3 ms·

“Die Brüder Grimm” ;) A lot of those stories aren’t written in contemporary German and would sound very weird if you used it in your day to day language.

• samtho 3y ago
  As someone who learned German as a second language (so take this with a pinch of salt and feel free that I did this wrong/bad), I found older German works useful for the purpose of understanding sentence structure and grammatical case. Immersion introduces vocabulary and contemporary ways of speaking. Stuff like the verb in second position was not difficult for me and asking questions by leading with a verb is actually still used frequently in English (more so in en-GB). Additionally, a number of European languages heavily use the verb “to have” in ways similar to each other, where an American English speaker may use “to be”, or “to do”, but the one thing that, to this day, I find myself struggling with occasionally is the gottverlassen grammatical case.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• Suppafly 3y ago
  so to make it plural, you just change the u to a ü?
  • phyrex 3y ago
    In this case yes. Not in every case. I don’t know if there’s a rule
  • nohaydeprobleme 3y ago
    In most cases for „der Bruder“, the answer is yes: the plural is „die Brüder“. But in the dative (Dativ) case where the "brothers" are an indirect object, the plural form has a different spelling. The singular „den Bruder“ transforms into „den Brüdern“. For example, if you want to say "I gave it to the brothers," you can say: „Ich habe es den Brüdern gegeben“. To figure out the plural forms, I use the online Leo dictionary (e.g. at https://dict.leo.org/german-english/bruder https://dict.leo.org/german-english/bruder), which often includes a table icon for indicating when the noun endings change in other cases. For studying plural forms of any noun, you can follow general rules for pluralization and individually memorize the plural forms of each noun with flashcards. You can also read and listen to native content to develop an intuition for what sounds right.
  • bloak 3y ago
    Yes, but there are only about 24 German nouns that form their plural just by adding two little dots like that (Umlaut). Four of them mean close relatives and are recognisable to English speakers: Vater, Mutter, Bruder, Tochter. A while ago I came across an ancient copy of "Teach Yourself German" printed around the start of the Second World War. The very first chapter had a list of those German nouns that form their plural just with an Umlaut and instructed the reader to learn them. I bet you won't find many books published today that start like that. I like to think there are still a few people around who learnt German by reading that edition, perhaps during an air raid.
• bloak 3y ago
  True, but they are beautiful, in my opinion, and if you're going to have to spend some time working on a text it helps if the text is something that you're willing to spend time on. Also, although the "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" use old-fashioned language, it's an old-fashioned spoken German, which means that in some ways they're closer to modern colloquial German than a lot of modern prose. They won't suit everyone but I'd definitely recommend that anyone learning German give them a try. If you did want weird, how about learning German from the lyrics of Bach cantatas? :-)
• dunham 3y ago
  I recall "Von dem Fischer un syner Fru" being particularly weird. But there may be be editions that are translated into modern German.