Having lived in Germany for 3 years now, and managed to speak German to a half-decent level (B1/B2), I offer the following observations.
1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning - das Bund/der Bund (the bundle/the association) is the only one I can think of off-hand. Same with adjective declinations - "das verbundenes Konto", "zum verbundene Konto", "ein verbundenen Konto" are all wrong and will grate on the German ear, but will all be understood.
2. I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones. One of the things that improved my German a lot is learning the verb + proposition combinations - "ich denke an...", "ich freue mich auf...", "ich helfe dir bei ..."
3. There is an amazing amount of structure in German words which you start to see after you have basic vocabulary, which makes it easier to guess at the meaning of words you've never come across before. For example: das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion" or "pity". This of course gets extended far further with German's compound words.
Well, sometimes Germans themselves are not quite sure about which article to use. It differs from north to south, from east to west and depends a lot on the dialect you're used to.
An (Upper-)Bavarian would for example never say "die Butter". It is and will always be "der Butter". Same with "der Radio" in the South and "das Radio" for the rest of the country.
Another funny thing I stumble upon every time Oktoberfest starts: Oktoberfest in Munich is referred to as "die Wiesn" (the lawn/grassland). Bavarians don't know an 'e' in the end of a noun, they will therefore always replace it with a 'n'. In the rest of Germany, Wiesn doesn't exist. It's either 'Wiese'(sgl, a single grassland) or 'Wiesen' (pl, many grasslands). Since Wiesen sounds more similar to 'Wiesn' than 'Wiese', even newspapers regularly refer to the Oktoberfest as a multiple of 'Wiese' which - for us - sounds just wrong: "Heute sind wir auf den Wiesn gewesen".
It gets worse with new words. Sometimes, there's a "correct" way of deriving the article I guess, but it sounds weird.
For example Blog. Correct would be "das Blog" (because "das Web-Log" = "das Logbuch" or "das Protokoll"), but "der Blog" sounds nicer imho. Some people say "das Laptop" although this sounds off for most and "der Laptop" is correct.
For other words, the article can change over time. Correct is "das Virus", because it's a Latin word and the ending -us comes with "das". But most people say (and the media writes) "der Virus".
It’s even more complicated, as even Bavarians use the articles by context, using the proper one when speaking standard German and the variation when using dialect. Alas, not everyone has the same level of dialect, especially in Munich, so you can hear both even when Bavarian is in use.
As for the plurals, the -e suffix can often both be left out and replaced with an n, so you have two singular forms for some words.
But again, without the dialect it won’t work. As the GP said, you’ll still be understood, though. As with most languages, a lot of parts are superfluous and can be determined by context.
I have asked multiple germans about gendered nouns and other funky grammar points. I often end up getting different answers or confusion when I relate what I learnt from a reliable source elsewhere. Honestly, despite the confusion, I love how diverse the German language is despite the relatively small range and number of speakers, but also considering it came under many of the same forces for "flattening" the rules as English did.
I have a weak spot with articles, i, a native speaker, have to think for long about "teller" is it "der Teller" or "das Teller". One is my local dialect the other standard German. I know which one to use by imagining how my old neighbor would talk.
Another gem is that in my local dialect the word for foot (Fuß) has an extended meaning and denotes the body part of foot and leg. There basically is not a separate word for leg (well there is but it's standard German not dialect). The standard German word for leg is "bein". Now Bein has a common ancestor with a similar word in English "bone", and indeed the dialectal version of Bein in my dialect is the word for bone. (To me that indicates that the word has made a meaning change in standard German).
Now if I don't think hard (or if I am tired) I will call my leg "foot" in English, which confuses everyone.
From my experience you don't learn the grammar of your mother language the way you learn it when learning a language later. This appears to be universal. You just do what feels right and it works out but you can't cite the rule that applies.
It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”).
(And then there are Platt (= Low German) and Alemannisch/Schwyzerdütsch, both of which are distinct languages from High German.)
> It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”).
Nonsense. If a native speaker uses a form and thinks it's correct, it by definition is.
I think this is misleading: Dialects exist but they don’t change the rules of standard German grammar. In German, only “die Butter” is correct, regardless of where you are. Upper Bavarians may use “der Butter” but there’s an understanding that this is dialect, and not correct German. It’s fine in daily usage but not in more formal speech or in writing.
(A better example is “Mus”, which has multiple correct genders.)
German is a lot more prescriptive than English. This is only different for neologisms and anglicisms (“Newsletter”), where a generally accepted gender hasn’t been established through usage yet (Duden now lists “Newsletter” as masculine, but both “die Newsletter” and “das Newsletter” were common until recently).
It depends on the word. Der oder das Radio for example: das Radio(gerät) oder der Radio(empfänger) defines the article. The same can be distinguished for butter: the word's origin might originate from Greek or Latin - depending on which language you choose, you'd get a different article.
That’s not true. Only “das Radio” is correct Standard German. Only “die Butter” is correct Standard German. Other forms may well be common, and accepted as dialect. But they’re not Standard German, which means they’re not taught in school (except by mistake), and are not acceptable in official communications. You may not like that German is so overly prescriptivist (I have issues with it) but it’s a simple fact.
Additionally, your explanation about the origin of the gender of “Butter” is entirely apocryphal: the original Greek/Latin gender has at best an indirect influence on the gender of the modern German word (and in fact both were neuter: βούτυρον vs butyrum).
Native German speaker: Most of the time we think it's just funny if you get the gender wrong, no harm done. As you said, there's very few instances where there are words changing meaning if you swap out the article. And even then, it's ususally obvious from context. (Der Schild => the shield; Das Schild => the sign). I do get the frustration though, I had to learn French in school and I'm currently learning Swedish (I'd consider their en and ett words something conceptually similar to the gender thing).
I also agree about mapping the prepositions, but I think that applies to learning other languages in general, or at elast, more than just the pairing German/English. I can only compare it to English => Swedish (I had not interest in learning French as a language, I was more trying to get a passing grade in it. And I do have to learn Swedish from the English perspective, because Duolongo doesn't offer a German => Swedish course), but it's the same thing
As a native Swedish speaker, albeit with little interest in languages and grammar, I can't see how that would help anyone. How do you know if "bil" (car) is masculine/feminine or neutral (en bil, ett bil)? Open to learn here :)
It helps because words describing a profession, a person or something animate are usually male/female. The same goes in Dutch, where "de" refers to male/female and "het" to neutrum.
There are several rules of thumbs which can help foreigners to correctly guess the article in both Swedish and Dutch. Of couse, they'll only be an accurate guess at best, but they can give you a headstart as a novice learner.
Well, it works for many cognates. Haus/house/hus all come from the same word, so if you know that it's "ein/das Haus" you can expect it to be "ett hus/huset" in Swedish. Same with e.g Hund/hound/hund, "ein/der Hund" is masculine so it is of common gender in Swedish "en hund/hunden".
Back when I Lived in Germany a colleague used to have fun when I said "meine Deutsche" instead of "mein Deutsch" when referring to my knowledge of the language.
After 2 years I just stopped worrying about articles, knowing that I would anyway always sound like auslander to them.
I even suspect that wrong gender is a running gag among Americans. See "Hotel das Alpen" on the show "Titans" and "Der Waffle Haus" on the show "Dead like me".
While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about".
Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.
That's true but I'd say it's less about appearing lowly educated than about reinforcing your foreign-ness.
A lot of Germans are to varying degrees prejudiced against foreigners, especially if you're brown or can be read as Turkish/Arabic or Eastern European. If you pass as white European you're more likely to be read as educated but still learning the language whereas otherwise your language problems are more likely to be attributed to a general lack of intelligence and education.
I'm not saying all Germans think this but there are certain cultural clichés around uneducated "southerners" (generally Italy, Greece, Turkey but also Arabs and everything West of France) and Eastern Europeans speaking broken German the same way Americans have stereotypes about people speaking AAVE.
In other words broken German has a cultural stigma but depending on how you are read you may be less impacted by it. If your career is going to involve speaking German a lot, it's probably advantageous to speak it well.
It also shifts with time. 30 years back the prejudice would have been flipped. As a white immigrant you would've probably been a low educated russian or polish worker, while with a taint you would've been Italian and much more respected.
It's the general bad practice of putting individuals into larger groups with a stigma based on visual appearance.
I think a lot of the resentment about bad German skills in my generation (80s/90s) comes from 10+ year residents and 2nd generation immigrants not capable of speaking our language correctly.
I mean in the seventies and eighties there was a lot of racism against Spaniards and Italians. Nowadays this is gone. They are allowed to be proud of their heritage.
We also had a lot of highly educated migrants from Yugoslavia back in the seventies and they were appreciated back then. But after the Balkan wars they were suddenly the bad guys despite some of them being perfectly integrated in our society and sometimes being the third generation to live here.
It's funny how fast the perception shifts and how quickly we are to judge on the prejudices we have of a group of people and not on the individual.
I would say, in the US it is at the same time "not a thing" and "an even bigger thing". I guess it is easier to be seen as American, but on the other hand, those Americans claim they are Irish/German/Italian (and the corresponding percentages), because of some great-grandfather. Germany historically also has had immigrants (e.g. Ruhr area with it's mines) but those people don't think they are Polish/Romanian, because of their ancestors.
It's also sometimes fun to play with this kind of prejudice: I'm from the UK, but if I'm having a bad language day, a bad hair day, or I'm wearing my work clothes, I get some people being very unfriendly, often rude, because I'm clearly Eastern European. As soon as it comes up that I'm from the UK, the reactions totally change.
West of France. Spain, Portugal and possibly the Southern parts of France. But ethnic stereotypes are of course silly and somewhat arbitrary so I don't think it's possible to draw a clear line.
"Hedonistic lazy people with dark hair who steal our daughters" seems to be the general idea. This is somewhat distinct from "lazy people with light hair who steal our things", which seems to be the stereotype against Eastern Europeans.
I agree. People will understand you, but they will also judge you. In my experience, Germans are much more ready to notice "wrong German" than English speakers do with "wrong English". This is just a sad fact.
My aunt, an American who has lived in German-speaking countries for 10+ years and can say almost everything she'd want to tells me she still gets treated less seriously because of subtle mistakes like that in her speech.
My experience is that after some time and level of proficiency in a language, some just stop learning and caring. I think that is a pity because I believe that with revisiting the rules in interesting exercises one can fix the mistakes even later.
It may help your Aunt to learn German (again) with beginners books. There are good self-learner books with interesting exercises. They are less than 20€ per level and if you are already good, it should be easy to do multiple pages per hour.
It would be important for a native speaker to check the answers, though. And also the solutions should be crosschecked with the books solutions, if there are any, because many Germans don't know all the rules correctly. If in doubt, just stick with the book.
> Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....
Native German speaker here: I disagree with all the sentiment of "less fear". Better concentrate on your ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences.
In school, I often felt that the German grammar works somewhat like a mathematical proof system (and asked myself why German grammar is not part of math classes). When studying mathematics, you first have to learn to write correct proofs. It makes no sense to try learn something more deep in mathematics if you have difficulties writing elementary proofs.
For German, it is the same: first learn the internal structure (grammar) of the language (just like predicate logic in mathematics) and just like thinking how to express something that you want to prove in predicate logic, find out how to formulate something in German's grammatical structure.
Only after this elementary step, you can begin with more complicated things.
Funny thing though is that most native speakers (of any language) generally don't know the grammar explicitly. They know it implicitly insofar as they speak correctly, but they'll generally be hard pressed to explain why they say things the way they say them.
These are some of the exact same observations that I've had while learning to the 10% fluency level. German has just been a joy for learning root word associations. Learning just a few root words can yield so much (think "die dienst").
Also nice is seeing a completely new German word in writing and immediately knowing with nearly 100% confidence how it is pronounced.
Compare that to the unfortunate person learning English, which almost seems deliberately designed to trick you with seemingly arbitrary pronunciations.
> das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion"
That is just the same in English. Although you probably need to remember a bit more etymology, and some Latin doesn't hurt, "compassion" is just the same. "com" means with and "passion" in this context also means suffering.
> some Latin doesn't hurt, "compassion" is just the same. "com" means with
English uses this "second register" to make words, which makes it harder. German and Dutch do not, they use the regular vocabulary. The classic example is scientific terms like "Carbon", ""hydrogen": In German "Kohlenstoff" and "Wasserstoff". It helps if you realise that "stoff" is stuff, material; "Kohle" is coal and "wasser" is water.
>Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning
Being French myself I'm curious what makes you say that. I can't think of many nouns that change meaning if you swap their gender. They exist but I never thought that it was common enough to cause issues. For the most part I can understand strangers just fine even if get the genders wrong. "J'ai mis la téléphone dans le voiture qui est garé devant le maison" sounds obviously broken but absolutely unambiguous.
Also, French having only two genders means that you'll get it right at least half the time if you guess randomly, while in German you'd only have a 1/3 success rate, so there's that...
>I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones.
That's definitely true and it's not just with English <> German unfortunately, it's true with every language I've studied. Even among Romance languages there are significant differences (for instance "to dream of" is "rêver de" in French but "sonhar em/com" in Portuguese, and then there's the whole "por/para" distinction that doesn't really exist in French). Similarly I'm currently trying to learn Russian and that's one of many difficulties with the language (made even worse because you need to learn the right preposition but also what case it calls for).
What about if I say 'J'ai mis la téléphone dans la peau" instead of 'j'ai mis le téléphone dans le pot"?! I find in french that there is always another meaning behind a noun and it is easy to slip up.
I hadn't thought about homophones, that's a good point (and due to our quirky phonology there are many of those in French). That being said even in proper French we lose the distinction in the plural and I don't think that's really much of an issue, "le" and "la" both become "les": "les peaux" and "les pots" are pronounced exactly the same. I believe German does the same thing with plural "die".
Clearly if you told me the strictly correct sentence "les téléphones sont dans les pots" I would never wonder if you meant "the phones are in the pots" or "the phones are in the skins" because we don't generally put phones in people's skins (yet).
But that's using a whole different noun, albeit one that sounds similar. In this case using the correct gender won't help, especially if the sentence could make sense with both nouns.
They are homophones so they are different nouns but have the same sound. The only audible difference is the article gender. I think the original point was the (audible) gender doesn't change the meaning much in German vs French.
Not sure what you mean about "sonhar em/com". In this case em" is used to depict the medium, while "com" regards the subject. For example, "sonhar em alemão" means "to dream in German" (e.g. everyone talks in German), while "sonhar com alemão" means "to dream about German" (e.g. you dreamed you were in class).
In Portuguese you can also use "em" in sentences like "sonhou em regressar ao Brasil" (quoting an example from the Wiktionary). In French we would say "J'ai rêvé de retourner au Brésil", the literal translation with "en" would be nonsensical.
In my experience, not having German as my first language, you can get pretty far with guesses and rules of thumb as far as the genders are concerned. With experience your guesses will become more educated. You will start to feel the patterns in how the ending of a word maps to the gender of the noun, with some accuracy. You'll memorize some of the most common exceptions. "Impossible" delineations such as "mit das [..]" will feel wrong.
Also, by all means, memorize the delineation tables and the rotes that will help you identify accusative and dative. I still remember those from school and they never cease to be useful.
Oh, and by the way, it turns out that Polish is even worse in terms of grammar .. or maybe my mind is just less pliable these days :)
You’re probably referring to the fact that the school system differs from state to state rather than being organised at the federal level but I find that quality of education differs a lot more between individual schools than it does between states, and not just because of the tiered system (grammar would be elementary school curriculum anyway).
As someone who went to four high school in three different German states, I can assure you, that the state is a very good indicator. As a child, you live in a world of stress when you move from easy to hard and basically repeat a year, when you move back.
In the simple example you give the genders don't matter and germans will quickly correct you but I'd still advise everyone to just learn the article with the noun and remember them as one unit. While German children don't learn this way it's more efficient for adult foreigners and helps a lot with more advanced grammar later on.
I haven't lived in Germany, but I've travelled there for work, and I've found that getting genders wrong confuses Germans. Or at least, German waiters.
Also pro-tip - when asking if a sauce is "hot", don't use "heiss" which literally means hot, the word you want is "scharf", spicy. Because "heiss" is slang for "horny" and if you phrase it wrong, you end up asking the Afghani waiter if the sauce is horny, and he looks a little aghast.
I agree with point 3 though, German makes a lot of sense when you learn how the words combine together.
I'm German and my first association if a German asked for heiße Soße, would be that they are asking about temperature, not spiciness and certainly not horniness. And as the other comment said, both heiß and scharf are slang for horny.
Could you share how you've learned to speak German during those 3 years? I have used all the common apps to learn German and reached an A2 level but going to B1/B2 is harder to achieve using only apps. Thanks!
I paid for courses at the start, which really helped.
Beyond that, reading books in German, and dealing with German society in German (surprisingly hard to do here in Berlin, as all the locals love to speak English, Jens Spahn excepted). Watch German TV.
I’m also lucky to have a few German friends who tolerate speaking to me in German, despite the fact their English is near fluent.
As a native speaker I can confirm that using the wrong gender is totally fine. Sometimes even native speakers don't know better. That is what I keep telling people.
I think the most important thing to watch out is the formal (Sie) and informal (Du) form of addressing people. Not so much of politeness, but it sounds very awkward if you would address kids with "Sie" for example.
Is there a German word for the delight one experiences when a person uses the wrong word unknowingly (as I often do) and creates a new and wonderful concept? As in "map German propositions to English ones." I do not mean to be snarky, I mispell thinks constantly.
> Prepositions claim different areas of ‘cognitive space’ in English and German
The thing about pre/postpositions is, their use is almost entirely idiomatic in modern language, i.e. it doesn't follow from the meaning of individual parts and thus doesn't translate without reconstruction.
In English, afaict, practically all adpositions signify relations in space or time, plus there are ‘of’ and ‘for.’ However, once you begin dealing with even slightly more abstract notions, these semantics break―and you just have to pick a word that you will use, without ties to its meaning. “The paper is on the table” is straightforward, as it uses the original meaning of ‘on,’ but you can't say why it's “We speak in English” and not e.g. ‘under English.’
So, German and other languages simply picked different words: it's not like you can complain that some inherent semantics are violated by that.
It's pretty much the same in e.g. Russian with prefixes, since many of them also originally denote spatial relations, and this derivation with prefixes is used in much the same way as with adpositions in English. (Speaking ‘in English’ is actually something like ‘along-English’ in Russian.)
But, English also has a habit of forming piles of new idiomatic phrases, with completely different meaning, by adding postpositions, in the same entirely arbitrary way―which makes learning these phrases an ordeal.
Speaking "on" English doesn't seem so strange if we can talk over (i.e. through) the radio.
And English gets so much less reasonable. "Put up" is to house, "put down" is to insult, "put up with" is to suffer, "put through" is to test, "put around" is to spread, "put in" to contribute, "put out" to have sex or produce, "put over" either to delay or to decieve, "put past" to offer, "put on" to act or wear or present, "put off" to delay or dissuade, "put away" to tidy or eat or earn, "put aside" to save or to forgive, "put forth" to suggest, "put back" to replace.
Yeah, phrasal verbs (verb-particle combinations) are almost entirely idiomatic. At least as a non-native learner, I've found it best to memorize them as units and not to even think about what the adposition would mean affixed to a noun, and that's how they were taught as well.
As a non-native speaker, over the radio makes sense to me because in that case the radio is the medium that carries your speech. It's "in" English because that's the "encoding" of your message. You would then transmit it possibly on a vehicle at some physical location.
so... HTTP over TCP over IP sounds most natural to me, though I guess HTTP on TCP works too.
Of course they sorta make sense, people wouldn't use completely bogus prepositions (at least mostly wouldn't). They're still arbitrary, though: why is it not ‘with English’ and ‘with radio,’ since both denote usage? And, as previously said, other languages have chosen different prepositions: e.g. in Russian, both happen to use ‘по’, which means something like ‘sliding along’ or ‘moving on.’
I think I would use over for all of those. Is that wrong?
And English phrasal verbs aren't really different from German verbs with separable prefixes. I agree though that it's one of the harder parts of the language.
> I think I would use over for all of those. Is that wrong?
You're probably right, I should have tried harder to find a better example. The "on" doesn't sound too awkward to me, though, and I might say it just to avoid saying "over" three times in a row.
(Ah dang, "put together" is to construct, "put out" also to extinguish, and to be put out is also to be disappointed... I'm not going to add to the list.)
I wonder if Lojban or any of similar languages have taken a stance against this encroachment of old physical descriptors on newer abstract meanings. Though I guess it's impossible to foresee what kinds of relations will need to be denoted in the future.
> The genders of individual nouns and the grammatical rules to decline articles and adjectives using those genders constitute a shared set of rules that the sender and receiver both know. It may not approach the Shannon limit, but German gendered nouns form a weird, organically developed forward error correcting code. This might be a convoluted example, but imagine trying to hear the difference between Rat and Rad over a bad phone line. Your brain has to do this kind of reconstruction all the time, you’re just not usually conscious of it! “Gib mir das Ra{d,t}” makes the distinction clear – a German speaker would decode it as das Rad immediately, because that “just sounds right.” The declinations are just parity bits in the sentence, and whatever “just sounds right” is actually an error-free solution to a parity calculation.
This formulates something I thought of myself. It's a really good way to state it. The test is this: find people who are native speakers of a gendered language. Make up a dummy noun, or give them an import like "Internet". Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.
I always thought there was some unstated rule relating to the sounds, but as a non-linguist it's hard for me to dig any deeper.
> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.
That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc.
Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manager" is integrated, and it's clear its' "der Manager," same for Computer.
Some words do seem to evoke a certain gender (I've never heard anything but "der Podcast") but you shouldn't assume your personal preference extends to all (native) speakers ("das Podcast" would easily be possible.)
But how do people assign gender during the integration process? It's a consensus process, but there are several factors: lexical similarity (Computer denotes the same concept as "der Rechner" so it becomes masculine. Same for City/Stadt (feminine)) or lexical analogies (this loan word denotes something we already have a category for) morphological analogies (words in -er are likely to become masculine, as many German masculine words already have that ending, same for nouns ending in a vowel and feminine.) Sometimes it's chaotic, but that's the nature of consensus.
This process is much easier in Slavic languages, where gender assignment follows stricter morphological rules. German, on the other hand is chaotic. Note: German is not chaotic for the reasons given in TFA, because formations with -chen -keit -heit -ung etc. have fixed, regular gender. But words which did not undergo a morphological derivation process, but are instead atomic nouns are very haphazard in their gender assignment.
Some words are also officially recognized with different genders. E.g. it's "der oder das Ketchup". [1] I argued multiple times with my girlfriend that "der Ketchup" doesn't sound right at all, until we looked it up.
My best guess is this comes from different dialects that associate different genders with certain sounds. She comes from Schwaben, while I'm from Franken, which speak very different dialects. I had never heard "der Ketchup" before.
Kitchen terms are generally crazy. Do other languages also have hundreds of different terms for the last piece of a loaf of bread that is too thin for further slicing, but too thick to be considered a slice?
What I've also noticed in myself and other people is that seemingly weird German genders come from not saying the second part of a compound word.
I.e. "das Factory" which does sound somewhat weird (because I would think of "die Fabrik" instead), comes from "das Factory-Pattern" where "Pattern" ("das Muster") was omitted for brevity.
Yeah like in Spanish "la moto", which would make you think that's wrong because moto ends on o and should be masculine. But turns out it is actually a short for "la motocicleta", which ends in an a.
What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong to everyone else.
But you're right: It's a consensus process and with time words can get completely integrated and then tend to have only one gender.
Though Das is usually the go to gender for foreign words that don't feel German enough, when you say them in a German sentence. In my experience that feeling largely depends on your expectation to be understood. I.e. mixing German with tech terms with a tech coworker is far more acceptable than mixing it with a coworker from accounting.
> Funny enough I always use "der Log" and not das.
People are nice to you if they don't correct that :) Das Log is pretty universal a neutrum. "Ich schreib das mal ins Log", if you are used to der Log that must be an individual mistake or a dialect far removed from Hochdeutsch.
I use der Log, as do most of my colleagues. I also say "der Blog." Duden seems to agree with you, but I'm still not convinced. It's probably a regional difference.
> Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das Restaurant etc.
No. For example "Kiwi" originally comes from Maori language. In German, it is "der Kiwi" (the bird) and "die Kiwi" (the fruit). No neutral genus.
In this case, the genus even has importance what the word means - it is not uncommon in German that using different genera for the same noun is there to distinguish different meanings. On the website https://www.cafe-lingua.de/deutsche-grammatik/nomen-mit-mehr... some further examples for this are listed. So always learn the genus properly.
The moment a word is used as a german word by a german it does not really matter anymore where it's from, the usual mechanisms that specify gender apply. Which are the few fixed rules, then mostly "how do others speak", maybe a bit "how does the word sound". That's how foreign words become german words.
There is no rule that loanwords end up as neutrum: Die Allee, die Paella, der Computer, der Laptop are just a few counter examples.
Good examples for some of the different ways gender can be derived.
Going deeper into blog, people who still remember "weblog" as the full form of "blog" will call it "das Blog" (because "das Log" is a well established German term, gendered from "das Logbuch" perhaps), whereas people who were introduced to "blog" when it already felt like a standalone term will tend to use "der Blog", perhaps for to phonetic similarity to "der Block".
The log (as in chronologically written record) surely derives from the book where the log measurements were recorded, so it's all the same basically. Nauticalese is like a separate language that "infects" coastal languages with common terminology. Of course this would all be much more interesting if Log and Buch did not share gender.
> Not with the gender of the word. The last noun counts.
OK, then I misunderstood - you were talking about this elementary grammatical rule and I was talking about the origin of the word "Logbuch" (the latter is something that even many native German speakers do not know).
Most famous example: Der/die/das Nutella. Some of the ambiguousness with technical terms come from older people I think. I've never heard anyone below 50 saying "das Email", but a lot of elder people saying it that way. Might be regional though.
A funny thing is that, in Castilian (Spanish spoken in Spain), the word "Internet" is always used without an article.
We do assign the masculine gender to it when we attach adjectives to it, but never an article, which actually is a bit strange once you think about it.
For example, "the Internet is full of X" is "Internet está lleno de X". To refer to a slow Internet connection, we would say "Internet va lento" or "me va lento Internet". No trace of "el Internet".
Also, I think in Latin America they treat it as feminine and always attach the definitive article, so "the Internet" is "la Internet".
And as a last comment, just to see how crazy language is, we always use "la intranet". Maybe because that is a "concrete" place, while the Internet is a more abstract medium.
That seems enviably correct to me! "The Internet" usually refers more to a state of connectedness than to a specific entity consisting of connected computers. "Internet" can be slow or broken while the entirety of "el Internet" is doing just fine. In the languages I use you would always say "the internet" or "das Internet" is slow or broken or full of lies, even though the inclusion of the article does make it technically refer to the whole thing and you are clearly just talking about your own tiny little corner.
You know the reason even if you're not aware of it. It's the same reason you are using capital I for Internet and lowercase i for intranet. Internet is a proper noun, like "Laura", because there's only one. Intranet is a common noun, like "silla", because there are many. You don't attach determinants to proper nouns in Spanish.
To give another example on how genders are assigned to new nouns, interestingly English imports often have a different gender in Québec and in France (Belgium and Switzerland will usually use the same as France, probably do to its regional weight).
A job and business are masculine in France, feminine in Québec, it's the most common case (I think feminine is the default for all new words in Québec while masculine is the default in France).
A Game Boy however is usually feminine in France and masculine in Québec, like a party.
Others have the same gender, say blog or sushi (for another origin than just English) are both masculine everywhere.
I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment.
And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.
You say it exactly as you wrote, thankfully we have stopped translating that kind of term. Translations are only found at the extreme edges of the formality spectrum: in very formal writing, you use whatever is defined in the glossary of your organisation, and informal chitchat might occasionally be spiced up with ridiculous translations spontaneously made up on the spot.
Even when I was a child, with no or very little education in English under my belt, the chapter "E/A-Anweisungen" in my trusty GW-BASIC manual confused me to no end. I'm pretty sure that I would have grasped the meaning of "IO".
Where those terms still rule unchallenged is in MS Excel formulas. All the function names are translated. When you are a native speaker but used to programming vocabulary, Excel expressions read like hieroglyphics: you can easily identify most of the symbols, but the semantics remain unknown.
...except that you still need to memorize or deduce the correct articles. Der Layer (ends in -er); die VM (die (virtuelle) Maschine); die Postgres-Database (die (Daten-)Bank); das Upgrade (probably because it's a verb turned into a noun, like das Aktualisieren?), etc. Fun!
For some reason, many recent open source tools are still translated into German word by word. I guess the volunteer translators feel like they're cheating when they use English terms?
"Das Layer", for me, 100%. But I can't give a reason.
Translations are difficult. If you are talking or writing you just use the first word that comes to mind, but when you are translating it takes active effort to decide on where to stop. On top of that, with open source translations there is always a bit of an assumption (and self-fulfilling prophecy) that power users would stick to the original English and when you think of an audience that does not know the technical terms it feels like helping them if you forcibly translate (which might be a mistake).
Thanks for that and yes you're right. I think this isn't so critical though. My (French) girlfriend speaks German, with terrible grammar - but people understand her. I wish my French was as good...
I couldn't care less about the correct article (although I mostly guess correctly anyway). I think being understood is the real winner. As is seeking to understand, of course.
Man, as a native German I hate this obsession with german naming english words. Disruptive becomes "erschütternd" which is a bad translation, or how do you translate "tech-stack"? Technologie Haufen? I solve this by speaking denglish, but sometimes my fellow Germans who are less into the tech lingo complain about that. I really hate it when germans try to germanize international english words.
Technologiehaufen sounds refreshingly honest if what you are referring to is the usual tangled mess of tools hotwired together from the repositories, and not the carefully vetted selection of neatly interlocking components people dream of when they say "tech stack". The latter might be called Basistechnologiekompisition which did not even exist in the Google index until now. If you insisted on making a direct translation, you should at least go with Stapel, not Haufen.
Tangent: stack (as in LIFO) is traditionally translated Keller instead of the much more literal Stapel, likely to avoid ambiguity between batch (also Stapel) and stack. One of the few ancient computer English translations that absolutely did make it into the 21st century is "Stapelverarbeitung". I think that this is because it sounds just as clumsy as the concept it is describing. When you say Stapelverarbeitung you can almost feel that stack of punched cards that you have never worked with if you are my generation.
It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated.
I find this interesting because my native tongue, Finnish, is quite good about accepting neologisms.
People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.
I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"
“Computer” is non-existent in Hungarian, we call it számitógép, built from the words számitás (to calculate) and gép (machine). Since most Hungarian words are constructed like that, it sounds completely native to the language.
I cringe whenever I hear English words mixed in with Hungarian ones, they sound completely out of place, which is probably not true for German.
I think we can roughly equate Swedish with German, and gosh do English words sound "cringe" in Swedish. Luckily, we can often use the direct translation, English being very Germanic. Pointer becomes "pekare" for instance. Mouse "mus" and so on. So people recognize what it came from and can use the familiar sounding native version. "Computer" becomes "dator" meaning something operating on "data". "Data" is "data" in both. "Linked list" is "länkad lista". You see the pattern?
This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is "rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".
That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no statistics)
They make a new word using Dutch spelling whereas the Dutch use the English words one-for-one. Basically all of the words around computing are English words (which actually made it harder to learn Dutch, you need to know when the English words are actually the correct ones).
I'm Flemish, and I worked in The Netherlands for more than 4 years. The dutch understand "muis" (mouse) "toetsenbord" (keyboard). There are dutch words with different meaning in both regions (like "aftrappen", "precies"). I think the biggest problem learning Dutch for foreigners (except for the rather complicated grammar) is that there are plenty of dialects (especially in Flanders).
I remember a uni class about data structures that we had to study with a german book... With things like "Keller" for the recursion base and "Halde" for the heap. Oh boy.
I don't see the problem with translating terms that have a strong visual component, especially if it's an introductory text. It also depends on how old the text is (fundamental concepts don't change much) and if the current nomenclature has already been established back then.
I've never heard German words for any concepts like that outside of university.
You'll usually get by just pronouncing those words a bit more German or replacing the ones that are very close to German words with the German one (e.g. cryptography -> Kryptographie but "public key cryptography" -> Public Key Kryptographie). If you want to "pass" while speaking German but need to use English jargon, just use a slight German accent and nobody will bat an eye.
Fun fact: most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would, at worst you'll just sound a bit stilted or old-fashioned.
> most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would
Only those that were introduced from Latin texts (alongside all the ancient Greek we tend to confuse with Latin). Those that came from Latin via French are for when you need to cheat in the same way west of the Rhine.
I'm a software engineering student in Austria and have interned at multiple companies and we always just used the respective English terms.
Actually, I've noticed that I sometimes just use English words mixed with German in my day-to-day talking too because they come to mind more quickly. Probably ~10% of what I say when talking German is English (with German grammar of course).
I am German living in Germany, but for the last 5 years all my work/professional live is english and I also have small word finding problems when talking about the same concepts in german, just because I usually never do it.
If I'm talking to colleagues or making notes I just use the English words. I mean all my notes about computer related topics are in English. When I write a documentation or an e-mail for or to customers I translate everything to German. I feel this helps me to keep things simpler and makes it easier to understand.
I have to say I hate mixing languages. It makes me feel uneducated and a bit like a loss of identity. Especially German is really expressive and it shouldn't be a problem to make up the words needed to express yourself.
About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in -chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.
Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t my native language I wouldn’t want to learn it but I do love it.
It doesn't make sense, but it is a pattern. There is a similar pattern in French: all nouns ending in -tion or -sion are feminine (apart from a single exception: le bastion). Handily we also have most of those nouns in English too.
When learning French I stopped searching for patterns in genders. Some are truly weird, like penis being feminine and vagina being masculine. But I told myself it's no different to having to remember the pronunciation of every single English word, so my brain easily has capacity for it. After a while it becomes just as natural.
And there is "die Magd", ancient expression for a young woman and the grammatical gender is female, as well as "der Bube", ancient expression (it is still used more often, though) for a young man and grammatical gender is male.
Of both these words you can create the diminished versions "Bübchen" and "Mädchen" which both follow the aforementioned rule and are neutral.
Commonly, in Germany we say "Jungen und Mädchen" if we refer to children; but which words are chosen to be used are rarely a sensible decision.
My objection is not to the formulation of the rule, but to the existence of the rule―because where I'm from, a little girl is still a girl, grammatically too.
(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)
Ah, then maybe to clarify further: This rule applies to virtually every word. A table is "der Tisch" (male), a small table is "das Tischchen" (neutral); a tree is "der Baum" (male), a small tree is "das Bäumchen" (neutral); a break is "die Pause" (female), a small break "das Päuschen" (neutral), etc. In theory you can take every word and diminish it by appending "-chen".
You could still argue, that the "-chen"-rule should be overwritten by an "obvious-grammatical-gender"-rule.
Anyone wanting help with German grammar, I thoroughly recommend the dartmouth german grammar pages [0]. (I used them for GCSEs and A-Levels). They have a page explaining the bracket structure [1]
FWIW, for me as a Ukrainian, both of this examples would be natural because in Ukrainian we have some similar rules. Diminutives of a particular form are always neutral gender (e.g. дівчатко / divchatko). And words meaning properties / traits are always female even if a trait would be characteristic of a male (e.g. чоловічість).
Because the final consonant is actually pronounced softly in related forms ("Rad/Räder" vs. "Rat/Räte"), German speakers tend to "hear" a difference, purely by association, that isn't there phonetically.
> Because the final consonant is actually pronounced softly in related forms ("Rad/Räder" vs. "Rat/Räte")
Because it isn't anymore the final consonant in the listed related forms. The rule is that simple. Note that it also affects some vowels.
> German speakers tend to "hear" a difference, purely by association, that isn't there phonetically.
This is so annoying. Some then try to prove you wrong and try to stress the soft consonants at the end of words until realizing that it sounds stupid and wrong. Such stubbornness.
As a native speaker: Generally no, but it depends.
The "t" in "Rat" is pronounced much harder than the "d" in "Rad" is. BUT: The more and more you go into the north of Germany, lets say Hamburg for example, they have a very similar pronouncing of "t" and "d". Both often sound very hard (more like an "t"). Whereas people in the south tend to pronounce both letters more soft, like a "d".
Please don't use "High German" in English to mean (some perceived) "Standard German". It's bad (and incorrect) enough to use "Hochdeutsch" in German, but "High German" has a specific meaning in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages and the dialect spoken in Hannover is not in fact a High German one.
Right, but that standard is more about the written standard language than about the language as spoken in Hannover. I know it's a trope that TV news announcers supposedly pronounce things like they are pronounced in Hannover, but that pronounciation is not a standard.
Says who? Not Wikipedia, which says that that's a regionalism and quotes sources. Where is the standard codified?
> What is the ending of the pronunciation of 'und' in your region? Is it 'd' or 't'?
This is a trick question: If I answer the same as you pronounce it, you'll say "see, it's standard!", and if I answer the other way, you'll say "well, it's not my fault that you don't speak Standard German™".
That said, it's 'd'. If anything, it's softened further and half swallowed to say something like "un'".
Why would there have to be a standard? My point is exactly that there isn't one that captures how actual people actually speak German. There is one for written German that everyone agrees on, but not for spoken German. And that's completely fine.
And coming back to the original Rat/Rad distinction, https://forvo.com/word/rat/#de and https://forvo.com/word/rad/#de do sound different. The second "Rad" speaker (from southern Germany) makes almost no 'd' or 't' sound at all, but the same speaker pronounces "Rat" with a very hard and clear 't'.
Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer.
Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier".
At the beginning of learning a language, reading texts is too slow. In that phase, memorizing and practicing vocabulary or short translations (like Duolingo, which I can wholeheartedly recommend) are a good start.
In my experience, especially from learning English, it's a good idea to not look up every unknown word when reading. You quickly develop a sense of which words or grammatical concepts are important for the meaning of a sentence. If you see a new word in different contexts a few times, you may get curious enough to look it up. Or you already have a sense of its meaning.
Lots of reading is how my high school English became adequate enough to write a Ph. D. thesis. As soon as I started reading books, the language just clicked. Before that it was just endless amounts of grammar and vocabulary. Also reading something interesting is a bit more engaging than processing endless amounts of meaningless dialogs and other examples from grammar books. The first book you pick up will be a bit of a struggle but that is kind of the point. It gets progressively easier. I remember doing something similar with French and being able to process a simple novel but sadly I never pushed through and I've since forgotten most of my high-school French.
A few tips, for reading. 1) don't use translation dictionaries and instead look up words in the native dictionary. E.g. Merriam Webster is great for English. English words explained in English gives you a good sense of the full context of the word. It's all about getting a sense of context of words and constructs. 2) So, try figuring out things from their context. Language has lots of redundancies and you can sort of skim a sentence and get a rough idea of what it means even if it contains verbs and nouns you have never seen. A fun little exercise is transposing all the verbs in a sentence with something non-sensical like "fu--". Many sentences continue to make way more sense than they should after that. 3) Languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. have lots of common roots. This can help you as well. Understanding the etymology of words that look similar across languages can help as well. E.g. English has lots of nautical terms adapted from Dutch, lots of French words that the Normans introduced and quite a bit of viking stuff as well. I actually picked up some Swedish when I was living there a long time ago; enough to be able to process simple Danish and Norwegian as well.
That being said, my German still sucks even after living in Berlin for many years. So do as I say, and not as I do ...
My tip for learning and understanding new words from (nearly) any language:
Looking up their etymology.
Seemingly arbitrary words suddenly make sense and the story behind it makes you remember them and connects them to other words. Also it is so much more interesting than just looking up some definition or word-by-word translation.
I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I can't imagine reading a foreign language and surmising what a word means without a definition.
I won't say it's easy, but it's easier than you might think.
Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.
I think the rewrite of the sentence is the way better way to phase it. Just because something is legal German, like in the original example, it doesn't mean it is good German :).
(German native speaker).
You're right and in some sentences, the entire meaning of the sentence only makes sense when you read the last word. Thus, a style guide for writing recommends to restructure the sentence as much as possible.
Unfortunately, especially in academic writing, some people want to appear smart and make their sentences super complicated on purpose. Fortunately, I'm not a student anymore and I stopped reading bullshit where the author doesn't respect the reader.
As a german speaker this strikes me as wrong. I personally would have written that as "Ich trete meine Rechte, die ich Gott sei Dank habe, ab", or simplified as "Ich trete meine Rechte ab, die ich Gott sei Dank habe"
It doesn't strike me as wrong, just as a bit unhandy. The explanatory Nebensatz that is started with a relative pronoun that refers to the object that is about to be explained can always start directly after the object, and sometimes even must start there. For example:
Seine Meinung, die ich nicht teile, macht weniger Sinn als ihre.
Sadly Kuro5hin is defunct and google only pulls up an archive of part II...the link to part I is broken and I'm not sure whether the promised third part was ever posted.
Btw: Sanskrit is originally defined with similar-to-Backus-Naus-form rules.
From "Backus–Naur form" wikipedia:
The idea of describing the structure of language using rewriting rules can be traced back to at least the work of Pāṇini (ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian and a revered scholar in Hinduism who lived sometime between the 7th and 4th century BCE). His notation to describe Sanskrit word structure notation is equivalent in power to that of Backus and has many similar properties.
For a limited very subset only. The rules presented there are way too easy to handle most natural language statements.
That being said the core of Japanese grammar is quite simple for a human learner and the recursion is more obvious there than in most other natural languages.
It's funny that as a german I'm now learning interesting stuff about my own language in a foreign language about a language made up to make machines do things.
"Probably the first difficulty people run into when leaning German is memorizing the gender of each noun and properly declining that noun’s articles when used in a sentence."
It really depends on what your mother tongue is.
I personally like the analogies. You can do things differently with language. Some languages use more words to convey some information, others encode the information in the words' gender/declination/position etc.
What makes language really difficult is that languages clash and get mixed up. Imagine a team building a compiler that works with cobol and java code. Imagine the team adapting the codebase to what works best for that new compiler and then slowly deprecating & dropping unused features.
Memorizing gender: I hear the trick is not to do it separately ("1. I know the word 'Mädchen'. 2. Its gender is feminine.") but as an integral part of the word ("1. I know the word 'das_Mädchen'.").
Also completely forget the non-grammatical male / female association. Treat it like quarks in physics (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top): Words with the same name as familiar but mostly unrelated concepts.
American who moved to Switzerland 1.5 years ago and learning High German (now in A2).
Hardest thing for me right know is knowing when it is appropriate to use the Akkusativ versus Dativ cases. Declining is always difficult, especially considering that adjectives are declined and also this declination depends on the presence and kind of article (which is also declined).
I love Switzerland but since I am learning High German it means the Swiss are more likely to talk English to me if they know it (completely understandable, given the relationship between High German and Swiss German). So practicing is intimidating or can feel rude if I try to stick to High German in this case.
A bit offtopic but there [1] is a funny list of some really weird details of the German language. After reading those examples I can not understand how some people are able to learn German at all.
Well, you can do that with every single language out there if you look for the most ridiculous examples. The ones in this link are funny but partially so far-fetched that for one comparison I had to take a look in the dictionary, as a native speaker.
I am currently learning (german) sign language and I see very many parallels to programming languages there as well. Eg the subject object verb sentences structure reminds me of a stack machine and establishing references points (for persons or objects) in the space around your body in order to later in the sentence (or in future sentences) related to to them reminds me of register allocation.
Seems to me that the last footnote on the website about pre-computing x+4 in pipelined processors is very simmilar to (if not the same as) the fairly recently discovered Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability. What do you think?
Programmers? Sure German language needs a nice round of refactoring. Remove all redundancies. It would be a huge changelist with shit ton of lines removed, and still all tests for meaning pass.
Removing all redundancies would require everyone to speak and formulate perfectly. Otherwise the message is lost.
A lot of misunderstanding would happen.
Redundance in language makes it easier, because it really is some kind of error protection.
Not necessarily in case of German, What exactly articles give to the meaning? What would it lose if they are removed or consolidated into a single article.
Personally love them. Not so much in German, but in Russian they make word order wonderfully flexible. You can just blurt stuff out, adjusting the case as you go along, to build a sentence, rather than having to go back and restart.
What bugs me with German inability to reliably form plurals and having adjective endings vary by determiner (though not difficult to learn, but just seemingly serving no useful purpose).
For me I found aspect in Russia the most difficult thing grammatically to grasp. I hear learning articles from an "articleless" language is similarly difficult.
My biggest gripe with german is the redundancy, all articles and form changes they create are actually redundant, they don't contribute to the meaning in any significant manners. Remove all of them and all the complications, different forms they create, you would still perfectly understand it.
Yeah I know, languages, organic, beautiful, but subtle things , etc etc.. But still.
I quite like the cases, personally. If you're not in a more formal context or writing (like say you're talking to friends or so) it lets you be a bit more fast and loose with word order, plus it can let you say things more concisely than you can with english. The only real solid annoyances I've had were adjectives. Learning all of the rules and endings around them sucked on some level and it felt really quite superfluous, but once you get them and you can gauge correctness just based on it "sounding right" it's not so bad.
I've been trying to learn German (at least enough to carry on a light conversation,) so I'm hoping this will help me. I've mostly been learning to speak it, haven't really focused on writing/spelling...though I do understand some basic German grammatical concepts from speaking.
Good job on attempting to map German to some programming concepts.
German cases have to be learned by listening to others, as your post kind of alludes to but may not be obvious to people, is that the gender assignment is not intuitive and too much of a sentence relies on knowing the gender assignment of a noun.
Fortunately, in a conversation you can listen to which suffixes people use, to reverse engineer the gender assignment of the noun. You have to store the experience in your mental hashmap and always assign the noun that way. The classical conditioning comes when people look at you ridiculously and disagree with your sentence structure, you'll re-evaluate quickly to avoid that.
I would recommend starting with something like Duolingo. It will give you a head start on listening comprehension and grammar.
In my opinion, reading texts is more efficient than listening to conversations. It's basically "on demand language streaming", you can slow down or speed up as desired.
Duolingo and apps like it, including Memrise, really fail with German. They can be good for syllable pronunciation and maybe memorizing gender of some nouns, but they never will explain or brush on the more complex nuances of any language, which you would learn in the second week of any formal education.
I agree with that. I banged my head on Duolingo and Memrise for ages before I got a tutor, and things fell in to place within weeks.
Out of disgust for the solutions that existed, I went so far as to start working on my own Memrise style app which understands enough German grammar to generate English/German sentence pairs, so you can practice sentences with nouns/verbs/adjectives swapped around.
So it shows you the first sentence and you translate:
I lay the pen on a table.
Ich lege den Stift auf einen Tisch
The pens lay on the table.
Die Stifte lagen auf dem Tisch.
Or it shows you a present tense and you make it past:
Ich lese ein Buch.
Ich habe ein Buch gelesen.
It was really effective at hammering in the edge cases of grammar (you'd practice maybe 500 sentences an hour). Though I got kicked out of Germany due to visa trouble and life took a different direction, and haven't touched it since!
It's not that easy to get kicked out of Germany...
Duolingo is but a tool among many. For one thing it tends to not force you to repeat enough, and for another the grammatical explanations are not that elaborate and easily ignored.
But for basic drilling it's great and I would prefer it over most other tools. After a point, of course, other things like reading, listening and writing become more important and efficient.
The visa office made a typo in my email address when setting the appointment, and when I didn't show up, they sent me another email asking if I wanted to reschedule, and when I didn't reply to that, they closed my case.
As I was under a bridging visa that meant I was now there illegally.
When I contacted them to find out what the hold up was, they told me what happened and that I was now there illegally and needed to leave immediately, so I did.
After the mistake was found out the visa office were apologetic and offered to give me a visa again, and the criminal case against me for overstaying was dropped.
But it was such a disruption to my life I no longer have interest.
Interesting story. To avoid that to happen, I'd recommend to get a lawyer and to contest the authorities decision. You could have worked that out if you had looked into it. Sure, just letting it go is suboptimal, but in cases like this one things should still be able to be fixed if the mistake was on the authorities side.
For me it was a wake up call for how stupid I was being entrusting my welfare to a badly designed bureaucracy. All I'd be doing by fighting for the right to stay would be setting myself up for another messy situation that impacted my livelihood down the road.
Until I dealt with the German government and professionals that deal with the German government (taxes, visa etc), I had no idea how lucky I have it as an Australian.
I know other people from other countries in Germany. They use a similiar language as you do. Are the rules really that bad, or is it that they are unintuitive?
I would estimate as a freelancer that the paperwork and accounting involved was five times more difficult than in New Zealand where I was also a foreigner, growing from an annoyance to a substantial (and expensive) burden. That alone is enough that I would caution foreigners against moving to Germany to start a business or be self employed.
A lot of the stories I formed my opinion on were second hand, issues my friends were dealing with; such as the Kafkaesque situation of registering for residency in a city, but not being able to rent without residency paperwork, and not being able to get the paperwork without a fixed address.
In Australia, it's just not a thing at all. If the Government tried to make us register with the city we're living in, we'd tell them to fuck off. Albeit in less polite language than that.
In the eight years I lived in New Zealand (as an Australian) I interacted with the government once a year to file my taxes, filled out two census forms and had a ten minute appointment to convert my Australian drivers license to one from New Zealand. It's not just that the interactions were easier, there just weren't any.
> A lot of the stories I formed my opinion on were second hand, issues my friends were dealing with; such as the Kafkaesque situation of registering for residency in a city, but not being able to rent without residency paperwork, and not being able to get the paperwork without a fixed address.
This is the type of problems that come up. I don't understand, though. There are multiple ways to get an address in Germany without a residency permit. You can also rent places without a residency permit. Maybe the person that encountered the issue you describe wanted to rent one specific place which requires a residence permit, and didn't want to do any other (temporary) thing to get an address.
Right, with patience, persistence and a little bit of Googling you can always work through the issues.
But the issues don't exist in the first place in AU/NZ (and presumably UK/US though I can't speak first hand do that). Even if they did, they'd be solved in a much more straightforward manner. I guarantee a similar form here, even though it would never exist, would accept "address pending" as a valid answer.
I'm not trying to say the German way is wrong, but you have to understand how crazy it seems to a foreigner.
For me I was content that I could parse what other people were saying. I wanted to know the concepts and how people think, my own ability to synthesize sentences would have been a side effect.
Memrise was great for learning vocabulary. I greatly expanded my French vocabulary using it. But I later tried to use it for Afrikaans and found they had redesigned it and it was useless.
Duolingo is completely useless in my opinion. It doesn't teach you anything about grammar and doesn't teach you much vocabulary. It's more like having random conversations with a native who doesn't actually know much about their own language, except you will never ever be able to converse with a native after only using Duolingo.
It's a waste of time just like "Roseta Stone". Both try to tell you it's the "easy way" because it's how babies do it. Well babies spend years immersed and completely helpless without language until they finally get it. Even if you could go through with that, would you even want to? As an adult you would be stupid not to use the best tool you already have for learning things: your mother tongue.
If you're serious about learning a language you need some way to learn vocabulary, a good book or books in your language to teach you grammar, and lots and lots of material in the new language: books, news, films, radio etc. You will not be able to learn to speak without a sympathetic native, though.
Duolingo has notes explaining the grammar as it introduces it, for the most part, and the grammar gets reasonably sophisticated by the end. Not really what I'd call complex nuances, but probably equivalent to a year or two of university study. What second-week German grammar concepts do you think it doesn't brush on?
In my experience Duolingo does have good grammar notes. But they are easily ignored and the exercises don't force you enough to read and understand them. Which may be impossible for any such tool.
I think the problem is that these apps sell themselves as a one-stop shop to learn a language, but they're not. When they're effective, is when you treat them as tools, to target various areas.
1. The genders don't matter nearly as much as non-speakers think they do. If you talk to your bank, it doesn't matter if you ask about "der Konto", "die Konto" or "das Konto" (the last is actually correct), you will be able to communicate quite fine. Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning - das Bund/der Bund (the bundle/the association) is the only one I can think of off-hand. Same with adjective declinations - "das verbundenes Konto", "zum verbundene Konto", "ein verbundenen Konto" are all wrong and will grate on the German ear, but will all be understood.
2. I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones. One of the things that improved my German a lot is learning the verb + proposition combinations - "ich denke an...", "ich freue mich auf...", "ich helfe dir bei ..."
3. There is an amazing amount of structure in German words which you start to see after you have basic vocabulary, which makes it easier to guess at the meaning of words you've never come across before. For example: das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion" or "pity". This of course gets extended far further with German's compound words.