I am impressed however that all that declination has survived unscathed into the modern day. Well it is fraying at the edges I suppose - many German natives can't use genetive case properly, merging it into dative instead. They've still got the jump on most English speakers who can't even really handle the difference between who and whom - but give it a couple more years and nobody will care anyway
Thanks for the post - it seems those Romans have a lot to answer for!
I now just speak the damn language, am prepared to repeat myself a million times and to sound like a retarded maniac with a speech impediment...losing my sense of shame helped in all that
Elli
My husband, who is half Swiss/half German, also finds German fairly illogical...when he attempts to explain things to me, which isn't very often!
Elli
As I and many linguists understand it Luther simply chose High German and not the then more common Low German read Diez or Diets (Dutch) for his bible translation. Hoch Deutsch is simply written language from the high lands as opposed to Low German from the Niederländer. For Proof of this look at what Berthold of Regensburg said in 1250 over 250 years before Luther, when he said even some people of the lowlands are using German of the highlands to communicate. And the fact that High German is split into three types of high german - AHD MHD NHD - Althochdeutsch, Mittelhochdeutsch, neuhochdeutsch. AHD was spoken UNTIL the ca 11th Century... The AHD has full noun declensions and these became the reason why we have the table being der Tisch - masculine etc... When you understand the original noun declensions you understand the reason for the articles being as they are - and why the Germans do not know what article to give new words therefore they receive (generally) neuter.
And then finally Luther actually picked the Meißen language (dialect) for his bible. This was a German from the middle of Germany high german but spoken with the low german pronunciation - a compromise...
Interestingly Swiss German is actually very close to mittelhochdeutsch - which is why there are different pronunciation for the vowels in German words such as Mein...
Of course I also have problems with Grammar and the 3 points Litespeed made at the begining of this thread but I'm sure those will improve with time.
I thought it interesting to read your threads:
I am a German native speaker and my first first foreign language was Latin, followed by English and French.
The way some of you struggle seems to me similar to the way I struggled when learning any of these. But Latin really helped me to understand the grammar of my native tongue in the first place; some of you said something like this before.
But I can only encourage you to hang in there, for the more languages I speak, the easier it gets. German is quite a cool language, once you use it. Starting out with Swiss German, a preserved ancient dialect, will make it harder though.
I can only suggest reading as much as you can and urging people to correct you as often as possible. Then finding new expressions and finding new approaches to the same thing verbally as different languages do is very much fun.
Good luck to all of you!
helen
This really interests me can you expand on this. As I am sure you know Latin and German have effectively nothing at all in common only at the Indo-European level and then both are developments along their respective subbranches, so I am very interested to know why you think Latin helped you understand the grammar of German given that it is accepted that Latin along with Greek developed independently highly complex tenses.
Interestingly English has a much closer relationship with Latin than German given that the major separation of the languages at around the start of the last millenium relates to English taking SVO word order and incorporating Latin through the Normans neither of which German did...
I think most people are introduced to grammatical concepts and terminology when they learn their first foreign language, and this alone makes it easier to learn subsequent languages (except of course for Japanese where you can forget a lot of what you learned!).
Learning German helped me understand English in a completely different way. I notice that for Helen, Latin was her first foreign language - perhaps it was the fact that it was the first foreign language that helped her, rather than the fact it was Latin?
This too is what I believe however not being Helen and not knowing quite why it was that she found Latin helpful it would be unfair to say. I did it a bit the other way round learning about linguistics and not a language but then when it came to having a post school stab at French and German I found it relatively simple. Attempting languages outside of the Indo - European Genetic would I guess though be very different. I do always find it interesting that Yiddish is very close to German and interestingly if you look at the Gothic alphabet then you can see the closeness. Germany only changed to the extended latin alphabet in the late middle ages, urm, at around the time Luther was strutting his stuff...
The alphabets of the world are far more interesting actually than the grammar which more or less falls into 3 or 4 categories the oldest of which is a la Japanese. I guess that means if you could speak 3 or 4 languages at the turn of the last millenium you were rather talented! If you were to check out the early MHD with old English you would find not only in the alphabet but also the words and script many similarities indeed at that time the closeness was still such that the languages were understandable for each other in the same way as Spanish and Italian today. You can do it in old graveyards and now with your German knowledge you might have a reasonable chance of understanding it if you think yorkshire pronunciation (ie correct English - I believe I have had this conversation once before...) and phonetically.
Regarding the alphabets - I think you meant to say Chinese rather than Japanese. For a long time the Japanese had no written alphabet, so they borrowed the pictorial symbols from the Chinese. Problem is that it didn't adapt well enough to their own language so they had to later invent two additional phonetic alphabets to go alongside the Chinsese characters. The result is any given chunk of Japanese contains characters from three different alphabets at once (four if you count roman characters as well).
I also noticed a while back how there were a lot of similarities between German and Old English, but hardly surprising given the history. Note: many people believe Old English is the language of shakespere - they are confusing it with "Early Modern English". Even Middle English in written form is almost incomprehensible for us today, and we can only guess at how Old English may have actually sounded. Much like we can only guess how Latin must have sounded back in its time.
Which goes to show how easily English speakers can talk across each other. What I was referencing was the actual grammar ie sentence structure. Correct me if I am wrong but Japanese uses a system of place markers and references to which words are refering to which. This is how most languages were before the modern adaptions which started around 700 and continued on until the mid 1800s in the case of German. ie Heuhochdeutsch is only around 150 years old and is changing again with the relaxation of the writing rules and the simplification of the tenses.
How did we land up here anyway?
I guess Luther is to blame for us being here...
It also means we could argue about the pronunciation as to whether it is more like the lancastrians or those from God's own but anything else was infiltrated by the vikings and Celts to a large extent. Incidentally nearer to your neck of the woods the Liverpudlians were to a large extent influenced in their dialect by the Irish Vikings from Northumbria and hence the similarity between Irish and Liverpool. Your Southerner line was drawn in and around Chester not a million miles away hey...
Oh obviously in making this statement I am also assuming that English must be rooted in the language of the Engels from which the word originally comes. Otherwise you can pick anywhere and be equally right.
well I don't care whether or not and how they are related. Great Britain was occupied by the Romans and left more of their language behind then they did after occupying half of Germania. But of course I did not know about Nominativ, Genitiv, Dativ and Akkusativ before either, let alone the tenses. What I wanted to say: These things exists, there is no denying or bickering about this. So instead of fighting German for its illogicalities, and believe me, there are tons of that in any other language as well, enjoy it. Buy a "Fettes Brot" CD or some of the "Die Fantastischen Vier" Albums. Read the lyrics and enjoy, there is some really good and real stuff in there. Speaking German should be a chance, not a hazzle. It is also fun to see how differently Swiss German is to high German and how links to English and French can be made.
Thats it.
Aloha, helen
I have spent so many years hearing Swiss German, and my husband is teaching me High German (to start with) and he says I crack him up because I am an American who sounds like a Swiss trying to speak German.
Vocabulary rentention is another thing for me, plus just feeling plain lazy about learning to decline verbs in another language (I took French in high school and Greek in college). I know how much work it takes so I procrastinate. Now, if you ask me anything that's in a toddler book, I'm good. I can say the German words for Sheep, and Goat, and Cow, and Dog and Cat and - well, you get the idea. Take me to a farm in Switzerland and I'll rock. Anywhere else right now, not so much.
I'm looking forward to checking out the cheat sheet. My husband has created some quick reference things for me as well, so if I think any of it might be of use to someone else, I'll see if I can post it.