English did one thing correctly when it absorbed a great deal of German but it chucked the articles for words.
Der, Die, Das are all words meaning the same as 'the' but they identify masculine, feminine, and neuter gender for the corresponding noun. For example, 'das Mädchen' is girl but has a gender of neuter. 'Die Frau' is a woman but now has a gender of feminine. Behold the perfect clarity.
The problem in learning German is not so much pounding vocabulary into my head because the biggest problem for me is getting it with the articles to ensure I use the correct one with whichever word comes to mind. I have not as yet discovered any logical way to do it.
My objective isn't to shred German, say it's too difficult, and run away. That makes no sense and I have a high interest in continuing to learn it. The only point is this part is really a bitch when I come from a base with a language in which that kind of specification in identifying the gender of the noun is not important.
On the other hand, English chucked the Umlaut and that really was a mistake. An Umlaut is used over ä, ö, ü and it looks peculiar at first but the purpose is pronunciation. When you are clear on the difference in sound between an 'a' without the Umlaut and the 'ä' which uses it, reading for sound is much easier.
Example: you may take a bath and at that time you bäthe. That is close to exactly what the Umlaut does in changing sound. You might ogle at a girl or wobble before an Ögre. You might take your supper and üse implements to eat it. All those are close matches to the sound change auf Deutsch.
There are some others which are immediately obvious as the German preference for 'k' rather than 'c' makes people scream NAZI when they see 'Amerika' but there's no offense because that's the actual spelling in German. In English, the 'c' and the 'k' have the same sound ... sometimes. This adds a needless complication and it's a mistake kids frequently make but it's not an unreasonable one.
No need to get too linguistic about it but there is some intrigue because there is much resemblance between the two and this gives me a feeling of global community in the knowledge there is much more flow between nations and cultures than that which is more obvious such as Vietnamese restaurants, Chinatown, etc.
No need to shy away from linguistics altogether as one key of it is two primary languages through Europe: Romance and Germanic. From within those major classes, come all the languages within them at national levels. The intrigue in this is it shows me a large-scale flow which is more than border crossings back and forth but rather flows through entire countries.
We are the world is so much more than a simple platitude. You can see another stream in Greek flowing into Cyrillic for Russian since there is much similarity between the alphabets as with the pictographic Oriental languages.
Der, Die, Das are all words meaning the same as 'the' but they identify masculine, feminine, and neuter gender for the corresponding noun. For example, 'das Mädchen' is girl but has a gender of neuter. 'Die Frau' is a woman but now has a gender of feminine. Behold the perfect clarity.
The problem in learning German is not so much pounding vocabulary into my head because the biggest problem for me is getting it with the articles to ensure I use the correct one with whichever word comes to mind. I have not as yet discovered any logical way to do it.
My objective isn't to shred German, say it's too difficult, and run away. That makes no sense and I have a high interest in continuing to learn it. The only point is this part is really a bitch when I come from a base with a language in which that kind of specification in identifying the gender of the noun is not important.
On the other hand, English chucked the Umlaut and that really was a mistake. An Umlaut is used over ä, ö, ü and it looks peculiar at first but the purpose is pronunciation. When you are clear on the difference in sound between an 'a' without the Umlaut and the 'ä' which uses it, reading for sound is much easier.
Example: you may take a bath and at that time you bäthe. That is close to exactly what the Umlaut does in changing sound. You might ogle at a girl or wobble before an Ögre. You might take your supper and üse implements to eat it. All those are close matches to the sound change auf Deutsch.
There are some others which are immediately obvious as the German preference for 'k' rather than 'c' makes people scream NAZI when they see 'Amerika' but there's no offense because that's the actual spelling in German. In English, the 'c' and the 'k' have the same sound ... sometimes. This adds a needless complication and it's a mistake kids frequently make but it's not an unreasonable one.
No need to get too linguistic about it but there is some intrigue because there is much resemblance between the two and this gives me a feeling of global community in the knowledge there is much more flow between nations and cultures than that which is more obvious such as Vietnamese restaurants, Chinatown, etc.
No need to shy away from linguistics altogether as one key of it is two primary languages through Europe: Romance and Germanic. From within those major classes, come all the languages within them at national levels. The intrigue in this is it shows me a large-scale flow which is more than border crossings back and forth but rather flows through entire countries.
We are the world is so much more than a simple platitude. You can see another stream in Greek flowing into Cyrillic for Russian since there is much similarity between the alphabets as with the pictographic Oriental languages.
No comments:
Post a Comment