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DerDieDas.wtf: If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German
- atbrakhi 4y agoThey keep saying: You should learn the gender of nouns in German by heart. If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German then it's for you!
- 082349872349872 4y agoI <3 "der/die/das Tram"
- sarabande 4y agoStandard de-DE is _die Tram_, but with Austrian/Swiss differences, which is frequently true. I don't know any Germans who would be confused on the gender of this word.
- 082349872349872 4y agoDuden claims all work, so I guess CH and AT both picked different genders out of the remaining der and das... (unless it's LI that has the third :-)
- wegwerf12345 4y agoFor those who don't think "Tram" is a real word: "die Straßenbahn"
- euroderf 4y ago[flagged]
- hdhrufjdi 4y ago[flagged]
- psychphysic 4y agoWhat if two Nouns love each other really very much? Who cares if ones tangible and the other proper? Class and society rules be damned!
- xg15 4y agoMissed the opportunity to add "Der Käse" after "Das Käsestück". And yeah, it's the equivalent to English prepositions, it's just lots of history and no logic.
- ahartmetz 4y agoThat one is logical: the piece of cheese - it's a piece, not a cheese. The bottle of water - it's a bottle, not a water.
- sokoloff 4y ago“Two waters, please.”
- ahartmetz 4y agoAnyway, clearer example: wall paint is a paint, not a wall. It is always this grammatical structure in German. Consider the alternative: weighing the "weight" of the parts of a compound word to figure out the grammatical gender. Lots of rules and exceptions! As it is, there is one very simple rule with AFAIK no exceptions. German is difficult for sure, but the gender of compound words is a bad example to prove that.
- atbrakhi 4y agooh I made that mistake with "Die pizza" und "Das pizzastück"
- sschueller 4y agoThis reminds me of the German version of Seasame Street which had this intro song: https://youtu.be/uPHi5xn_q5c https://youtu.be/uPHi5xn_q5c (Der Die Das)
- pestatije 4y agoNice wonderful idea, my 2 cents: Instead of counting each amount, should be counting right/wrong answers. Plus more words...i don't know where but there must be a place with a list of common nouns.
- atbrakhi 4y agoThank you. I plan on adding new words and introducing levels as well. Right now offering 35 words as for beginners it might get too much at once. With new levels complexity and number of words will increase. About right/wrong answers: I don't want to feed wrong information to the brain. Idea is to allow users to make mistake and at the end only allow them to swipe in direction which is right. But I will think about pros of your idea as well :)
- senavneetsharma 4y agoThis is awesome application. I know from the pain of learning german. From what I saw application is just for mobile users. And about right/worng point you are right that users should be allowed to only swipe in right direction. But you can give a notification to user when he/she tries to swipe in wrong direction, as when I first used the app I thought something is wrong with it.
- chickenimprint 4y agoIf you think about it, a trinary bit is much less information than another sound would be. It's really quite easy to remember, but english minds seem to exclude articles from making it into memory, since they are usually not necessary. Change your mindset to include the articles as part of the word. There's a bunch of easy sound patterns that will make a German guess the right gender of a new word 99% of the time, like -er being masculine or -nis neuter. You can look them up, but it's much easier to form that intuition by learning vocab the right way.
- ownlife 4y agoThe gender system in German is something Mark Twain poked fun at in his famous essay "The Awful German Language": "Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl." https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
- hilbert42 4y agoI've often thought the only saving grace for those learning goddamn English as a second language is that they are spared all this gendered nouns nonsense (that is except for a few special cases). Gendered nouns, both in French and German, have always been a problem for me. German came later but I recall at school that the beginning of each chapter of my French textbook had a list of nouns each preceded by its article and learning them was a pain. After school I'd sit on my bed bashing my head against the pages of the textbook whilst trying to learn these damn genders, they made no logical sense to me and rules for remembering them had so many exceptions that they were essentially useless. I hated learning them. German was a whisker easier in that I was in German-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions! In my opinion, the only effective way to learn these genders is to be smothered in the language on a daily basis—this way, somehow, one learns them by a form of osmosis. As already mentioned elsewhere, Appendix D - The Awful German Language in Mark Twain's The Tramp Abroad is a quintessential summing up of the difficulties a native English speaker has in learning German. It's a brilliant summary, not only is it hilariously funny but also he gives some excellent examples from different aspects of the language such as separable verbs, gendered and compound nouns and those damn German adjectives. It's a while since I've read it so I can't remember chapter and verse but I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the matter of German genered nouns read his bit on the 'sex' of fishwives and young girls. Appendix D also has some unforgettable comments on the length of German compound words—something to the effect that 'they stretch across the page like mountain ranges' and are long enough 'to have perspective.' It's a must-read.
- shankr 4y ago> German was a whisker easier in that I was in german-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions! But that's what makes gender more complex in German than Latin languages. It really breaks any level of competency you can have in German. You can write correctly subject verb agreement but put wrong declension and people will think you have no competency in the language. I have spent way less time learning Spanish (~2.5 years) and it's still much better than my German (on and off for last 7 years). Every time I open my mouth to speak German my head spins around "oh what declension I might be missing". I speak Spanish without having any such thought. The only tricky part of Spanish is subjunctive which I ignore completely.
- mharig 4y agoThere is one easy rule: diminutives are always neutral: das Mädchen, das Jungchen, das Eichhörnchen, ....
- BirAdam 4y agoAnother, if it ends in e it’s usually die
- BirAdam 4y agoI dunno. I love the German language and didn’t struggle too much with it. To be honest, the variety of accents is far harder. Every language is pretty much equally difficult if you want to gain near native fluency (even Esperanto). If you are aiming for quick business level fluency, English and Mandarin are easy due to the abundance of resources. Generally, however, sticking with your native language’s family is going to be easiest. I personally think that most of the English speaker trouble with German is that it is at once both familiar and frustratingly foreign due to the Romanization of English after the Norman conquest, while Spanish or Urdu is just foreign. The speaker carries no assumptions with himself/herself into the learning process.
- nautilius 4y agoJust in time for my family! However, the instructions remain hidden behind the browser address bar on my iPhone SE, so it took me a while to figure out what to do. I thought tapping der / die / das at the bottom seemed like the most intuitive thing, rather than having to learn where to swipe. Anyway, thank you!
- atregir 4y agoLoved this! I was just hoping I'd see a count of how many I got right with the first try in the end, but it was fun anyway!
- atbrakhi 4y agoThank you :) The reason I don;t have that feature is because I only want us to feed right information to our brain. But I will marinate over your feedback :) I will also keep adding different levels and words. Keep an eye :)