But, capital, Switzerland, blouse and woman are all feminine in German. Anyway, a “der” is used because dative. WTF is dative?
I started to understand when I saw tables with subject/direct object/indirect object. Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive are meaningless words for me.
The fun thing is that the concepts of nominative, accusative, etc come from Latin/Greek. Somehow I learned Spanish, English and French with teachers using the concepts of subject, direct object, indirect object.
I guess that the people that want to teach German want to to feel special or something like that by using the Latin derived words instead of using words/concepts more widely known around the world.
I learnt Latin at secondary school… with all of the declinations (rosa / rosae / …), etc…and some Greek also. So, in theory, German should be easy – as I have been trained in languages with declinations (if you speak also any of the Eastern European languages, they also have cases …and even more cases than German, actually). As such, if you are already ‘trained’ like that, it is just a case of ‘memory’ (the object-gender memory, particularly).
The problem - at least for me, here in Switzerland- is that, the moment that you speak with an accent, most of the locals jump into English, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to convince them that they are not making you a favor. …
I’m not sure why you choose to attack German teachers in particular. It’s hardly their fault that the language is the way it is.
The reason that Romance languages, and English for that matter, don’t bother so much at the different cases, even going so far such that most native speakers don’t even know their names, is that they make very little difference to the rest of any given sentence. Those languages developed to rely on word order and prepositions whereas German stuck with the inflected endings as used in the ancient languages.
Much as I agree that German is unnecessarily confusing to learn as a result you can’t blame it on the teachers nor on modern-day speakers of the language.
One thing I did find useful back in the day when I was trying to come to terms with the different cases was to find parts of English where we do actually use them, perhaps the most obvious is in our use of personal pronouns. like I, Me, My, Mine etc.
So when trying to work out the required case of any given part of a sentence, try substituting an English (or French, Italian etc. which all do basically the same thing) personal pronoun into the sentence in place of the indefinite or definite article, or the noun itself, which should quite quickly show you which case is most likely to be correct. OK, that trick is not much good for dative, but it’s not a bad starting point.
I learned Latin at school as well and thought it was probably a useless language to learn until we moved to Germany and I started learning German. The Latin really helped me with German.
Yes, even to the point where, buying a coffee this morning, I simply said “Kaffee creme, bitte” and the answer is immediately back in English, “do I want anything else with that?”
Sometimes it leaves me wondering, if every word I say in German is telegraphing my Englishness.
You’re probably right. The academic choice to use words from Latin/Greek should may have been made centuries ago by a scholar or council of scholars trying to standardize.
The surprise for me is that I’ve found the same words in textbook 3 western languages: subject, direct object, indirect object and possessive.This implies some standardization at some point. While, textbooks in Germany keep using what scholars may have chosen a long time ago.
Don’t know. Maybe I learned English and French packaged as products to be exported and learnt by “others”. Full speculation: this packaging may have been aimed at exchange and trading, not at integrating me in their cultures.
The challenge with German is learning within the country without without any simplification for the “others” because the goal is integration, not only trading. From a certain perspective, thanks to the locals for not discriminating and offering equal opportunity for learning the local language. At the same time, the day has 24 hours and we have only 1 life, make a compromise and embrace mediocre language skills in foreigners. Mediocrity is better than zero.
One time I was in a small shop in a village somewhere looking at the wine selection and an old shop assistant in a smock and bearded asked if he could help me.
I answered something like “alles klar danke”
He replied in perfect Engish “Don’t you find a wine to your taste?”
As a software engineer I’m used to dealing with various grammars, so naturally the first thing I do when learning a new language is to familiarize myself with the grammar (familiarize first, train for fluency/memorize it later). For human languages there’s never a one good grammar book, all of them try to describe some patterns, but since the language was first, books later… it all feels like an approximation rather then the core recepy how the language works. So I verse the books back and forth until I get a glimpse of understanding of all the concepts. My grammar books are always full of my annotations
Good book should depict as much as possible the concept it tries to list rules for. For German I can recommend Gramatik aktiv
However the issue with the possessive approach is that it’s not enough. You can own stuff but you don’t own people (die Eltern der Tochter). Moreover, some prepositions (trotz, wegen, während, etc) demand genitive. There’s nothing possessive about this, the relationship is causal.
But if it works for you that might be all you need, 80% covered is definitely better than 0%.
Well you could use a different verb, of course, but it has a slightly different meaning, more ‘the red blouse belongs to the woman’. But what about ‘Die Fraus Bluse ist rot’? That’s where I struggle, do we then make the definite article ‘der Fraus’ to agree with the possissive/genetive, or does that get cancelled out by the s on Frau?
I hated that approach of language teachers, learn the list of prepositions that usually, or always, take a given case. It shortcuts the thinking process, and is not always guaranteed. I remember having an argument with one stubborn teacher in Luzern, and managed to find an example where the same sentence could be constructed with either accusative or dative to give it a slightly different meaning. I think it was something like “I’m going to ski in the mountains”, where “in die Berge” means “I’m going skiing, in the mountains” and “in den Bergen” is more “I’m going to the mountains, to ski”.
Something like that, anyway, and whatever it was exactly, she accepted that I was right. She was not pleased though. I hate teachers who aren’t prepared (or able?) to explain properly for those who feel the need to know why. Same in skiing, not just languages.
That’s all I want. I won’t write the next novel in German that wins a literature prize. I won’t write a textbook for anything. Not even a newspaper article. Just enough to get around and the rest is snobbery. After all, I am and forever will be the foreigner.
