Welcome to Germany!
The girl/girls/girl’s/girls’:
Das Mädchen (singular, nominative, neuter article)
Die Mädchen (plural, nominative, feminine article)
Des Mädchens (singular, genitive, masculine article)
Der Mädchen (plural, genitive, masculine article)
German:
Singular: der, die, das
Plural: die
Also English: Random pronunciation without working rules.
Blame the Norman French.
nooo Why did the Norman-French army of William, Duke of Normandy, have to Invade in 1066? It could have been so much simpler …
A lot more Germanic, anyway. We’d have a lot more in common with our cousin tongues.
Also include Gaelic languages like Irish and Scottish influencing English. I remember making a Portuguese colleague pronounce the words “bough”, “lough” and “tough”. It was funny and a realisation that the English language is just as non-sensical as any languages. Millennia of language mixing made any attempts to make sense of any language rules farcical but in amusing way.
Which psychopath decided to put the cases in German in the wrong order?
It’s:
- Fall (Nominativ)
- Fall (Genitiv)
- Fall (Dativ)
- Fall (Akkusativ)
I was gonna say that for Chinese but I ain’t got a nice gif like that.
Also no plural.Japanese: you guys have plurals?
Japanese: just say the word twice.
Any slavic language afaik.
The Eastern South Slavic languages (namely Bulgarian and Macedonian) are distinct from all the other Slavic languages in that they do have definite articles (and don’t use grammatical cases)
Damn, beat me to it!
Singular male, female, neuter, Plural male, female, neuter
Nominative: ο, η, το, οι, οι, τα
Genitive: του, της, του, των, των, των
Accusative: τον, την, το, τους, τις, τα
Callitive: (no article)
dual plural is ripe for a comeback
I fucking love German grammar!!! It’s awesome. The Futur 2 and Plusquamperfekt are my favourite. We have some funky letters like ß (<- look at this guy :) ) and weird sounds like the CH and SCH. There is this one grammar “rule” that I don’t like. Because there is no real rule. You just have to know. It’s about the “connecting s”. So in some compound words you sometimes put an s between the two words to connect them. But there is not really a way to know when to do it. It’s Rind + Fleisch = Rindlfeisch but Rind + Leder = Rindsleder with an S.
Thank you all for coming to my tedtalk.
I love how we can stick two words together and bam it’s a new word. Rucksackriemenquerverbindunsgträger
Compound words are great because there’s no ambiguity about where noun groups start and end. English has compound words too, but german are the undisputed champions of compound words.
Meanwhile Danish turns the indefinite article into a definite suffix. Like:
A house: “et hus”
The house: “huset”
Houses: “huse”
The houses: “husene”Don’t most (if not all) Nordic languages do that?
Also, I can’t help but share: https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk
Scandinavian, yes, nordic, well, I don’t think they do it in Finnish? Not sure about Icelandic.
Fair. I meant Scandinavian and not Finno-Scandic in my comment. Finnish isn’t even in the same language family, so I don’t claim to know anything about it
English can be confusing too-- just look how many homophones we have! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNTM9iM1eVw
What did you call me?
Slavic languages: You guys have articles?
Finnic as well
What really fucks with me is akkusativ suffixes
If dein grampa isn’t the first and foremost noun in a sentence then it has to be deinen grampa but if it’s a feminine word the the rule doesn’t matter
Meine Oma Liebt deine Oma.
Mein Opa Liebt deine Oma.
Mein Opa Liebt deinen Opa.
Meine Oma Liebt deinen Opa.
I want to be good at this but that shit makes no sense, Hans. And why the fuck does a Library have a gender?!
EDIT: Liebt not Liebst in this context
Note that “liebt” should not be capitalized here because it’s a verb.
Oh yeah I forgot German uses capitalization for uses other than emphasis or punctuation. In English, they don’t change capitalization based on context of subject/verb.
Just a minor correction: instead of “Liebst” it must be “liebt” since it’s 3rd person singular:
- ich liebe
- du liebst
- er/sie/es liebt
Thank you for catching that, I appreciate the input.
It’s not gender like in humans or in animals. Nobody thinks of the library as a woman, that would be absurd. It’s a purely grammatical concept.
Grammatical gender will never make sense to me, and I suspect that’s because it actually just doesn’t make sense.
I mean. 30+ European languages have grammatical gender, just a single one doesn’t. Not difficult to guess which is the unusual one
Because the subject is in Nominativ and the object is in Akusativ here.
Has anybody so far just considered not doing any of that anymore?
No? Because then the whole langiage just stops functioning. I will just assume your native langiage is english here because pretty much all other european languages have cases.
I don’t think it would stop functioning if everything was das and dein, though. Bonus points for making every verb end with e as if it followed ich.
Don’t worry, Dativ will come and double fuck you too
In Persian we don’t even have “the”. If it’s indefinite we use the equivalent of “a”. If it’s definite we don’t use anything.
That sounds… efficient
In Russian there aren’t any articles, and no concept of definite/indefinite. Hence the cliché accent in English leaving out all of the “the” and “a/an”
I have guessed the lack of articles in Russian from the cliché! By the way, how many cases does Russian have?
Six real cases, plus some remnants of two more that are no longer used.
The same ones as in German, plus prepositive (typical use is “in” something) and instrumental (typical use is “with” something). They also distinguish between living and non-living, for example, accusative male is the same as nominative male if the subject is non-living (things), but if living (humans and animals) then it is the same as genitive male.
They also love to use genitive for everything. Let’s say you’re counting. One is nominative, two through four is genitive singular, five through twenty and zero is genitive plural. Above twenty the last digit determines the case.
Wanna say a date? Ordinal number in genitive according to the rules above for the day, genitive for the month.
Wanna say x amount of something? The something is genitive. If it is countable, it’s genitive plural, if it’s uncountable, it’s genitive singular. You might think, that’s not so bad, until you discover that Russians consider onions, potatoes, carrots etc as uncountable. Of course you can’t say 5 carrots! Impossible to count them. You must say “5 pieces of carrot” in genitive plural. Duh.
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You might think, that’s not so bad, until you discover that Russians consider onions, potatoes, carrots etc as uncountable. Of course you can’t say 5 carrots! Impossible to count them.
:))) I love these random craziness of languages. And I don’t want to know the reason behind them. Like when I learned the word for “girl” is neuter in German, I was happy but when I learned the reason, it was boring.
I swear Persian might be the easiest language there is.
Is it prepositive or locative? I know slovenian has the same cases and they are used pretty similarly.
Prepositive. They don’t have locative anymore. I believe prep. replaced loc. They also had ablative but I think it was combined with accusative. But I’m not sure about that.
I finally realize why the people coming from the east to speak Portuguese have some special quirks in their efforts. It’s really hard coming from that perspective.
The last time I counted them, it was six.
That’s why “the” is such a common word in English. If you have a toddler, teach them to read (recognize) the word “the.” Then sit down together with a book, reading aloud with your finger running under the words, and pausing to let them read all the "the"s. It’ll help them get the connection between print and speech, even if they’re still working on the alphabet. And they’ll feel powerful.
As a lesson in English, you can explain that even though there’s no t, h, or e sound in it, it’s pronounced “the” because whenever t and h are together we say (long exaggerated th sound), and it’s such an old and common word that we got lazy about saying “ee” and now we just say “uh.”
I taught my daughter to read during covid when the schools were closed. ‘The’ was the first word she learned to read, and I did exactly what you suggest, pausing for her to read it. It really helped. When my workshop reopened I made her a silver badge of the word ‘the’ to celebrate.
This really fucked me up in German class
Ha, try the modal verbs! Or Konjunktiv 1. Partizip is also a favourite
Plusquamperfekt! Futur II!
Und jetzt machen wir die unbestimmten Artikel.
Und den Plural auch nicht jeweils vergessen
