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“Ich stimme dem Maler, der die Meinung, dass Rot keine Farbe ist, vertritt, zu.”
This sentence can be rewritten in German just as in the English translation:
“Ich stimme dem Maler zu, der die Meinung vertritt, dass Rot keine Farbe ist.”
I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may. "While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)" The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules. Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd. Die Männlichkeit: Words endin…
Are they though?
> Ich habe einen Rat für dich.
> Ich habe ein Rad für dich.
This formulates something I thought of myself. It's a really good way to state it. The test is this: find people who are native speakers of a gendered language. Make up a dummy noun, or give them an import like "Internet". Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.
I always thought there was some unstated rule relating to the sounds, but as a non-linguist it's hard for me to dig any deeper.
About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in -chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral. Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t…
> All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral. Now this actually makes no sense.
Tip for remembering if a noun is male, female or neuter, visualize it as burning/being burnt/blowing up for coding female and freezing for coding male. Of course you can reverse the system if you prefer. Also in my experience, reading text eventually is the most efficient way to learn a language, including the grammatical pecularities. If you come upon the phrase "das kalte Bier", you know that it is "das Bier". At t…
I took German back in high school but I don't really remember anything about it. How can you read if you don't at least have an idea of what each word or phrase means? I'm a native born English speaker, and I occasionally have to look up English words if I have no idea what they're supposed to mean. It's one thing if it's an obvious random word for a gadget such as doohickey. I can't imagine reading a foreign languag…
Knowing those will usually get your comprehension to a surprisingly high level. You can start filling in the gaps from there.
I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may. "While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)" The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules. Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd. Die Männlichkeit: Words endin…
About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in -chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral. Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t…
> All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral. Now this actually makes no sense.
> Diminutive words are always neutral
And there is "die Magd", ancient expression for a young woman and the grammatical gender is female, as well as "der Bube", ancient expression (it is still used more often, though) for a young man and grammatical gender is male.
Of both these words you can create the diminished versions "Bübchen" and "Mädchen" which both follow the aforementioned rule and are neutral.
Commonly, in Germany we say "Jungen und Mädchen" if we refer to children; but which words are chosen to be used are rarely a sensible decision.
I like the analogies, but I'd like to nitpick, if I may. "While the grammar is mostly regular here, two things make this challenging: the nonsensical assignment of genders to nouns and (...)" The given examples for weird assignment of genders are inadequate because they are explained by common rules. Das Mädchen: Diminutive words are always neutral, and Mädchen is the diminutive of Magd. Die Männlichkeit: Words endin…
> the words Rat and Rad are pronounced identical, thanks to the Auslautverhärtung. Are they though? > Ich habe einen Rat für dich. > Ich habe ein Rad für dich.
I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment.
And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.