How many words are there for “the” in German? And I need to learn about parts of speech and verb tenses to get it right? And I have to know the “gender” of every fucking noun in the language to have even a chance of getting it right? That’s literally just for the word “the”.
The thing with cases for nouns in German is that after you surpassed the first hurdle in understanding them, it just makes so much sense.
If you place languages on a spectrum from syntactical to context based, you find Latin basically on the far side of syntactical. Almost everything regarding relations of different parts of the sentence can be cleared up by suffixes, whole subordinate clauses are packed into 2 words without any comma.
English on the other hand is very much dependent on context. The word order is paramount, there are like 30 tenses which are not concerned with time, but relation to other actions or dozens of case-by-case rules and meaning is often inferred. But the upside is that it’s studiply easy to reach a level where you can hold a normal conversation on the streets, especially when you already speak a Roman language. It’s just very inefficient and far less unambiguous.
While German is not as syntactical as Latin, it’s much closer to it’s roots.
Gendered nouns should be a thing of the past and I see my prescriptivism leaving my soul every time I talk about them.
How many words are there for “the” in German? And I need to learn about parts of speech and verb tenses to get it right? And I have to know the “gender” of every fucking noun in the language to have even a chance of getting it right? That’s literally just for the word “the”.
Yeah, English isn’t all that bad.
The thing with cases for nouns in German is that after you surpassed the first hurdle in understanding them, it just makes so much sense. If you place languages on a spectrum from syntactical to context based, you find Latin basically on the far side of syntactical. Almost everything regarding relations of different parts of the sentence can be cleared up by suffixes, whole subordinate clauses are packed into 2 words without any comma. English on the other hand is very much dependent on context. The word order is paramount, there are like 30 tenses which are not concerned with time, but relation to other actions or dozens of case-by-case rules and meaning is often inferred. But the upside is that it’s studiply easy to reach a level where you can hold a normal conversation on the streets, especially when you already speak a Roman language. It’s just very inefficient and far less unambiguous. While German is not as syntactical as Latin, it’s much closer to it’s roots. Gendered nouns should be a thing of the past and I see my prescriptivism leaving my soul every time I talk about them.