Crazy German

I have Wem ist kalt? in my flash cards. I'm not sure that's correct, in fact, I think that's wrong. Pity I didn't also add citations to see where I collected that from?

A quick explanation of the issues: the nominative question is wer? - "who?" For the accusative case, it becomes wen, while for the dative case, one says wem ("whom"). This follows the normal pattern, der becomes den or dem.

An example that makes sense to me: "Wen ruft sie an?" - "who is she calling?" Consider "she calls a plumber" - "she" is the subject, "the plumber" is the object (direct object), so der Klempner becomes den Kempner, sie ruft einen Klempner an. Thus, wen ruft sie an.

As usual, it seems Swiss German is different. Of course. How else could it possibly be. :-P I happened to notice Wikipedia saying:

In general, the dative marks the indirect object of a verb, although in some instances the dative is used for the direct object of a verb pertaining directly to an act of giving something. In Russian, Hebrew, and Swiss German, for example, the verb "to call (by telephone)" is always followed by a noun in the dative.

In any case, surely for "who is cold?", "who" should be nominative? Ich bin kalt! Otherwise, and this is the explanation I've been going with, one actually asks "to whom is it cold?" - but then I would expect an answer in a form similar to "it is cold to her?" (What would that look like?)

When I find the answer I will drop a comment on this post, unless someone has already done so.

I have taken up using flash cards to drill vocabulary. I'm using a tool called Anki, available for many operating systems including Linux and Android. I am only using it on my laptop though, as I have not tried out uploading my deck. (By the sounds of it, syncing is somewhat fragile if you forget to close your deck.)

If there is interest, I will be happy to share more details on how I use it, how I've set up templates to make it easier to create cards for verbs and nouns. I share some detail below in any case. Generally I also type out my answers rather than just "think" them in my head, a useful discipline for me.

[Read more →]

(Please do correct my German if you see me making a mistake.)

Guten Tag! Ich heiße Hugo. Ich komme aus Südafrika, ich bin Südafrikaner. Ich wohne in Zürich. Ich spreche Afrikaans und Englisch, und lerne langsam Deutsch.

Welche Sprache sprechen Sie? Welche Nationalität haben Sie und woher kommen Sie?

At last, I'm starting to review everything we've learned, starting at Chapter 1 of Book 1. In the process I'm also collecting (on secret parts of this site) the words I've learned. And I note how clueless I still am about nouns' articles, time to drill drill drill. I'll have to write just a little bit more code before I'll be able to use it to help me with that.

[Read more →]

Verb conjugation is found in most European languages. English has simplified verb conjugation significantly, but it is still present. In particular, the infamous irregular verb to be: I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are (plural), they are. This verb is also particularly irregular in German.

"To be", infinitive, in German, is "sein", and its conjugations are as follows:

Ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind.

You can found pronunciations in wiktionary in the entry for sein, and too much information about conjugations on sein (Konjugation).

For regular verbs, English can be relatively simple. Third-person singular is typically the only odd one out, ending with an "s": I run, you run, we swim, they read... but he runs, she swims, it reads. German is more complicated, but conjugated verbs' endings generally follow a pattern. Consider the verbs to run, to swim and to read...

Verbs with ich tend to end with -e, du with -st, er/sie/es with -t. Verbs with ihr also end with -t, but lack the modifications of the vowels seen for singular cases for some verbs (e.g. laufen -> du läufst, lesen -> du liest).

German also has a formal second person (a formal "you") which is verbally identical to the 3rd person plural, but capitalised when written: Sie laufen, Sie schwimmen, Sie lesen. This case applies to both singular and plural.

In fact, our German instructor writes out his verb conjugation tables with ten lines, with some grouping: ich, [Sie, du], er, es, sie; wir, [Sie, ihr], sie. This way he includes the formal second-person singular and plural cases in the table. I've written about his er/es/sie ordering in the previous post, as er/es/sie corresponds to der/das/die. I'm sticking to der/die/das, and I'm combining them for verb tables since I won't often include nouns in the same table.

Good old Afrikaans has no verb conjugation. Ek is, jy is, hy/sy/dit is, ons is, julle is, hulle is. Gotta love it. Among European languages, it seems only Swedish is equally smart. ;) (Source: Grammatical conjugation on Wikipedia.)

Nouns are crazy in German. It's not enough to just know the word you're looking for, you also have to know its gender and how to pluralise it. (And from what I can tell, eventually, also its genitive form will need to be learned?)

German has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. (French, another crazy language, has only two genders.) The nominative articles for the three genders is der, die and das respectively.

A table is masculine, a lamp is feminine, and a bed is neuter: der Tisch, die Lampe and das Bett. Do the genders make sense? Sometimes. Der Sohn, die Tochter, das Kind. However, a testament to the arbitrariness of genders is that they aren't always the same in other languages: in French a table is feminine.

German nouns are always capitalised. If you see a German writing English with extraneous capitalisation of nouns, that would be why. Or more interestingly, if you see them writing english with too few capitals, it's because they're making an effort to not capitalise too many nouns. (In English, and Afrikaans and Dutch I believe, "proper nouns" are capitalised while the rest aren't.)

Another thing you'll need to learn for each noun is what its plural form looks like. Die Tische, die Lampen, die Betten. Some words have stranger plural forms. Der Stuhl, die Stühle. In the case of plural the article is die, irrespective of gender.

That's brushing the surface. It gets crazy when you start dealing with the other three cases. There are four cases, nominative (the plain form above), genitive (which I thankfully still know nothing about), dative and accusative. I'll get to dative and accusative later.

Articles should be learned as part of the word. By example, don't think of "chair" as Stuhl: a chair is der Stuhl.

Der/die/das oder der/das/die?

For all the German I've been exposed to until this year, I saw things organised masculine/feminine/neuter, der/die/das. However, the instructor we have now organizes things according to der/das/die. I asked him about his breaking of what I thought was convention. He insists "every book does it differently", this is just the way he chose. It so happens that every book I've come across thus far did der/die/das, as does Wiktionary, so I'll be redoing/reorganising the notes he gives us and the tables he writes on the board. The brain appreciates consistency...