As an English speaker learning German, I face endless confusion and frustration with many of the short question words that are “False Friends”
Such as:
Wer (where) - Actually means who.
Wo (Who) - Actually means where.
Wie (We) - Actually means how.
Was (was) - Actually means what.
Also (also) - Actually means so.
Will (will) - Actually means to want.
And the completely arbitrary gender assignments!
For example.
The year is: Das Jahr, a neuter word.
The month is: Der Monat, a masculine word.
And the week is: Die Woche, a feminine word.
And then there’s directly counter-intuitive examples of words that seem like they Should be a gender other than what they are, such as:
The little girl - Das Mädchen (Neuter, not feminine)
Breasts - Der Busen (Masculine! Boobs is masculine!)
Person - Die Person (Feminine! Why isn’t this word neuter?!"
Dutch (probably applicable for a bunch of Germanic languages), the way a word at the end can modify the whole meaning of the sentence as I’ve already mentally parsed it.
I need a book Ik heb een boek nodig
I have a book need
So my brain has got to ‘boek’ and therefore already finished that part of the sentence as ‘I have a book’, only to have a new word thrown in. It feels like a kid saying “I like you… NOT”.
And time… Ugh… Half past seven = Half acht (eight) Twenty five past one = Vijf voor half twee (five before half two).
On the other hand, dutch swear words? Sublime. Gezellig? Amazing word. Swaffelen? Chef’s kiss.
Regarding the times:
Took ages until I was somewhat sure on how to use that am/pm thing in English. 🙃At least in the UK we just use the 24 hour clock, am/pm isn’t used nearly as much
Interesting, didn’t know that.
I learned British English at school, yet all the learning materials focused on using the am/pm style.
Perhaps because we already know the 24h format well in Germany, as it is also routinely used here.I guess in speech we tend to say something like 'eight thirty" rather than “twenty thirty” but certainly in witten communication its always 24 hour.
This is how it works in German as well. 16 o’clock is called “um 4” in a typical conversational situation.
I know some Dutch. God verdomme just beats any other swear word ever. So satisfying
My favourites (especially as a microbiologist) are the swearing ilnesses. Krijgt tyfus. Kanker op. Teringlijer etc ect.
Woaw, this sounds awesome! Ik moet mijn nederlands verbetern!
Could you tell me what time it is?
Could you tell me what time the train leaves?
Similar to Dutch in the sense that the important verb comes at the end.
There’s other stuff hinting about what to expect in the end of the sentence: Because there is the question word “Could?”, you know you need to wait until the needed verb arrives. You will of course already encounter a verb at “tell”, but it’s clear that something more is still to come.
In Dutch and German (but not in Scandinavian languages!) it works in a much less clear way: “I have a book” is a complete sentence. There’s nothing making it clear that there must be still more words coming. In your English phrase the sentence feels incomplete if you leave out the last word. But in Dutch they say “I have a book needed” when they want to say “I need a book”. A foreigner hears “I have a book” and then gets surprised by the “needed” still coming up. In English you get a clear warning that something is missing. In Dutch you don’t. You kind of don’t, that is.
Because actually you do: In spoken Dutch you will eventually learn to recognize the intonation pattern that tells whether the sentence is at its end or not. There is a certain melody and stress pattern that you can hear going on, and at the point of “I have a book” the sound of the phrase sounds such that your brain expects more to be coming up. And in written text your brain sees that the sentence still continues. So, in the end this is a beginner level problem. A person living in the Netherlands will quickly learn to subconsciously recognize the intonation and stress patterns. At least that’s what happened to me when I moved to Germany where they have the same “problem”.
Yeah, it’s the same in German. You don’t say Seven-thirty. You say Half-eight. A bit tricky. And german is the same qith sentence structure. The second verb always comes at the end of the sentence. Makes it so you literally can’t know the purpose of the sentence until you hear the whole thing. Which, is kinda ingenious actually. Means you can’t interrupt people.
As a German I have to agree: Yes, the whole gender system of the language is nuts.
And false friends work in both ways.
My favorite:
bekommen - to get
become - werden“I become a sausage!”
As a German, do you have a difficult time remembering the genders of new words? Or does it come naturally?
I am perhaps too old to answer that question, as I don’t stumble upon new words often enough any more.
Most of the new ones for me are imported terms, like “Computer” or “Internet”.
These are mostly gendered based on the translation of the part that defines them, e.g. “the net” - “das Netz”, so it is somewhat logical.There are some unclear or disputed ones, though. E.g. “Interface” is “das”, but “API” (from application programming interface) often is “die”, because “the interface” translates to “die Schnittstelle”.
Also, there are some regional differences.
E.g. “Butter” is female (“die”) in many parts of Germany, but in some it is male “der”.To sum up: It is complicated.
The recommended way for remembering words’ genders is to always attach an adjective in front of a word when learning it.
Do not try to learn “die Nacht”.
Learn “stille Nacht”, which means “a quiet night”.
The -e in the word “stille” is there because the word is feminine. When you learn “stille Nacht”, you can automatically recognize it must be “die Nacht”.
Similarly: “Blödes Auto” means “Stupid car”. the ending -es means it’s das Auto.
And “Blöder Mann” means “stupid man”. -er, because it’s der Mann.Same works in other languages as well. Buen viño = Good wine. Therefore: El viño. Persona rapida = A fast person. -a means it’s la persona.
Because a native speaker of German often hears adjectives in combination with words when they learn them, they automatically constantly receive the necessary information on the words’ genders.
And you have to relearn the whole genders, if you start learning romance languages.
German, french, Italian:
Die Sonne (f), le soleil, il sole (m).
der Mond (m), la lune, la luna (f).
And lots more like that.
Yep. I know German quite well, but French and Italian better. My brain just picks a random gender every time. Usually not even consistent
That seems like the best option imo. Just decide on the spot which gender you want the word to be and go with it! I really don’t think it matters if my refrigerator is a man or woman lol.
In German there are some rules to this:
- All non-living things that end with -e are always feminine. Coffee ends in and -e in German, but is a plant, and therefore living, so that’s why the rule doesn’t apply. But otherwise it applies fully. (Except that “the end” is “das Ende”, and building is “das Gebäude”. But still, the exceptions number in one or two. Otherwise all non living words ending with -e are feminine. “Die Straße” for a street. “Die Dose” for a can.
- Everything with -chen is always neutral. This rule is so stupidly strong that even the word for “girl”, “mädchen” is not feminine. Girls are not female in German because they end with -chen, think about that!
There are other rules as well, but these two are the easiest ones.
Plus there’s the “don’t learn just ‘das Mädchen’. Learn ‘kleines Mädchen’” that I mentioned in another comment above!
I had this question. I’m learning Welsh from English. So learning a language with genders from one without. Then met some who learnt Welsh from German. Two gendered languages. Which do you think is harder - having to learn about genders and try to incorporate a new concept or having. to learn genders for words that may or may not match your ‘expectations’ and ‘logic’ from your L1
I personally don’t think of them as genders and instead go by what feels right for the individual word. Swedish technically has two grammatical genders, but no one thinks of them that way; there are just en-words and ett-words. So for me “el mar” and “la mer” aren’t confusing because the “the” is part of the word, and the word sounds wrong if you change it.
I’ve only learned Germanic and Romance languages before, so learning Finnish feels like repeatedly running against a wall, hoping the wall will give up.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
Learning something completely new is humbling. I started learning Finnish for the grammar but have spent so much time on vocabulary it’s annoying. I hadn’t realized just how many roots indo-european languages share that Finnish doesn’t.
Any recommendations for learning resources especially for grammar? I’m currently in s low motivation phase for learning Finnish, but I should get started again.
I’m currently using duolingo which is usually good enough but kinda sucks in this case. There was an app mentioned here that had Finnish as one of its first languages and could be good but sadly I didn’t save it. If anyone remembers it please do say.
Yeah, I’ve been done with the Duolingo course for a while now.
As for the other app, you might be talking about Lingonaut. They’ll have Finnish from the start. The iOS version is in beta and they just started development of the Android version.
Or you are talking about Anki, I’ve made a super deck with all the Finnish courses and removed the duplicates, but I lack the motivation to get started again.Yeah Lingonaut might be it, it was something new. If you are on a good level you could try some content outside of lessons. There is [email protected] here where I can’t understand anything yet but maybe you’ll have more luck.
Duolingo had extremely good grammar lectures for many languages, hidden under a “hints” button underneath each learning node. And then Duolingo went and deleted all of that information, making the “hints” button essentially useless and nullifying hundreds of hours of work volunteers had put into writing the grammar lectures there! Finnish is one of the languages where the volunteer crew had made a seriously big effort writing good quality grammar lectures in the “hints” sections. And then one day: *poof*!
A solution I have found useful with various languages has been figuring out what are the reasons some stuff is done in a very unusual manner. There’s basically always something such a rule allows you to take shortcuts at in some whole other language situation. When you notice that the very weird structure is not used in some situation, you get much more precision in understanding what that means. All languages have things that are ambiguous because the grammar leaves things unsaid. “We are ugly” doesn’t really tell whether you, trolske, are ugly or if it’s only me and a couple other people who are. But there languages where you have a different word for “we” depending on whether it also includes the people being talked to, or not. (Finnish is not one of those languages, though :( )
That’s a rule that is a bit annoying to learn because instead of “I, you, she, we, youse, they” you need to learn “I, you she, we, wo, youse, they”. One extra word. But damn it’s satisfying when you hear “we are ugly” said in that language and know precisely that you are not included! Or “Wo are ugly”, meaning that yes, “wo are indeed ugly, including you.”When you find out why the complexity exists, your brain stops rebelling against the rule and you will learn what needs to be learned!
What are the most frustrating things about Finnish? I might be able to help you a bit, maybe? :)
As a polyglot person I’ve to say that his is the shit which makes me the most mad about the transgenders issue. Our languages evolved independently defining differently the gender of words based on how the different people “felt” about them. If we can accept that these “feelings” are valid and we teach them to students learning a new language why cannot we accept that a person feeling about its gender are valid as well? Unlogical shit, let me tell you
IDK if this is true scientifically. But when I learned french articles (la/le) I tried to imagine some sterotypical French guy and I easily could remember what he likes (everything with ‘la’) and dislikes (everything with ‘le’) but sometimes it was arbitrary.
I think Japanese writing is really stupid. Any given character has many potential pronunciations, and they for some reason tacked on multiple syllabaries instead of just doing their own thing like the Koreans did.
Some of their printed media has both kanji and also a furigana pronunciation key so that younger people can read it, which makes me ask why they don’t just use one system that everyone can read.
Typing is a nightmare because you type what you’re saying phonetically, but then you have to select which kanji you want for the correct meaning, and you also have to switch between which version of the syllabary you want. It’s too many extra steps.
Chinese is similar, but I forgive them because hanzi is their own historical system instead of a messy version of someone else’s, and I feel like the pronunciations and meanings are much more consistent. I can appreciate the historical value and artistry of it in a way I just can’t with Japanese kanji.
Initially I hated it for how very much it was. Over time, I’ve come around on the multiple scripts, the beauty of Kanji, the fun of writing them, the way it breaks up words, the way they convey ideas at a glance.
But the inconsistent pronunciations will always throw me. If even just at least the onyomi readings were always the same, it would make life so much easier.
Breasts - Der Busen (Masculine! Boobs is masculine!)
Die Brust (some parents give milk from it)
!= Der Busen (sometimes the full upper torso front, the chest)
!= Das Euter (breast of milk giving animals)I think each language has some trait that feels arbitrary, hard to learn. I think the purpose is, to be able to figure out foreigners who didn’t “drink the language from mother’s breast”. I believe, historically/evolutionary, language speakers had to quickly sort out infiltrated traitors.
- how to speak written words in English
- articles among central European languages like French, German
- cases among eastern European languages
- when to say “sk” like “sh” in Swedish
- measure words in Mandarin
Overall, false friends are everywhere because our brain works in associations.
I stoppod learnong Oroboc bocauso of ots wrotong sostom: On tho caso of short voweols they onlo pot o mark sayong “o short vowol comos hero”, bot don’t bothor tollong whoch vowol ot octuallo os!
Or the same without garbling the writing the way the Arabic script does:
I stopped learning Arabic because of its writing system: In the case of short vowels they only put a mark saying “a short vowel comes here”, but don’t bother telling which vowel it actually is!I know it’s something you can get around because the Arabic grammar does tell what is the only possible vowel in that place, once you know the language very well. But the requirement that I need to know the language very well in order to be able to start reading it, and thus, start learning it, was too much for me. Not an impossible thing, but damn difficult.
And then that of course is exacerbated in non-Semitic languages using the Arabic script, such as Farsi/Dari and Urdu, all of which are Indo-European languages. While in Arabic you can figure out which vowel is meant once you know the grammar very well, in Urdu and Dari that’s as clear as in English. The writing system of Urdu and Dari/Farsi is really as mad as what I wrote as the first line for this comment!
Luckily, Dari/Farsi has a third name: Tadjik. And Tadjik is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, meaning that you do have the full information about vowels visible. So, learn Tadjik well enough and you can then move on to Dari and further to Farsi. Similarly, Urdu is just Hindi with any words even remotely related to religion swapped for other ones. So, one can always learn Hindi, which does show all vowels in a (largely) sensible manner and then move from Hindi to Urdu with relative ease.But yeah, directly learning a language written with Arabic or Hebrew script is something I won’t be trying. Somali is distantly related to Arabic and written with Latin script, so that’s something I’m trying to learn, hoping it will give me enough of starting boost with Arabic once I understand Somali.
Okay, that was about scripts being annoying enough to move me to learning other languages that are otherwise as useful for my life situation…
Then there’s a thing that really feels almost like an unsurmountable obstacle: Pronunciation systems that have too little differences making very big differences in meaning. All examples of these known to me are tonal languages. There are tonal languages that are just fine. Mandarin, the language spoken in Beijing, has four tones: Rising, falling, stable and wonky. In laymans terms: The tone is a melody. A word with a rising tone begins from a middle-level musical note and ends at a high musical note. A word with a falling tone begins with a high note and ends with a low note. And then there’s the tone where the note remains constant throughout the word. And the one that begins in the middle, goes far down and then returns to the middle for the end of the word. For example the word “ba” means either “eight”, “a father”, “to pull” or “a handle” depending on which of the four melody patterns (“tones”) you use when pronouncing the word. But the four tones are so distinct that I learned them in less than a day when I was hitchhiking in China. (I did have a book to help me, of course!) You can pronounce the four variants of “ba” by yourself right now when reading this, and you will probably get them right on the first try. Not all that bad!
But then there are languages such as Cantonese (the language spoken in Shanghai and Hong Kong) and Igbo (a language spoken in parts of Nigeria). Cantonese has whopping 16 tones. In Mandarin you need to only recognize whether the tone is rising or falling or wonky or flat. That’s easy to hear. But when you have two different tones that are otherwise clones of each other but differ by one beginning at a tiny bit higher note than the other? Get’s too crazy for me!
And in Igbo the tonal system is extremely clear as for itself: Each syllable either has a rising or falling tone, and that’s its. But they are falling or rising such miniscule amounts that I cannot hear them at all! The four ways of saying “aqwa”: áqwá, áqwà, àqwà and àqwá sound like just one and the same word for me, no matter how carefully I listen. I would probably learn to hear the difference if I really put an effort into it… But damn, there are about 7000 other languages to learn out there. I’ll just go for one where such a tiny tiny difference in pronunciation doesn’t completely explode the meaning of the whole fucking sentence! Igbo is an endangered language with 50 million speakers. It feels a bit crazy that a language with as many speakers as the combined populations of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands and Belgium can be endangered when none of those eight are. But when your language is as difficult to learn as a second language as Igbo is, I understand that people are likely to choose whatever other language is available when they need to communicate across language barriers.
