4 ms·
"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 i
by stewbrew 8y ago
"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.
- pjtr 8y agoMemorizing 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. Or maybe like "open(2)" vs. "open(3)". https://linux.die.net/man/2/open https://linux.die.net/man/2/open https://linux.die.net/man/3/open https://linux.die.net/man/3/open Example: "die Steuer" (tax) vs. "das Steuer" (rudder)