Quote:
Originally Posted by tsa
I'm Dutch, and many people are surprised that my German is almost nonexistant despite having had German at school for a long time and living almost next to the German border. But German is the most nasty language in the world if you ask me. Exactly as described in the article you linked to. Even French has more logic to it. But we digress and I will fix that by posting a picture of what I bought yesterday:
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Aww, German isn't that hard if you're used to it. Though I admit you really have to be used to it for it to be really easy. And I can imagine that the whole gender thing is a horror for all native English speakers, since they don't have different pronouns for it, and the gender of words (yes, even in English words have gender. It's not as obvious with the lack of different pronouns, but it is shown in some rare cases. Like poetry. I am not sure, but I think the Moon might be female in English, and the Sun male. In German it's the other way around, so if it is that way in English, you must have adopted that from somewhere else. Like France, or something. Though I do not disapprove, the moon should be female. ^_^ ) can usually not be told from anything for most words (except for example "Frau" which is German for "Woman", which is obviously female. Another case where you can tell easily is the word for "Cat" as used when described the species in general. In German it is "Katze". Now, with that information alone you can't really tell either. *BUT* if you also know that a male cat is called a "Kater" [which is also a term for "Hangover", by the way
], then you can figure out that "Katze" is a female word. For the word for "Dog" it's the same, as a female dog can be referred to as "Hündin", meaning the general term "Hund" most must be male. Similar things work for Chicken and Horse, which are both neutral too. For example, Chicken is "Huhn". You can call a female chicken a "Huhn", and no one will complain - you can even call a male chicken one, though it is less common. But there's also specific terms for each gender in this case, namely "Henne" [female chicken] and "Hahn" [rooster] - and from that fact you can tell that the word "Huhn" is neutral. And horses are similar. You can't tell the Gender from calling a Horse "Pferd". You're just saying what it is. There are specific terms for each Gender - "Stute" for the female, and "Hengst" for the male. [And there's even a term for a castrated male horse, namely "Wallach", but no one is going to be angry if you're calling a "Wallach" a "Hengst" in the sense of telling that is male. If you want to breed it though, you should be sure it's a real "Hengst", though.
]. So yeah, there are some ways to tell the gender without looking it up. Of course, there are exceptions, like Mark Twain said, and "Regen" is as good as any. Objects are usually the culprits here.).
But really, once you've gotten used to it, it becomes second nature. You learn vocab words with the pronoun in school to start with, so you rarely have to look it up - you would never learn only the word "Regen" as a vocab word, it would always be "der Regen". Also, you rarely hear a word used without some kind of pronoun defining its gender, so even if you never learned it in school you likely won't have to look up its gender. In fact, I can't remember me ever having to look up the gender of a word in German in my entire life. Its similar with french vocab words. You always have a "la" or "le" in front of it.
I say, French is much more evil than German to learn. Because not only do they have as many exceptions if not even more in their language, but they also make exceptions for even the most important grammar rules so that it sounds more beautiful! How demented is *THAT*?
Oh, and German has no neutral possessive pronoun. So you can't say "Google and its money". You have to say "Google und sein Geld", which is basically "Google and his money.".
(By the way, if I used any terms like "pronoun" incorrectly here, please forgive me. I always had trouble remembering the terms. I had no trouble with grammatics apart from when they asked me to form, for example, the Dativ. Because then I had to remember what the term "Dativ" referred to. I had no trouble forming the Dativ, but I'd
By the way, the thing with "Wegen dem Regen" and "Wegen des Regens" is a typical case that is used in German communication. The first case, the Dative, is what you will usually hear. The second case, the Genitive, is what is correct, but most people neglect that fact. There's a funny little book about common errors or misunderstandings in German language that I can highly recommend to anyone learning German, and is not opposed to laughing a bit in the process. The book is called "
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod meaning "The Dative is to the Genitive its Death", with the title being a prime example of what it is saying (It's Dative. The correct Genitive form would be "The Dative is the Death of the Genitive"). Seriously, you should read this books and its sequels. They are excellent, and you even learn something from them.
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