Irritating rules about other languages (light hearted) when learning them/using them

[profpoopsnagle]

I have been learning German for a few months, I always thought that I was rubbish at learning languages but I am enjoying it more than I did at school.

The whole thing of masculine/feminine and neuter nouns is a minefield. You have to basically learn the Der/Die/Das with everything- there are sometimes clues but it's all a bit random.

But it's the case system does my head in.
I love the idea behind the logic, that in itself is very German and organised in a sentence. So that you can tell if an object is the subject or having an action applied to it. But... and this is the but, it only applies to the masculine nouns. So Der goes to Den, but Die stays as Die and Das stays as Das.

So, on the one hand, the Germans are saying this is really important and it means you can have 'fun' with the word order (although you actually can't that much because they have strict rules about that too), but it can't be that important if the majority of the nouns don't change.

And then, when you learn the dative (third case), the Der changes to a Dem, but the Die changes to a Der. Re-using a word! Why couldn't they have a Dez, or a Deg- something to differentiate it from the masculine?

I'm sure there are nuances with English for learners too- I'd like to hear them. What other rules in other languages make you completely baffled?

@RampantIvy Think it's still in use in ecclesiastical services. Odd really, since the deity is addressed in the familiar form.

How about using the plural for gender neutrality ?

As a native speaker, you don’t even have to think about the things that foreign learners often find so difficult.

English doesn’t have noun genders (except that a ship is traditionally a she) and there’s hardly any conjugation of verbs, but as I soon found out when I started teaching EFL, other things can really flummox new learners.

Question tags, for one. ‘You went shopping today, didn’t you?’

‘She’s off sick today, isn’t she?’

‘It was really hot today, wasn’t it?’
They change according to the tense and subject. Whereas in e.g. French it’s just ‘n’est-ce pas?’ and in German ‘nicht wahr?’ for everything, and there’s an equivalent in Greek, and I dare say in Spanish and Italian, too. So much simpler!

Just one example, but I could quote several others.

Polish plural of nouns. There's a male, female and neuter form as per usual, but then there's an entirely separate form just for male persons which however doesn't apply to the word for "peasant". Go figure.

Ils is the plural form to they in French whether the group consists of only boys or mixed boys and girls. 50 girls and 1 boy and you’d still have to say ils.
WRT what they use for gender neutral eg Sam Smith, I have no idea.

Japanese. Not one different alphabet, not two, but THREE, depending on whether the word is foreign or not and just what they feel like.

Also, counters. The system in Japanese (which has no plurals) is that you say the noun, and then the number. So, say 'cats, two of them'.
EXCEPT there are more than forty, yes forty, different words for the 'of them' bit, depending on what they are. There are different words for animals that are bigger than dogs, and animals that are smaller than dogs. There are different counters for people, and flat things (think pieces of paper and slices of toast), for buildings and for ideas. My favourite one is for shoes and socks, oh and dried squid.

I have been learning this for 153 days on Duolingo and I still can say almost nothing.

日本語

This is a test to see if I can type Japanese on Mumsnet. It says Japanese

Gender neutral French is seemingly impossible without a fairly radical overhaul of the rules. There are a variety of pronouns in use although not widely - iel, ille, ol, al, ul, yul and probably others I've not yet seen or heard but you're still stuck with having to pick a gender for adjectives. It's a bit shit.

I like French sometimes (good thing given I moved here) but required genders in language never did make sense to me. Yes, words to denote sex or gender if appropriate but not absolutely required.

I just knew this was going to be about German 🤣

@FinallyHere, I use that diagram a lot, it's very helpful.

We have some occupations as gendered words, but I think they are dying out, e.g. firefighter. How do gendered languages categorise new nouns, is there a preference for neutral? What if the language does not have neutral? And yes, cat is feminine in German, but masculine in French. And yes, it will be interesting to see how more gendered languages evolve to a more gender neutral position.

I hadn't though about the English question tags! They act almost as an accusation, don't they? where you are asking someone to confirm a positive but with a negative slant.

The Japanese counters is fascinating, especially the bespoke one for flat things! I have always thought the English word several (which looks like seven) but means 3-4 must be baffling.

If anyone can recommend a book on this subject, with a variety of languages that would be brill.

@RampantIvy, my elderly Yorkshire student landlady used to use thee and thou to her budgie, often in the context of, ‘What’s tha doing, tha little booger?’ when he was enjoying himself knocking over all the little ornaments on her mantelpiece.

She loved him dearly though.

Admittedly this was a few decades ago now!

Norwegian has an interesting twist on noen genders. You start with masculine, feminine and neuter. So far so good. But you can optionally use "common gender" where feminine nouns use the masculine form but neuter nouns remain neuter....

@profpoofsnagel, I could never fathom out why the German for girl, Madchen (pls imagine the umlaut), is neuter.

One useful thing I remember from German lessons is that everything in the dative plural ends in N.

And another - nouns that end in -heit, -keit, -schaft or -ung, are feminine.

Might add that many decades later I still occasionally have a nightmare that I have a German Lit (A level) exam coming up, and not only have I not only not read any of the books, I don’t even know what they are.

I’m not sure why, since I got a C, which was quite respectable back in the Very Olden Days.

I also took French and Russian A level and never have nightmares about those.

A trick I learnt when doing Spanish helps with French nouns. If the noun ends in "-o" in Spanish it's usually masculine in French, while "-a", "-z" or "-dad" means it's feminine: "la paz" (peace) = "la paix".

Wish there was an equivalent rule for German nouns though.

As for Japanese, they even conjugate adjectives. So you can have a "black cat", which is present tense. If you put "black" into the past tense you get a "cat that was black".

[quote GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER]**@RampantIvy, my elderly Yorkshire student landlady used to use thee and thou to her budgie, often in the context of, ‘What’s tha doing, tha little booger?’ when he was enjoying himself knocking over all the little ornaments on her mantelpiece.

She loved him dearly though.

Admittedly this was a few decades ago now![/quote]
That's where the term dee dar comes from. Barnsley folk call Sheffield folk dee dars

I wonder how the trans community feels about voisine, cousine etc?

French now has inclusive writing to make women more visible in language so you would write étudiant.e.s not étudiants. Iel is a new neutral pronoun.

@KeflavikAirport I noticed that and I find it very ugly and unwieldy

@BlackLambAndGreyFalcon

Russian verbs of motion! You can't just "go" somewhere. The word depends on whether you walk, run, drive, fly etc to get to where you are going.

Not to mention the 2 infinitives for every verb, IIRC perfective and imperfective….

Nothing much to add, I've forgotten most of the French and German I took at A level, but loving this conversation! Especially the Russian verbs of motion.

This is the one!

Irish has inflected propositions, words have both initial and terminal mutations depending on their role in a sentence, nouns are inflected for emphasis as well as number and sex. It’s a brilliant language.

[quote GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER]**@profpoofsnagel, I could never fathom out why the German for girl, Madchen (pls imagine the umlaut), is neuter.

One useful thing I remember from German lessons is that everything in the dative plural ends in N.

And another - nouns that end in -heit, -keit, -schaft or -ung, are feminine.

Might add that many decades later I still occasionally have a nightmare that I have a German Lit (A level) exam coming up, and not only have I not only not read any of the books, I don’t even know what they are.

I’m not sure why, since I got a C, which was quite respectable back in the Very Olden Days.

I also took French and Russian A level and never have nightmares about those.[/quote]
Ooh I know this one! ‘Mädchen’ is neuter because of the suffix ‘chen’ - it’s a diminutive, ‘Magd’ means maid, so Mädchen means ‘little maid’ . I find the gender rules both fascinating and confusing- sometimes there’s no logic at all! I speak German, French and Spanish and I know this is the area I find trickiest, that and German cases!