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Good strike rate for German grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5225 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 70 30 December 2013 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My choice of "total mastery" may not have been the best wording here. I didn't mean that native speakers never make mistakes. What I meant is that native speakers have a total command of how the system works. That does not exclude "slips" of the tongue that are usually corrected immediately. For example, I would think that not one native French speaker would say le voiture nor would any native speaker of Spanish say el comida without quickly correcting themselves. On the other hand, there may be regional differences as in le job in France but la job in Quebec and words where there is shifting or undecided usage. And there are certainly situations where uneducated speakers may use a form that is not that of the formal language learned in schools. Or, as is the case in the French examples I discussed, many people do not respect the rules of prescribed academic French. But all of this does not change the fact that native speakers have an overall mastery of the system that is a far cry from what most foreigners achieve. And, above all, do not make the same kinds of mistakes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5093 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 50 of 70 30 December 2013 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Which German dialect do you know? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5225 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 51 of 70 30 December 2013 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have no doubt that the grammatical gender system of French is probably less complicated than that of German. This I said myself. But this does not change the fact that all learners of French, even German speakers, find grammatical gender in French difficult. As for proposals to abolish the rules governing the past participles in French, this may seem to not be a big hassle compared to German but there one must remember that there are all sorts of more complex situations where users have to stop and think when writing. I remember reading statistics to the effect that just eliminating the part participle agreement rule would eliminate about half or a least a good number of the so-called mistakes in French exam essays. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 3826 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 52 of 70 30 December 2013 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
They can be excused as dialects, but standard lingua francas.... The absence of the preterite and genitive is what I mainly mean. I just have such a hard time understand why such a synthetic language like German has such complex word order and prepositional usage combined with cases used with said prepositions. Why the plurals are so irregular and the usage of mixed, strong, and weak inflection. And if there are irregular plural usage and just as many rules in German dialects. Well I guess they are superhuman for bearing such a language that has said features. I guess every other member of the Germanic family except Faroese and Icelandic is not intelligent enough. Chinese is uninflecting but it looks to me as if everything analytical about it is outdone in difficulty inGerman. So German is Analytical and Synthetic without the non features of both! This is throwing a pebble in the idea of languages going in inflectional cycles for me. Edited by Papashaw1 on 30 December 2013 at 10:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5093 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 53 of 70 30 December 2013 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are far too many rigid preconceptions in what you think to "know" about language(s). German is "heavily" synthetic, prepositions should not need cases, and so on ... Better learn about how it really is instead of relying on some too easy ideas about how it should be. Once you know more, things will get better. And you'll be less inclined to make premature guesses about supposed prescriptivism, "laws" of how languages develop and probably some other things. Edited by lingoleng on 30 December 2013 at 10:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 3826 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 54 of 70 30 December 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Very well, I only meant German is relatively synthetic when compared to some. I never said any of those things
were strange for a language to have, but it iss strange to have nearly so many of them at once. Why exactly have the plurals been so irregular though? What led to the plurals of other languages regularizing and not German? As for the Dialects, I looked in to them, you have to admit, some of them are a bit smoother in some ways. Edited by Papashaw1 on 30 December 2013 at 10:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4316 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 55 of 70 30 December 2013 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What do you mean with irregular plurals? There are a bunch of noun classes, Proto- Germanic had more and it's worse in Icelandic. Even the Scandinavian languages have several noun classes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6951 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 56 of 70 30 December 2013 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Indeed. Sometimes what look like irregularities in the modern language (and frustration for learners and some native speakers) are just expressions of what was a more elaborate pattern that the speech community for one reason or another stopped using.
Many of the irregularities in Slavonic languages (especially apparent when comparing even a few of them) are similarly caused either by melding what were once vigorous noun classes in Proto-Slavonic, and/or reinterpretation by native speakers in response to instances of distinctions such as dual or vocative become used less as time elpased (eventually to the point of irrelevance or nothing in many of these languages today). Papashaw1, check out the article for Proto-Germanic to get a sense of what daegga and I mean. You seem particularly keen to insinuate that modern German is somehow unjustifiably complicated (as if some malevolent being decreed it). There were more distinctions in the past, but arguably it was somewhat manageable because one could get a sense of which set of endings to use by already knowing which vowel or vowel-consonant/consonant-vowel pair constituted the stem's final syllable. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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