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in order of masculine, feminine, neuter, plural
- nominative: der, die, das, die
- accusative: den, die, das, die
- dative: dem, der, dem, den
- genititive: des, der, des, der
which becomes:
- RESE
- NESE
- MRMN
- SRSR
in high school I pronounced this mnemonic as:
- resee
- nesee
- Mormon
- sir sir
My teacher didn’t like the “Mormon” bit, he wanted me to say “merman” but I found it easier to remember “Mormon” and his discomfort only made it stick better, lol.
6 articles?
amateurs…
meanwhile the polish words for “this” and “that”:
Same across other Slavic languages
This is so painfully close to being Loss. There’s got to be a way to juggle those squares around just right.
Is this Verlust?
is this Das?
Omg I thought that was the joke.
Wait this isn’t loss?!
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Fuck gender and fuck german for letting “the” get THIS fucking out of control.
I studied this fucker for 5 years in secondary school, got a B , but fuck it.
I’m learning/speaking Spanish now, it’s still got gender and el/la/al but it’s not this bad.
My first language of Turkish doesn’t even have “the” for fucks sake.
there’s a cheat code called “not giving a fuck” where you just say “die” or “das” for every word, and natives will just cringe slightly and then forget about it
Afrikaans (one of my mother tongues) uses “die” for everything. The first time my (German speaking) partner overheard me saying “die man” he was so freaked out 😂 He still can’t deal with it, it’s just too wrong for his brain.
Das Mädchen und das Weib haben kein Mitleid für die man
Stimmt
That’s weird, Germans have usually heard Dutch before which also uses ‘De’ for most things (except randomly some words still have vestigal neuter article ‘het’), same in plattdeutsch in their own damn country (they have ‘dat’ for neuter).
De is not a german word, whereas die is feminine in german.
Yeah, but die is also “that” so people say “die man” all the time.
The word “that” is either “dass” when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, “that man” could be translated as “der Mann”, “dieser Mann”, “der da”, “den”, “welcher”, or “jener”.
Die is also the plural form, so they will say “die Männer”, but never “die Mann” singular.
I’m talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought “man” rather than “Mann” would make it clear. I’m just saying the phonetic sequence “die man” is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
I’m a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isn’t amazing, B1-2ish) so I’m not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, “the table” is “bordet” but “the tables” is “borden”, while “the chair” is “stolen”
it’ll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use “-et” for everything.
you’re forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since it’s all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
hm, isn’t that just how all grammatical gender works?
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, there’s usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; “common”, and “none”. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
That’s how it started out in the first place! Indo-European noun classes don’t really have anything to do with gender, there just happens to be three and the words for “man”, “woman”, and “thing” are in distinct classes, so that’s what the classes get referred by. Otherwise it’s semi-random, that is, by phonology. Unless people disagree (it’s die Nutella btw).
Classes are useful because they allow for concord between nouns and other parts of speech. The German the sentence “He holds a pen (Stift) and a bag (Tüte) and puts him on the table” unambiguously tells you that it’s the pen which is put on the table: Bag makes no sense because it’s feminine. There are rules as to how words are distributed into classes but no native speaker will be able to explain them short of the dead obvious. Not part of native-level German lessons, that’s literature and grammar analysis, not phonetics. Romanes ite domum.
I suspect that’s what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.
Maybe you know it but if not read Mark Twain’s Essay “The Aweful German Language”. It’s a fantastic and bellyachingly funny thing to read. I am a native speaker and have to admit Mark makes so many brilliant points.
Spanish is a rather easy language
German on the other hand not so much. On the other hand, it’s usually very precise and information-dense, which is reflected in how fast it rather slow it’s spoken, especially compared to Spanish.
Eh, there’s lots of filler in German, too. I learned both Spanish and German and as far as I can tell, Spain-Spanish fast talking is more a feature of cultural extroversion than anything inherent to the language. Even many of the american Spanish speakers speak considerably slower than the Spaniards, and there’s no obvious reason why Spanish should be spoken so much faster than Italian, Portuguese or even French.
Talking speed differs greatly by region though. Slowest speakers are probably Swiss and fastest being citizens of Frankfurt.
The Bart, The!
No one who speaks German could be an evil man!
English: We have one definitive article: “The”.
Me: OK, that’s nice and simple.
Scots Gaelic: Our’s is a little more complicated. We have “An”, which becomes “Am” for words beginning with B and P, for words starting with an h as the second letter (Th, Bh, Mh…) we use "A’ ", and for plurals we “na”, oh and if the first word in a word is a vowel, you slap “h-” onto it.
Me: OK, a we bit more complex but I can vibe with it, German what’s your Definitive articles?
German:
and if the first word in a word is a vowel
Damn, that sounds a bit complex /j (Thanks for the insight on how Gaelic definitive articles work btw)
Ist das Verlust?
Babe wake up. The German grammar political compass just dropped.
akkusativ my beloved <3
I’d like to start a petition to replace all these bad boys with “deez.” For example: Deez Frau ist mit deez Hut…uhhhh…getanzt.
You think this is bad you should see a chart that explains the prepositions across the cases… Jfc
I’m a nonnative German teacher and holy fuck is this helpful. I learned each of these separately and at different times with great effort, but I will be sharing this with my students, because it’s way easier to remember with this visualization. Thank you!!
This actually makes more sense than the arbitrary grammatical genders. (Sure, english has it simpler with, “from where”, “where” and “where to”)
Thither and thence/hither and hence/whither and whence are also counterparts to there/here/where, for older and/or more literary English
Until you introduce whom (and, occasionally, whose) and native speakers’ brains explode. It’s soooo easy: Whose brain was exploded by whom? His brain was exploded by her, not He brain was exploded by she. Native English speakers do understand cases, they just don’t know that they understand.
Yup, I’m a native English speaker who teaches German to mostly native English speakers, and it’s always a fun moment when someone in class realizes that we have cases in English, too (don’t worry, I do tell them, if nobody speaks up, I just give them the chance to figure it out themselves first).
I’m das/das
I wish it worked this way, but nooo, neutral gender is only ‘for things’ and ‘dehumanizing’.
Gendern nach Phettberg enters the room
Don’t worry I don’t mind being dehumanised
It’s all fun and games until someone revokes your human rights 😔
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Most adult strangers wouldn’t be happy to be adressed in the diminutive, though.
That’s actually helpful
Though it’d be maybe even more helpful if you’re and columns were named; from my understanding, the columns are “male | female | neuter | plural” and the rows “Nominativ | Akkusativ | Dativ | Genitiv”
They are, it’s just transparent thus you get black on lemmy background dark grey.
Haha ok, thanks, I had no idea
$5 says I’ll forget again in ten minutes.
disrespect bullshit grammar rules, just say “dee” to everything.
