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Good strike rate for German grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6601 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 33 of 70 29 December 2013 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yes I meant the passive mode.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5536 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 34 of 70 29 December 2013 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Please, let's keep this discussion civil. As for the question of an acceptable error rate, many toddlers spend years butchering their grammar to varying degrees and they still turn out OK. For example, French speech therapists have interesting-looking games to help children who struggle with the gender system. The interesting question is why do nearly all French children eventually converge on an accurate gender system, even if some of them spend years getting there? And why do some adults like the actress Jane Birkin get stuck making frequent gender errors even after decades of immersion? And why do some adults do much better than others? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 70 29 December 2013 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There are two distinct questions here:
1. Why do native speakers eventually, and at an early age, achieve total mastery of grammatical gender? 2, Why do adult foreign learners achieve highly variable rates of success at mastering grammatical gender? The answer to question 1 is pretty simple: that's what being a native speaker means. Grammatical gender, like many features, and particularly pronunciation, is best learned at an early age. I'm sure a lot of academic work has been done on this. As for the answer to the second question, I don't pretend to have the answer. I just have some ideas. First of all, I think that we should not focus exclusively on gender assignment of individual nouns. We tend to think that the problem is the use of le voiture instead of la voiture or der Buch rather than das Buch. That is part of the problem, of course, but I maintain that is is just that. The real problem is mistakes of gender agreement. If a speaker says J'ai vu le voiture, the mistake is hardly perceptible, especially if the phrase is said quickly. But J'ai vu le beau voiture really sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. Secondly,the problem of, let's say, English-speakers learning a grammatical gender system is lack of focus on gender agreement and probably over-focus on individual noun gender. The principle behind gender agreement is no different from that behind number agreement. When we say, The cars I saw yesterday were going fast we add s to the subject car and we make the verb form were agree with the plural subject. I should point out that I'm really talking about phonetics here. In any case what the speaker does instinctively is keep in memory the number of the subject and refers to it further down the line when they arrive at the verb. In English this is pretty simple although there are many little complications and subtleties that books on English dwell on. Just yesterday I heard a radio announcer say: News and weather is next. I would have said "are next" but the whole thing seem debatable (actually, maybe it was "The news and weather is next.") The key then to mastering a grammatical gender system is a) retaining the gender of the headword, b) recognizing the appropriate moments where morphological adjustments have to be made and c) implementing the correct adjustments. All this is much more easily said than done, I admit. In fact, it is very difficult. Although emk and I focus a lot on French, I should point out, in keeping with the theme of this thread, that grammatical gender in German seems even more complicated than in French, if that is possible. German nouns have three genders: feminine, masculine and neuter, and each has a singular and a plural form. So, in theory, there are six combinations. Add to that that German has four noun cases, nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. Combining gender and cases, we have at least 24 possible combinations. The combinations are manifested of course in the morphology of all the elements of the agreement chain such as articles, the nouns themselves, adjectives and pronouns. I should point out, at least from my limited understanding of German grammar, that it is not as bad as it looks because a many of the combinations share morphological forms with other combinations. So one does not have to learn 24 distinct sets of forms. This may actually be a cause of more confusion because one form may initially look like another. The problem of course for the learner is how to keep track of all this when speaking. There's no time to start calculating: "Let me see now, how do I say, "I want to go the biggest train station of the city" in German. Oh, oh, this looks complicated. Der Bahnhof (train station) is masculine, nominative, singular. But I want to use the preposition nach (to) and that requires the accusative, so we have nach dem Bahnhof. Thank God I don't have to do anything to Bahnhof. Then the "biggest" requires the comparative größte but also in accusative singular to agree with Bahnhof. But that doesn't seem to require any change. Now I have to deal with die Stadt (the city). This is nominative feminine singular but I have to convert die Stadt into genitive form der Stadt. So far I have "nach dem größte Bahnhof der Stadt" and I'm not done yet. I apologize to all German-speakers here at HTLAL if I've butchered your language. The point is that if you have to do all those calculations before you open your mouth, you are dead in the water. It has to become automatic, like a reflex. The question of how to get there is the elephant in the room. In a tiny nutshell, my approach to this question, and language learning in general, is to focus on mastering the system with a small number of important words and gradually expanding from there. Keeping in mind that grammatical gender is usually intertwined with number, sometimes case as in German and Russian, and who knows what else, the whole thing can seem overwhelming and just too daunting. That's exactly why most people give up unless they have a dire need to learn a language. But we all know that it's not as bad as it looks because, in fact, all languages use a small core of words or structures a lot and a large number rarely. I have said many times -- to the chagrin of some people who immediately see red and get agitated--that in the languages I'm familiar with, and I suspect most languages, there is a threshold of around 300-500 words that will allow you to start speaking the language fluently. Please note that I used the words "threshold" and "speaking the language fluently." Those who know me will have noticed that I did not say "being fluent in the language." I don't need to be reminded that one cannot discuss complex subjects or pass the CEFR B2 exam with only 300 words, although I could argue those points, but not now. But the fundamental point here is that you have to really master that small core. This is a lot more than memorizing a list of the 300 most important words in the language. That is useless. There real goal here is mastering the complexities of the grammar such as the grammatical gender instead of just adding more words to a shaky foundation. 300 words is a good starting point. In a language like French, this covers all the main function words, the 50 most common verbs in the language and a bunch of common nouns. Master those and then continue on to those 10,000 words that you feel you need to be comfortable. Edited by s_allard on 30 December 2013 at 2:55am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5134 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 36 of 70 30 December 2013 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I once asked my French teacher (native speaker): What is the gender of l'Allemagne. Her spontaneous reaction was, it doesn't have a gender. We both knew that this wasn't likely to be true :), so I followed up with: Is it L'Allemagne est beau or belle? That she could answer.
Maybe this is a meaningless anecdote, or maybe there is something to be said for learning / exposing oneself / paying attention to noun phrases and typical collocations instead of focusing on the gender as a "separate item to learn in addition to the meaning". After having internalized a set of expressions like une voiture neuve, une voiture hybride, une voiture volée, une petite voiture, une voiture polluante, une grosse voiture, une belle voiture, une voiture performante, une voiture rapide, une voiture volante etc., preferably in context (with or without the article), it should be easier to get gender and gender agreement of voiture right. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 4035 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 37 of 70 30 December 2013 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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To Mr Allard, Just to add and confirm, I think gender is the main factor in the difficulty of German articles, not
entirely case. The plural has its own article and is like an entirely different gender, so you have 4 choices, not 6. The genitive and dative cases are equivalent to the prepositions "of" or "to", but I see it in the gender really. But it is very interesting how cased languages have the extra complication of prepositions taken by cases when analytical uninflected languages deeply rely on them while not having this hurdle, wouldn't there be investment into other ways of discerning them? Emk, can you explain this to me? You might also like to look into German grammar if you haven't. It has many weird word order alterations such as v2 or moving the finitive verb into 2nd place for ersatzinfinitiv or SOV with certain conjunctions but not with some, for such a synthetic language. Try canoo.net (not sarcastic) One of the tough things is the alternation between strong and weak inflection that isn't found in all gendered languages. (HochER baum vs der hochE baum) (Mit einer schonEN frau vs mit schonER frau) Why not "der hocher baum"? But the difficulty rests on gender and not necessarily a case system. So I kind of agree. German has 6 article/inflection endings spread over 16 spaces for nearly everything and -e and -en for weak inflection spread over 16 spaces. On a similar note. One thing I never got that I is why English doesn't inflect for plurality in adjectives and Articles. We still have plurals. Why is there not any "thes" or "talls" like French? Edited by Papashaw1 on 30 December 2013 at 12:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4711 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 38 of 70 30 December 2013 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Why would English do that?
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| eugrus Triglot Newbie Russian Federation vkontakte.ru/euRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4701 days ago 6 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: French | Message 39 of 70 30 December 2013 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here is my set of flashcards with thirty German suffixes which might help to recognize
genders: http://quizlet.com/15712098/geschlechtsbestimmende-s uffixe-flash-cards/ Edited by eugrus on 30 December 2013 at 1:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 4035 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 40 of 70 30 December 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I just assume that languages with gender inflect for gender, languages with case inflect for case, so languages with plurals inflect for plurals. Bad reasoning on my behalf I guess, but I do ponder it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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