Language Course From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection Contents

The object/person mentioned earlier that turns into a pronoun later is called 
the antecedent.
In German this is very useful. You can't simply say 'it' anymore. Many food words are masculine and 
feminine, and when you turn them into pronouns, they turn into 'he', 'she', 'him', and 'her', not always 
'it'. For example, the sentence "The cheeseburger tastes good. It's very crunchy." turns into "The 
cheeseburger tastes good. 
He's
very crunchy." Note: You will learn how to say this in German later in 
this lesson.
Why is it "he"? This is where the antecedent comes in. Because there are foods that are masculine and 
feminine in German, you can't assume the 'es'. You have to look back at the previous sentence, at the 
antecedent, 
der Cheeseburger
. "Der Cheeseburger" is replaced by er (since it is the subject, and 
therefore in Nominative Case). Therefore, all you need to know are these connections: der/den-er/ihn, 
die-sie, das-es, die-sie.

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Food-Related Verbs
•
essen (I)
- to eat, to be eating, to do eat 
•
trinken
- to drink, to be drinking, to do drink 
•
bekommen
- to get/receive, to be getting/receiving, to do get/receive 
•
möchten (M)
- would like 
•
wollen (M)
- to want, to be wanting, to do want 
Of these five verbs, only trinken and bekommen are regular. Essen is 
irregular
(that's what the "I" 
means). Do you remember from the last lesson 'lesen' and 'sehen'? In both of them, the first 'e' changed 
to 'ie' in the du- and er/sie/es-forms. Well 
essen
experiences the same change, except that it changes to 
'i', not 'ie'. Also, it acts the same as 'lesen' in the du-form: You don't have three s's in a row.
Therefore, du/er/sie/es 
isst
and everything else is the same.
Isst
sounds and looks a lot like 
ist
. The minute difference happens to be in the way you pronounce the 
s
. When you mean 
eats
it is sometimes an overstressed hissing (i.e. extremely sharp) sound. In normal 
life Germans, too, can only tell which verb is meant from knowing the context.
Just like in last lesson, where you could say, 
"Ich spiele gerne Fußball."
, you can also extend it to food. 
"I like to eat cheeseburgers." is translated as 
"Ich esse gerne Cheeseburger."
The last two verbs (marked 
(M)
) are 
modals
. They will be discussed in the next section.