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Why? WHY?
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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For me it was der, das, and die
I don't care what that stupid green owl thinks, I'm not gonna learn three different words for "the"
The right order is: der, die, das :p
trällert Wieso? Weshalb? Warum?
Wait until you hear about dem, den, des, dessen, deren, denen
Wait until I don't, catch me learning Español instead
You dropped this ñ
I am still learning
It's not that hard the article corresponds to the gender of the noune like "der Mann" for male, "die Frau" for female or "das Brot" for neutral. Oh and there are 500 exceptions to that rule, because why should natural be easy and follow a comprehensive set of rules.
Most confused words: "der Bus" (the bus, clearly male...) and "das Mädchen"(the girl, because girls are definitely not female...)
Das Mädchen is actually easy as it is a diminuitive which are always neutral (granted, no one uses the root word anymore so that may be hard to identify in this case).
Outside of rare cases like that there are no actual rules, only things that can help guess, and anyone saying otherwise is simply wrong.
Wait until day 2 of German class.
You mean like "he, she, it"? ;)
No, because those are pronouns. Why is an apple male while a banana is female? Why is maiden neuter?
That one's easy, actually. "Mädchen" is the diminutive form of "Magd", signified by the -chen suffix. Diminutive form is always neuter.
Because it "sounds better" and makes sense when it's spoken and written.
Many languages have this, including my own. I do understand the frustration though for people who aren't used to it.
What's the logic behind these gender things? How to make sense out of it?
This is called grammatical gender. The articles as redundant information are quite useful when there is noise around. Even if you catch parts of the article and the noun, you can eliminate a bunch of similar sounding words due to the partial information (eg in this thread about See being lake or sea based on gender)
This is found in several sibling languages of German and the evidence for it is quite strong for PIE (4.5k-2.5k BC). It could have started with just slight changes (noun inflections) to signify information for clarification or redundancy which then got formalized over time due to natural language development.
Even old English had grammatical gender, and the gender neutral ness is a recent development (as compared to evidence of grammatical gender). We have holdover words from Old English where we don't see the absurdity because of the loss of gender during the Middle English (probably due to incorporation of different dialects in cities like London and gender less appearing novel and thus cool to speak), eg: wife and woman have similar but differently gendered roots (wif (neuter) and wifmann))
Thank you. So it has some uses Think it's a quirk from latin or something.
Tldr is that when you hear/read just the noun or verb itself you can already infer a lot of information about who is doing the act and what is the act being done to.
For more informaion feel free to read about conjugation and declination.
Yes, it gets pretty complex.
Sure, but when I'm looking at a lady, I know it's she, when I'm looking at a man I know it's he, and when I'm looking at an apple I know it's it. No reason why apple, flower, and water should all have different thes