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I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple

I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple heuristics to guess the gender. The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case. The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.

wolfgke 8y ago
> The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence. How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have. Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-( Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-( > Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)

wolfgke 8y ago

> The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence. How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have. Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-( Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-( > Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)