6 articles?
amateurs…
meanwhile the polish words for “this” and “that”:
Same across other Slavic languages
The Bart, The!
No one who speaks German could be an evil man!
English: We have one definitive article: “The”.
Me: OK, that’s nice and simple.
Scots Gaelic: Our’s is a little more complicated. We have “An”, which becomes “Am” for words beginning with B and P, for words starting with an h as the second letter (Th, Bh, Mh…) we use "A’ ", and for plurals we “na”, oh and if the first word in a word is a vowel, you slap “h-” onto it.
Me: OK, a we bit more complex but I can vibe with it, German what’s your Definitive articles?
German:
and if the first word in a word is a vowel
Damn, that sounds a bit complex /j (Thanks for the insight on how Gaelic definitive articles work btw)
akkusativ my beloved <3
god… ew.
This is so painfully close to being Loss. There’s got to be a way to juggle those squares around just right.
Omg I thought that was the joke.
is this Das?
Wait this isn’t loss?!
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Fuck gender and fuck german for letting “the” get THIS fucking out of control.
I studied this fucker for 5 years in secondary school, got a B , but fuck it.
I’m learning/speaking Spanish now, it’s still got gender and el/la/al but it’s not this bad.
My first language of Turkish doesn’t even have “the” for fucks sake.
Maybe you know it but if not read Mark Twain’s Essay “The Aweful German Language”. It’s a fantastic and bellyachingly funny thing to read. I am a native speaker and have to admit Mark makes so many brilliant points.
there’s a cheat code called “not giving a fuck” where you just say “die” or “das” for every word, and natives will just cringe slightly and then forget about it
Afrikaans (one of my mother tongues) uses “die” for everything. The first time my (German speaking) partner overheard me saying “die man” he was so freaked out 😂 He still can’t deal with it, it’s just too wrong for his brain.
tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, “the table” is “bordet” but “the tables” is “borden”, while “the chair” is “stolen”
it’ll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use “-et” for everything.
you’re forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since it’s all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
hm, isn’t that just how all grammatical gender works?
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, there’s usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; “common”, and “none”. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
I suspect that’s what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.
Spanish is a rather easy language
German on the other hand not so much. On the other hand, it’s usually very precise and information-dense, which is reflected in how fast it rather slow it’s spoken, especially compared to Spanish.
Talking speed differs greatly by region though. Slowest speakers are probably Swiss and fastest being citizens of Frankfurt.
Eh, there’s lots of filler in German, too. I learned both Spanish and German and as far as I can tell, Spain-Spanish fast talking is more a feature of cultural extroversion than anything inherent to the language. Even many of the american Spanish speakers speak considerably slower than the Spaniards, and there’s no obvious reason why Spanish should be spoken so much faster than Italian, Portuguese or even French.
Ist das Verlust?
Babe wake up. The German grammar political compass just dropped.
I’d like to start a petition to replace all these bad boys with “deez.” For example: Deez Frau ist mit deez Hut…uhhhh…getanzt.
You think this is bad you should see a chart that explains the prepositions across the cases… Jfc
This actually makes more sense than the arbitrary grammatical genders. (Sure, english has it simpler with, “from where”, “where” and “where to”)
I’m das/das
I wish it worked this way, but nooo, neutral gender is only ‘for things’ and ‘dehumanizing’.
Das is also for diminutive. Das Menschlein
Don’t worry I don’t mind being dehumanised
It’s all fun and games until someone revokes your human rights 😔
Gendern nach Phettberg enters the room
That’s actually helpful
Though it’d be maybe even more helpful if you’re and columns were named; from my understanding, the columns are “male | female | neuter | plural” and the rows “Nominativ | Akkusativ | Dativ | Genitiv”
ｌｏｓｓですか?
$5 says I’ll forget again in ten minutes.
