| Thanks for the advice, in general. >For the reason: To become fluent in German you have to know inside out how to conjugate a verb (there are some ugly verbs and tenses) and declinate a noun/adjective (in all three grammatical genders, singular and plural) in all tenses/cases, which is really ugly at the beginning for people who aren't used to it. The best way to learn this is in my opinion brute training until you can do it blindfolded. Like learning multiplication tables by repeating them out loud and/or writing them out, multiple (heh) times :) I guess that makes sense, particularly if there are not very systematic rules that define those things, i.e. you just have to memorize it (and is that what you mean by 'ugly' - that it does not follow logical rules by which one can figure out, say, verb conjugations of verb B after knowing it for verb A?) E.g. I realized a bit after starting the Duolingo course, that it was not clear (without knowing it already) when to use Der vs. Die vs. Das, and some other things like that; even Sie means both She and They (in different contexts) - at least it was not explained in the app, AFAIK - could be I missed some part of it and need to re-check. I think I need to now get some proper learning books for it. Duolingo can take you only so far, I guess. |
There are systematic rules for this, but you don't want to derive the result each time you want to express something. Compare it to applying a formalized multiplication algorithm each time you want to compute something from your multiplication table (up to 100) vs. memorizing the table. You have to understand the rules (just as you have to understand how multiplication works) for conjugating/declinating, but to apply them in practise you have to rote train them as often as you don't have to think about the rules anymore (because you really don't want hesitate for seconds what the correct, say, declination is).