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German ’die’ pronoun? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| fizzer Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5551 days ago 17 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 1 of 4 24 September 2009 at 12:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm puzzled by an exchange in Pimsleur German III unit 3.
Male speaker: "(Ich arbeite) bie der Citibank in Frankfurt" Instructor: "Wie fragt die Frau 'Where is it'? Use 'die'" Female speaker: "Wo ist die?" Huh? Surely 'sie'? I note that 'die' can be used as demonstrative pronoun like 'diese', but that seems inappropriate here. Edited by fizzer on 24 September 2009 at 12:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lingua Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5582 days ago 186 posts - 319 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 2 of 4 24 September 2009 at 7:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Colloquially the definite articles can be used as personal pronouns - "der" for "er", "die" for "sie", etc.
Edited by Lingua on 24 September 2009 at 8:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fizzer Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5551 days ago 17 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 3 of 4 25 September 2009 at 8:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you. Some comment from the instructor would have been nice, especially as this appears before they introduce the correct pronoun forms.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5772 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 4 25 September 2009 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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What Lingua said is true, but it doesn't apply in this case. You couldn't just replace the "die" with "sie".
In German, der/die/das aren't only definite articles, but also demonstratives (they generally serve the purpose of referring to a known topic without specifying the distance/relationship of speaker or listener to it). Also, your first guess:
is plain wrong. When diese/r/s, jene/r/s, der/die/das hier, der/die/das da, der/die/das dort are used as pronounds that refer to an object, the speaker has to know where it is. Only der/die/das (without hier/da/dort, did you notice? :D) can serve the purpose of replacing the noun when asking for the unknown location of a known object. (Jenes is almost obsolete in spoken language so I can't tell for sure how it's supposed to be used in spoken language ...) You can however use diese/r/s and jene/r/s like articles when you are asking for the place of something.
sounds perfectly acceptable to me. ... it is true, German deictic words are a mess. (Now I finally understand why deictic space is so difficult for me to acquire in other languages.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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