It may come as a surprise to youthat my reason for being in Germany is not to teach, nor is it to travel. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve ever mentioned my actual aim: learning German. Throughout my time in Germany there’s been this underlying, niggling question of ‘is my German actually improving?’. For the record it is, but I wanted to give you all an insight into the wonderful German language and what it is like trying to learn it. I do love it really, but there are times when it is incredibly frustrating. German grammar is particularly complex. So to non-German speakers: welcome to my world. To German learners: you are not alone in your hatred of the subjunctive. To fluent German speakers: this is why I am jealous of you.
I am going to try my best not to turn this into a grammar lesson, I just thought it would be interesting for everyone. And good for me to vent my feelings. I promise it won't be a frequent occurrence. Also, please do not treat this post as a grammar lesson as I am very much a German student so it is not necessarily correct!
Where to begin? Nouns. A noun is a naming word. Unlike in English, German nouns are split into three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. What you’d expect is that nouns like man and boy would be masculine, girl and woman would be feminine, and table and chair would be neuter. That would almost make sense. But you’d be wrong. Inanimate and animate objects can belong to any gender. For example table is masculine and girl is neuter. The gender of a noun is not logical in the slightest, you just have to learn them. Urgh.
The word ‘the’. I am a great supporter of ‘the’. It doesn’t matter whether the noun is singular or plural or which case the noun is in, in fact you don’t even have to know what a case is. It’s always ‘the’. This is not me going off on a tandem, unfortunately this is connected to our gendered German nouns... German has a myriad of different ways to say ‘the’. To illustrate this, I present to you...
Each gender has a different word for 'the'. So we're already up to three (der, die and das) but that's sort of manageable. But German doesn’t stop there. For this next bit we need to introduce cases (dun dun dunnnnnn). If you do not know what a case is, I envy you. They are the bane of my life. Slight exaggeration. Basically, nouns in a sentence are in different cases depending on their role within the sentence.
For example: Mike hit Reuben with Brendon's textbook.
- Mike is in the nominative because he is the subject, the person 'doing the verb'
- Reuben is in the accusative because he is the direct object, the person 'having the verb done to him'
- Brendon is in the genitive because the textbook belongs to him.
- The textbook is in the dative because it is the indirect object.
In German, der, die and das are only used in the nominative case. So once someone is eating the apple, it is no longer 'der Apfel' and once it is my dictionary, not just a random dictionary it is no longer 'das Wörterbuch'. It is time to unleash the table. I'm warning you, if you have ever had a German lesson this table is likely to bring back painful memories.
Just for fun/to fuel my German-nouns-having-genders induced misery I have included the English translation. Urgh. How depressing. So thanks to nouns with genders and a love of changing endings at every opportunity German has twelve ways to say 'the'. TWELVE.
I realise this has got very grammar-y. Sorry about that. The main message to take from this is that German grammar is ridiculous.
Rant over.
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