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Mark Twain was right | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 25 of 35 03 December 2012 at 11:16am | IP Logged | ||
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The ''weird'' thing about genders. German people can get them right, they can ''feel'' them.
There is 95% of gender correspondence in ''invented/constructed words tests'' in the native speaker groups, and only 30% of gender correspondence in ''non native speaker groups''. This means German speakers can get the noun gender right even in situations in which they encounter the word for the first time in their life. Edited by Medulin on 03 December 2012 at 11:19am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 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 26 of 35 03 December 2012 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, they've had a shittonne more exposure. If you wanna get better then do it more
often. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Surtalnar Tetraglot Groupie Germany Joined 4398 days ago 52 posts - 67 votes Speaks: German*, Latin, English, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 27 of 35 04 December 2012 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mark Twain wasn't right.
If you think German is too difficult, you should better avoid learning languages. For an English speaker nearly every language, which isn't a Germanic/Romance language, plan or creole language, is harder than German. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5696 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English | Message 28 of 35 04 December 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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The other day one of my colleagues, who’s an Austrian, had to consult an online
dictionary for the word das Opus. As a native Russian speaker I find the “gender” situation in German quite amusing. I always know what gender a certain Russian word belongs to. Perhaps the gender problem in German stems from the fact that you cannot always tell the gender of a word if there is no article or adjective attached to it, that is, in many cases the gender attribute is only loosely coupled with the word, so to speak. Edited by taqseem on 05 December 2012 at 9:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 29 of 35 05 December 2012 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Agreed. Our issues are mostly prescriptive - with words looking and being used as one gender, but traditionally being considered another one.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 30 of 35 05 December 2012 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think German is that bad. Sure, it has gender but so do most other European languages. The nominative case is almost the same as English and the accusative not that much different. The dative is tricky for native English speakers because we don't really have this in our language, apart from old relics like "to whom it may concern"
But you can cover a lot of the dative by learning which verbs and prepositions trigger it. Just accept it and use it. As for the genetive, you can easily speak German without ever using it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MixedUpCody Senior Member United States Joined 5258 days ago 144 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 31 of 35 07 December 2012 at 3:53am | IP Logged | ||
Is this comment an ode to trolling, or does satire legitimately confuse you? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5696 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English | Message 32 of 35 07 December 2012 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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you call it satire, i call it derision.
most of the European languages do have gender systems and many of them retained cases. if you find Twain's opus amusing you may just as well join the Flat Earth Society that maintains that the Earth is flat and make fun of those who believe that it is a spheroid. Edited by taqseem on 07 December 2012 at 3:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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