German words ending in -schaft

-schaft and English -ship are the same suffix, split by a thousand years of separate spelling. Freundschaft is friendship. Partnerschaft is partnership. Mitgliedschaft is membership. The German version is feminine, so everything it builds is die, and the mapping gets you the meaning for nothing.

It builds mostly on nouns. Freund gives Freundschaft, Land gives Landschaft, Mann gives Mannschaft. It takes adjectives too, so schwanger gives Schwangerschaft, bereit gives Bereitschaft and eigen gives Eigenschaft. So what comes before the ending will not tell you whether you are reading -schaft or -heit, and you never have to work it out. The letters on the page already say which one it is, and both are die.

German uses it for two jobs. One is the state or the relationship: Freundschaft, Partnerschaft, Schwangerschaft. The other is the collective, a set of people or things taken as one body, and English mostly lost this sense. Die Mannschaft is a team, die Gesellschaft is society, die Gewerkschaft is a trade union, die Wissenschaft is science taken as a whole field.

That second job is why the ending is worth more than its size suggests. Work, politics and family are the topics an exam keeps returning to, and this is the suffix those topics are built out of.