Thoughts on learning German and German grammar...

This morning I decided to look up a couple of words I've noticed lately which I should know the German translation for; write them down in a notebook; and then refer to them later in hopes of finally remembering them.

But alas - it never seems to be that simple in German...

I think German grammar is absolutely crazy, and I'm not sure I will ever get it right. I know I can get to the point of speaking passable German, enough so that any German would understand me - but I'm afraid it will be with very poor grammar. Kind of like if your next door neighbor came over and said "Can I your rake borrowing make?"

There's a TON of reasons for this, but mainly I think it's because they have horribly complicated rules - which in some cases can only be learned by rote, where we have no complicated rules at all.

And I know that people learning English face the same challenges. For example, my husband is Dutch, and he has no problem conjugating the irregular verb "think" into "thought" when he speaks, but he can never remember that "teach" is irregular and ends up saying "teached." Which, quite frankly I can understand, because learning irregular verbs either requires learning the language as a child, or memorizing a huge, long list by rote - and THEN trying to remember to apply it!

BUT - having said that, I think that German still goes over the top... Not only do they have a different word order which is very hard to adapt to as an English speaker, but then they have all these different cases which apply to verbs, nouns, articles AND prepositions. The tenses can be caused simply by irregularity OR by usage. And they send all of the normal or simple rules reeling.

Now I may sound like a grammar geek here, but I promise, I'm not. I do fine with the English language, but then when it comes down to applying it all to another language it gets all cloudy. If I could simply graph a sentence quickly in my head, AND remember all the rules right before I speak it - I'd be fine, but therein lies the problem...

So here's an example of what I ran up against this morning when I tried to look up a couple simple translations...

1. "May we sit here?"

I knew that Germans don't really have a word for "May?" as we use it in English. But I wasn't sure if it should be translated to "konnen" (can) or "durfen" (allow). But when looking it up, I noticed that the dictionary said that when combined with "setzen" (sit) it should be reflexive. And what is reflexive you ask?

Reflexive verbs are verbs which reflect the action back onto the subject. And they're kind of like irregular verbs, in that - you just kind of have to know which ones they are. So, if you are asking if you can sit somewhere, the action of sitting reflects back to you. Kind of like "Can I sit here myself?" But I'm not always sure how to distinguish those verbs from non-reflexive verbs, like - why isn't it, "I ran there by myself?" What's the difference between run and sit? Who knows...

So anyway, the translation for "May we sit here?" is...
"Konnen wir uns hier sitzen?" or "Can we ourselves here sit?" or more understandably "Can we seat ourselves here?"

but again the challenge is that you just have to know which verbs need the extra pronoun. No way to do that but by rote...



The other thing I looked up was...

2. "instead of..."

again, not so simple. When I looked it up the other day, I read - "statt" and though that was that. But when I looked it up again today, I noticed an annotation in the dictionary which indicated that it was a genitive preposition (there are also genitive nouns and articles to make things even more complicated...)

and that simply means that, whatever the object of the preposition is, will change form (along with its article!) - so either an "s" or an "es" is added to the end of the "instead of" object. Whether you add an "s" or "es" has completely to do with what the normal noun ending is, but that comes rather easily, because it just aids pronunciation...

so if you say "the car" it is "der Wagen"

but when it is "instead of the car" it is "statt des Wagens"

note that both the article (der to des) and the noun (Wagen to Wagens) ending changed. AND to top it off - the gender of every article will have a new ending which is different depending on what gender it is!

So "der" becomes "des," "die" becomes "der," and "das" becomes "des"

unless of course the articles are accusative or dative, in which case, they each become something totally different... you remember what the accusative and dative cases are, don't you? THEN try remembering which nouns are feminine, masculine or neutral on top of all that!

Make sense? Me neither.

Baffled? Yeah, me, too.

So I guess I've just resigned myself to sounding like the neighbor asking "Can I your rake borrowing make?"