and neutre endings and, respectively, the masculine and neutre articles (der, das). If it makes it easier, you could think of the usual ending "skipping" the first adjective and attaching itself to the following one(s).

Exercise:

1. "your beloved gay Mucki" =
2. "an ugly (hässlich) Yankee" =
3. "my little green ghost" =

The pieces are more than the whole

The image that will stick with me from the crazy cavalcade of my dreams last night: Delicate, wiry stems of dried grass pressed up large window panes. They were the width and colour of strands of saffron. And it was snowing and the large flakes were falling gently between them. Now there's something I'll never see in waking life!

Never say never, but the snows of winter are safely behind us now. Lilacs are in full bloom. Yesterday, on my way back to the el, I found a couple of fresh lilac branches perched in a pile of discarded cardboard boxes next to an alleyway. Their cut ends had been swaddled in damp paper towels and covered with a plastic supermarket vegetable bag. What was their intended destination? Why didn't they reach it? I was so charmed, I took them home to monshu who awoke to their delicate perfume this morning. Score! (And I did; candy may be dandy, but flowers have superpowers!)

Latest inexplicable act: An attractive young woman in a gray power suit carrying a canary yellow angle broom into the library this morning.