Grammar - Negation with KEIN

You might have experienced the need to negate certain requests or statements. In German, you do so mainly with the help of "nicht", an adverb, and "kein", an indefinite article. Let‘s start with the latter.

kein contains the word ein which already hints on when to use kein instead of nicht. Whenever you could say "ein-" the negation of that same situation would be "kein. A few examples:

Ich habe ein Auto.
Ich habe kein Auto.

Möchtest du einen Tee?
Ich möchte keinen Tee.

Ist das ein Ei-Phone?
Das ist kein Ei-Phone.

but:

Habt ihr xxx Kinder?
Nein, wir haben keine Kinder.

In the last example there was no eine and nevertheless we used keine to negate Kinder. This was an example of the so called Nullartikel. You can find the Nullarticle also in English: I don't like xxx ice cream. or I make xxx busses out of xxx wine crates in my freetime (some of us indeed do that).

The official rule is that you use kein to negate nouns (those words you usually use as triggers in your Preaching exercise) while you use nicht for everything else. We'll take a look at "nicht" in the next lesson. For now let's practice the use of "kein".