Learning German is difficult

Language Corner
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I’m using AI to teach me German. I asked for 6 sentences to translate into German:

  1. The old man has the new book.
  2. I see a big dog in the garden.
  3. Are you buying the flowers for your mother?
  4. He is driving to the train station with his new car.
  5. The student (masc.) gives the teacher (fem.) his homework.
  6. The cat is sleeping on the red chair (masc.).

Unfortunately, I managed to get only one completely correct.

This is going to be a long road…

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My mistake first learning German was not learning the gender of words

For example, the German word for shirt is not “Hemd” but “das Hemd”
In England we do not have genders for our nouns so we don’t understand the importance.

One tip, if you are not sure whether der, die or das is correct, 60% of the time die is correct.

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That must be some personal perception of yours. Unless you constantly speak in plural.

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46% die, 34% der and 20% das.

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That could be an interesting strategy. Try to find alternatives for words that are feminine and learn mostly those :smiley:

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Any word ending with “ung” is always female, just remember that.

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With some exceptions: e.g. der Schwung, der Sprung

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And words ending in -chen are das.

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-ung as an ending syllable indicates the substantification of a verb. Examples for the -ung added are:
bedeuten → die Bedeutung
bilden → die Bildung
zeigen → die Zeitung (yes, shift happens)

The same applies to the ending syllable -ion (this might be the same in English):
redigieren → die Redaktion
reagieren → die Reaktion
explodieren → die Explosion

Since the nouns following either of these two patterns are based on a verb’s trunk with the ending added, they have at least two syllables (two vowels or vowel groups). They’re all female.

Schwung und Sprung however aren’t based on the -ung pattern, they have only one vowel.

A similar pattern applies to the ending sillables -heit and -keit, though their root/trunk is an adjective instead of a verb. They’re also all female:
freundlich → die Freundlichkeit
frei → die Freiheit
schön → die Schönheit

The already mentioned pattern for -chen and -lein on the other hand uses nouns as a root, and makes them smaller or softer by adding either ending syllable to the noun.

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that’s what I have been doing for years!.. hey, Julius Caesar wrote always in 3rd person (referring to himself), so, why not using literature subterfuges :smiley:
there are some basic easy rules regarding the gender in German…
days of the week, months, and large and powerful things are always masculine (of course).
And (almost) anything ending in -ung, -heit, -keit, -ei and -schaft are always feminine. So you can always ‘nominalize things’ (that’s another of my tricks) , for example, I wouldn’t say "i find it very difficult’ (schwer) but "i found a lot of difficulties’ (schwerigkeit, which is always femenine):smiley:

in any case, when you hear the real swiss german being spoken in the lost valleys of Jura or Wallis…you realize that the structures and genders that they use are ‘alternative’ :smiley:

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I struggled for a long time to get enough confidence with my German cases, and specifically with the definite article, until I saw some Baseldeutsch written down, and noticed that much of the time they simply wrote d’ , yes that’s d-apostophe. Lesson learned? for spoken German, in Switzerland, complete and utter disregard for tenses, cases and plurals is actually not as big a drawback as you might think.

It’s long struck me how modern German has developed as a belts-and-braces language. The point about inflected languages is that the use of correct cases, voices, whatever, allows a sentence to be constructed in almost any order you like, but in practice there is a quite rigid word-order in German, particularly when it comes to active and passive verbs.

As such, like with English, the word order with appropriate conjunctions should be perfectly sufficient. You actually do not need all those awkward rules that make such an obstacle to learning. And they way they’re taught doesn’t help, with arbitrary rules of thumb like a set of verbs that always take a particular case, which are neither 100% correct nor any easier to follow than the real underlying rules…

As for AI, why, oh why would you want to add in yet another obstacle to learning?

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This was very similar to my strategy. A Swiss-German/German hybrid is very useful. Going the full Taggart, very guttural, also helped.
For written German, the newer AI? correction programmes are much better than word processing software used to be. After all these years, I still make gender and grammar mistakes.

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You are a basically screwed if your mother language is English when it comes to learning other languages… you lack a good command of grammar.

The Irish always go back to Gaelic for the grammar stuff when it comes to German as to the Welsh.

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Some years ago when teaching English I discussed this gender business with an Austrian student in her last 20s. She had not learned the whole der, die das, dem etc business and had to learn it at night school to get a decent job.

I said “Wait a minute - so what did you say?”

She said she used “d” for every noun.

And that opened the door for my German speaking - but not German exam passing. I simply use “d’ Turre, d’ Tisch, d’ Himmel” etc etc.

Thanks to Volkswagen at least I know it’s das Auto…

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Because it’s not an ending, it’s a root.

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Another obstacle in German, especially, I found, pre-computer translation, when trying to read a book or a newspaper article was that I could never work out which part(s) of an unknown word to look up in the dictionary. It’s simply not obvious, unless you already know it, what part of the word is the root, the ending, the prefix or whatever. As such, a newbie would be completely baffled by

because quite obviously the end of the word uses those three letters, so how is is not the “ending”? (Yes, I know).

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I also thought about using AI to generate exercises for me, but I’ve thrown away the idea.

As for the vocabulary, learning nouns with der/die/das did a lot of damage to me. It’s most likely subjective but my brain was recalling them with der/die/das as the whole word, where obviously it didn’t fit, spitting out of my tongue for example:

Wir fahren mit dem das Auto. Die Handtasche der die Frau.

So from now on I learn nous as
car = Auto (neutral)
woman = Frau (feminine)

Also I stopped learning from any ready made word packs. I am reading a bit every day adding new words to the list together with the original sentence I’ve found them for better context.

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I’m finding it very useful. e.g. computer tells me to write " 1. He is driving to the train station with his new car."

My attempt:

Er fahrt nach dem Bahnhof mit seinem neuen Auto

The response:

This is a great attempt at a very complex sentence! Your declension in the second half of the sentence is absolutely perfect, which is fantastic.

You’ve made two very common and important mistakes that we can fix.

Your Attempt: Er fahrt nach dem Bahnhof mit seinem neuen Auto

The Corrected Answer: Er fährt zum Bahnhof mit seinem neuen Auto.

Let’s break down the two corrections.

Correction #1: Verb Conjugation

  • Your version: fahrt
  • Correction: fährt

The verb is fahren (to drive). This is a strong verb, which means its vowel changes for the du and er/sie/es forms.

  • ich fahre
  • du fährst
  • er/sie/es fährt ← This is the one you need for Er (He).

So, the first part must be Er fährt.

Correction #2: Preposition Choice (nach vs. zu)

This is a classic B1-level distinction. Your grammar was logical, but the vocabulary choice was not quite right for this context.

  • Your version: nach dem Bahnhof
  • Correction: zum Bahnhof

You correctly identified that you needed a preposition of direction. You also correctly identified that nach is a dative preposition, and you declined dem Bahnhof perfectly in the dative. Your grammatical process was excellent.

However, the usage rule for nach is very specific:

Use nach for:

  • Cities, states, countries, and continents that don’t have an article (e.g., nach Deutschland, nach Berlin).
  • Directions (e.g., nach links, nach oben).
  • The word “home” (nach Hause).

Use zu for:

  • Specific buildings, places, businesses, or people within a town. This is the one you need here.

Since the train station (Bahnhof) is a specific building in a town, you must use zu.

Now, we apply the grammar:

  1. The preposition is zu.
  2. zu is a dative-only preposition.
  3. The noun is Bahnhof (masculine, der).
  4. The dative form of der Bahnhof is dem Bahnhof.
  5. This gives us zu dem Bahnhof.
  6. Finally, we use the common contraction: zu + dem = zum.

Your Flawless Declension

I want to emphasize that this part was perfect: mit seinem neuen Auto.

  • You knew mit takes the dative.
  • You knew Auto is neuter (das).
  • You correctly declined the possessive adjective sein to seinem for neuter dative.
  • You correctly declined the adjective neu to neuen after seinem.

This shows you have a strong grasp of the declension system. The main lesson from this sentence is the subtle but important difference in meaning between nach and zu.

The great thing is when comments are made, I can also immediately follow-up with questions or delve into grammatical topics etc.

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This is a very good explanation.

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Try going in the other direction. Instead of hoping to being able to make up sentences and write or say something, spend time just listening to the language, taking it in. That is, how many minutes, or hours, a day do you just listen to German? (Radio, podcasts, YouTube, etc.)

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