Mysteries of the German language

First, a disclaimer: I have been learning German for five months, and I really have no idea what I'm talking about.


I thought you'd perhaps like to learn some German on my semi-educational blog. And also, perhaps you're interested in finding out why German is considered "difficult", or about the nature of the sort-of-weird grammar:

First of all, German has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The coresponding definitive articles are der, die, and das. For example: Der Hund, die Frau, and das Haus. (In case you don't notice, ALL nouns are capitalized in German.) But the definitive articles don't always stay that way, because German also has cases (like Latin): nominative, genitive, dative, and accusitive. This makes it difficult (for me personally) to remember which nouns are which gender, as opposed to in French, in which I was always semi-able to associate articles with words, and thus remember them pretty well. But in German, I might first encounter a word in the dative case, and then later be unable to remember if it coresponds with der or das, which are both the same word in the dative case.

So, first of all, nominitive. The subject of the sentence is always in nominitive. For example: Der Mann rennt. (The mann is running.)

The object of the sentence is usually in accustive. Some verbs take dative, but those are rare. In the accusitive case, der changes to den, and die and das stay the same. Der Mann kauft den Apfel. (The man buys the apple.) The apple is also masculine, so its article changes to den.

Genetive is possesive. I'm not going into it right now, because I actually never learned the genetive. I always get away with saying "the house of" somebody or sticking an s onto someone's name.

Once you get into prepositions, it gets trickier. Some of them take accusitive and some dative, many of them take both, depending on the context. Ich gehe in die Schule. (I'm going to school.) The preposition in takes, in this case, accusitive -- thus, the die stays the same. But if you say "Bleib in der Schule!" -- stay in school! -- the die changes to der, because it takes the dative case in this example. In dative, der and das change to dem, and die changes to der. (Ich fahre mit dem Bus -- I'm going by bus.)


But wait! The fun's not over yet! Now, time for some crazy verbs! There are times when your lovely verb (mitgehen, to go with, in this case) spits in half, and the first half drops to the end of the sentence. When I first starting learning German back on Exchange Street in Portland, ME, this freaked me out. An example: Ich gehe mit. I'm going with (I'm coming too, a little more smoothly put.)

And then, totally simply, the infitive always drops to the end of the sentence. For example: Der Hund muss draußen bleiben. The dog has to stay outside. In english, it literally translates to "the dog has to outside stay," because stay, bleiben, the infitive, always ends the sentence. This was hard for me at first, because I can't make up my sentence as I go along, the way I'm used to -- and if you stick a prepositional phrase in there, it too must come before the verb! I have to go into the city in a couple of minutes! Ich muss in ein paar Minuten in die Stadt gehen! Gehen is at the VERY end.

Another thing that I find difficult are words like that, because, and if, because they do something kind of weird. Examples: Der Hund muss draußen bleiben, weil er zu laut ist. The dog has to stay outside, because he's too loud. After weil, because, the verb (auxilary! not the infitive!) drops to the end!! So the normal sentence would be: Er ist zu laut. He's too loud. And with because: Weil er zu laut ist. The ist drops to the end.