I've often thought the only saving grace for those learning goddamn English as a second language is that they are spared all this gendered nouns nonsense (that is except for a few special cases).
Gendered nouns, both in French and German, have always been a problem for me. German came later but I recall at school that the beginning of each chapter of my French textbook had a list of nouns each preceded by its article and learning them was a pain. After school I'd sit on my bed bashing my head against the pages of the textbook whilst trying to learn these damn genders, they made no logical sense to me and rules for remembering them had so many exceptions that they were essentially useless. I hated learning them.
German was a whisker easier in that I was in German-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!
In my opinion, the only effective way to learn these genders is to be smothered in the language on a daily basis—this way, somehow, one learns them by a form of osmosis.
As already mentioned elsewhere,
Appendix D - The Awful German Language in Mark Twain's The Tramp Abroad is a quintessential summing up of the difficulties a native English speaker has in learning German. It's a brilliant summary, not only is it hilariously funny but also he gives some excellent examples from different aspects of the language such as separable verbs, gendered and compound nouns and those damn German adjectives.
It's a while since I've read it so I can't remember chapter and verse but I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the matter of German genered nouns read his bit on the 'sex' of fishwives and young girls. Appendix D also has some unforgettable comments on the length of German compound words—something to the effect that 'they stretch across the page like mountain ranges' and are long enough 'to have perspective.'
> German was a whisker easier in that I was in german-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!
But that's what makes gender more complex in German than Latin languages. It really breaks any level of competency you can have in German. You can write correctly subject verb agreement but put wrong declension and people will think you have no competency in the language.
I have spent way less time learning Spanish (~2.5 years) and it's still much better than my German (on and off for last 7 years). Every time I open my mouth to speak German my head spins around "oh what declension I might be missing". I speak Spanish without having any such thought. The only tricky part of Spanish is subjunctive which I ignore completely.
I've not learned Spanish but just about every native English speaker I've spoken to who has learned Spanish says that it's the easiest foreign language to learn.
Even with my very, very limited experience with Spanish I reckon that's likely true as I've occasionally figured out a phrase or two of the language without Google Translate.
BTW, I don't at all consider myself very proficient in German, I somehow manage to get by when I have to—and that lack of proficiency is for the very reasons you mention.
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Edit:
"But that's what makes gender more complex in German than Latin languages. It really breaks any level of competency you can have in German. You can write correctly subject verb agreement but put wrong declension and people will think you have no competency in the language."
Exactly. My way around this is to have native German speakers speak to me in English as so often their English is much better than my German (of course, doing that doesn't help improve my German but sometimes communications is easier). I am regularly surprised at the excellent quality of many German speakers many of whom have essentially native English fluency (it makes one feel humble given that many of them actually reside in their home countries and don't have the same exposure to English as if they they lived in the US). I've often thought that the complicated and more formal grammar of German must give them a boost when it comes to understanding the intrinsic grammatical structure of English but I've never really gotten to the crux of the matter.
An excellent example of a native German speaker who speaks impeccable and often quite idiomatic English is the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. It's worth watching her in action in these YouTube 'send-up' videos about English and language:
'How to speak English like Einstein':
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmy-N4AFNDM
'What's the difference between American and British English?':
If I could speak German as well as she speaks English I'd be mightily pleased.
However, this doesn't necessarily apply when Germans try to learn French. I know a number of Germans who speak excellent English but who truly struggle to learn French. Again, it's not clear to me why they find learning one language easy and the other very difficult.
Norwegian I believe is easiest because it follows English sentence structure closely. Knowing German and English makes Dutch easy to read but not pronounce.
Thanks for the link it is quite informative. With Spanish at 24 weeks and French at 30 it's probably what I'd expect given the comments of those who've studied Spanish. Similarity, German at 36 weeks is clearly more difficult to learn, and it bears out both my own experience and that of shankr.
Your comment about Norwegian is interesting. I've no knowledge of Norwegian but on more than one occasion I've been watching a subtitled Norwegian movie on TV only to be startled suddenly when I've understood a phrase or two (it's as if the movie had dropped into English for a second or two), clearly quite a number of the words are the same as in English, so too the language's structure.
Re Dutch, I've been in the Netherlands on many occasions and I've found the language has many similarities with German but there are many gotchas too. Many nouns are very similar but some common ones that one would expect to be the same as German are very different. As for pronunciation, that's something that I'd never really attempt (nor was it necessary as so many Dutch spoke excellent English).
Years ago, I had a Dutch girlfriend who came from The Hague. When she was living there she worked in a secretarial capacity for the Dutch Government. She spoke often about the great importance of using correct and very precise Dutch at important levels of government, here correct usage was much more important than the equivalent situation in the anglophone world (the use of correct Dutch is an important indicator of both one's education and status). Incidentally, she spoke impeccable English, so too her German.
My native language is Greek and it has grammatical genders. It's not a "problem" for native speakers because children soak nuanced details incredibly fast. You never hear kids have problems with it, only non native speakers, usually from the Anglosphere because the concept is absent from English thus unfamiliar.
The gender system in German is something Mark Twain poked fun at in his famous essay "The Awful German Language":
"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."
Anyway, clearer example: wall paint is a paint, not a wall.
It is always this grammatical structure in German. Consider the alternative: weighing the "weight" of the parts of a compound word to figure out the grammatical gender. Lots of rules and exceptions! As it is, there is one very simple rule with AFAIK no exceptions.
German is difficult for sure, but the gender of compound words is a bad example to prove that.
They keep saying: You should learn the gender of nouns in German by heart. If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German then it's for you!
I dunno. I love the German language and didn’t struggle too much with it. To be honest, the variety of accents is far harder.
Every language is pretty much equally difficult if you want to gain near native fluency (even Esperanto). If you are aiming for quick business level fluency, English and Mandarin are easy due to the abundance of resources. Generally, however, sticking with your native language’s family is going to be easiest. I personally think that most of the English speaker trouble with German is that it is at once both familiar and frustratingly foreign due to the Romanization of English after the Norman conquest, while Spanish or Urdu is just foreign. The speaker carries no assumptions with himself/herself into the learning process.
If you think about it, a trinary bit is much less information than another sound would be. It's really quite easy to remember, but english minds seem to exclude articles from making it into memory, since they are usually not necessary. Change your mindset to include the articles as part of the word.
There's a bunch of easy sound patterns that will make a German guess the right gender of a new word 99% of the time, like -er being masculine or -nis neuter. You can look them up, but it's much easier to form that intuition by learning vocab the right way.
I plan on adding new words and introducing levels as well.
Right now offering 35 words as for beginners it might get too much at once. With new levels complexity and number of words will increase.
About right/wrong answers: I don't want to feed wrong information to the brain. Idea is to allow users to make mistake and at the end only allow them to swipe in direction which is right.
But I will think about pros of your idea as well :)
This is awesome application. I know from the pain of learning german.
From what I saw application is just for mobile users.
And about right/worng point you are right that users should be allowed to only swipe in right direction. But you can give a notification to user when he/she tries to swipe in wrong direction, as when I first used the app I thought something is wrong with it.
Gendered nouns, both in French and German, have always been a problem for me. German came later but I recall at school that the beginning of each chapter of my French textbook had a list of nouns each preceded by its article and learning them was a pain. After school I'd sit on my bed bashing my head against the pages of the textbook whilst trying to learn these damn genders, they made no logical sense to me and rules for remembering them had so many exceptions that they were essentially useless. I hated learning them.
German was a whisker easier in that I was in German-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!
In my opinion, the only effective way to learn these genders is to be smothered in the language on a daily basis—this way, somehow, one learns them by a form of osmosis.
As already mentioned elsewhere, Appendix D - The Awful German Language in Mark Twain's The Tramp Abroad is a quintessential summing up of the difficulties a native English speaker has in learning German. It's a brilliant summary, not only is it hilariously funny but also he gives some excellent examples from different aspects of the language such as separable verbs, gendered and compound nouns and those damn German adjectives.
It's a while since I've read it so I can't remember chapter and verse but I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the matter of German genered nouns read his bit on the 'sex' of fishwives and young girls. Appendix D also has some unforgettable comments on the length of German compound words—something to the effect that 'they stretch across the page like mountain ranges' and are long enough 'to have perspective.'
It's a must-read.