In German, all nouns take capital letters, no matter whether they occur in the middle, at the end or at the beginning of a sentence. If you use the singular form of a noun, you need an article:. Compare: Die Frau isst den Apfel. - The woman is eating the apple. In German, we have four different cases. The article changes to "den" with accusative. Ich trinke Kaffee. - I am drinking coffee. - You can not count the coffee in your coup, so we don´t use an article. BUT: Ich habe einen Kaffee und zwei Cola getrunken. - I had one coffee and two cokes. - Here, you are refering to the amount of coffee / coke ( one cup, two glasses..... ).