I'm at the point of learning German that it's starting to get interesting.
One thing is that when you begin a sentence, to get the grammar correct sometimes you need to know what comes at the end of the sentence, along with understanding the context in which nouns are used.
For example "the blue dog". In German if you said "I pat the blue dog" it would actually change to something like "I pat then bluen dog", whereas "I am the blue dog" wouldn't have the "-n" endings on the word "the" and "blue".
Once you change the word "dog" for "cat" then the endings on the words "the" and "blue" change, because every noun in German has a different gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and the words endings in a sentence can change based on the particular gender and context they're used in.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying - you need to know what you're talking about BEFORE you begin!
In English we have the luxury of kind of making it up as we go. If we decide last minute that we're not patting a blue dog, but are patting a blue cat then that's simple, we just change the noun at the end once we get to it. In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
>In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
In reality, (1) people rarely change their mind about what noun they're going to use such that the gender is different, and (2) when it needs to be done, speakers of German either ignore it or just go back and repair what they said, changing the forms of the determiner and adjective. Germans speak with no more planning than English speakers.
One might say the same thing about certain English grammatical phenomena. When asking a question, you have to consider whether the subject is going to be singular or plural: Is/are the dog/dogs hungry? This isn't needed in languages without subject-verb agreement, such as Swedish. But it makes very little difference to native speakers.
I agree. Is Spanish, chair vs stool is a better example because some objects are in between and you may change your classification on the fly.
People will ignore the error most of the time unles you make too many of them. In that case they will assume you are a foreigner and ignore the errors anyway.
It's not so much about changing your mind, but rather more that as a learner of German, you have to do a bit more upfront thinking, and be more considerate of the thing you're talking about.
For example, "can you pass me the X" is straightforward in English, but requires a bit more thinking / planning in German where you have to consider "what gender is X, and what case is it in?".
Of course for a native speaker this is for the most part automatic. For someone learning though, it emphasises objects in a way that you didn't have to before. All of a sudden every item is distinct, has an additional attribute and must be used in a specific way.
but you probably mean "Ich streichle den blauen Hund" ("I pat the blue dog")
as apposed to
"I pat then bluen dog"
(the latter seems incorrect in both English and German) ?
could you give another example maybe? I think you're on to something but petting the cat or dog seems to have an identical sentence structure in English and German. Only difference being sex. That's true in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and gets even worse with Slavic languages (or some non European languages).
I purposefully gave the example in germinglish - it's neither German or English but the point is to explain to English speakers how the words in an English sentence would change if applying the same logic to the English language.
Yeah, “den vs denn”, “dass vs das” can be a bit confusing for le foreigner, indeed. I suggest learning Russian next. You’ll finally understand what language can really do in brains (vs minds). And then Japanese … “et boom, c’est le choc.”
Shit like ‘Turkish’ and ‘Italian’ can be neglected, not much to understand about submission, obedience and how to ruin your children from a very young age.
you won't "believe" until you study it. same in french. at the end you won't have to believe, Neo, you'll know.
it's how language works in the brain or rather, how language wires the brain, what it does "to the brain".
Chomsky isn't wrong. Bad analogy: Think of the C language and how other languages interface with it so they don't have to touch the machine code itself. Now think of proprietary and open hardware and drivers. Why Python? Why Mojo? Do you get Zig? ( I barely know any code, btw, any actual coder is more qualified to speak about a languages relation and work-asAndOnThe-bitLevel-inAndAroundTheWire-Interface than I am )
It's not _just_ grammar (vs gran'ma), tho. it's in the combo of pronunciation, "tone", (syntax and) semantics (ambiguity & conotation) and all the other stuff. levels of lexicology are elementary/fundamental, and, as far as I know, nothing comes close ( Mandarin and Japanese are THE exception ) to the amount of Russian levels ( and the combos, if you ever reach that level, which nobody has done in a loooong time. there's no official records anyway )
it's not even that crazy once you get the pattern. Russian can go "all ways" at the same time.
English & German are on another level with the former being much more permissive in terms of personality/individuality than the latter, which is why there's such an immense effort to fuck up the German language, because it's much closer to unambiguous truth/logic/ actual rationality ( not to mention super-rationality )
you'll barely find Germans with a proper command and or understanding of their own language anymore. and no, they won't turn into Hubrismen (Hybrismensch vs Übermensch) or anything like that via language alone.
thank you for 'phrasing' your ridicule as a question <3, you don't even know how awesome you might be
just watched a short video on the lore of the game Blasphemous and read through a bunch of comments and *holy shit* my seemingly nonsensical idea keeps shaping up.
Spanish, partially ultra-religious origins, with great parts of the language building meekness and subservience right into brain structures ...
maybe i should focus on symbolism, after all, narratives and so on ... but then again, it's all linguistics and interpretations as well as personality traits/buckets differ greatly between cultures and languages.
but an LLM only works with statistical linguistics and not semantics per se, so no chance to align with symbolism and narratives. hmmm...
One thing is that when you begin a sentence, to get the grammar correct sometimes you need to know what comes at the end of the sentence, along with understanding the context in which nouns are used.
For example "the blue dog". In German if you said "I pat the blue dog" it would actually change to something like "I pat then bluen dog", whereas "I am the blue dog" wouldn't have the "-n" endings on the word "the" and "blue".
Once you change the word "dog" for "cat" then the endings on the words "the" and "blue" change, because every noun in German has a different gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and the words endings in a sentence can change based on the particular gender and context they're used in.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying - you need to know what you're talking about BEFORE you begin!
In English we have the luxury of kind of making it up as we go. If we decide last minute that we're not patting a blue dog, but are patting a blue cat then that's simple, we just change the noun at the end once we get to it. In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!