Somehow, It's Funny that Way

[digitS']

 

[flowerbug]

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et tu Brutus? ...

i never made it far enough in German to have an exam, three weeks was enough to tell me to drop that class.

 

[digitS']

der ~ die ~ das

Luckily English does not have the differences .

Imagine the Gender Grammar Police ... der die das ...

 

[Phaedra]

Oh, this der-die-das thing is just the very beginning of the entire nightmare, trust me. Just when you finally get some clues and feel relief, the real monsters are about to ambush you.

English is already comparatively complicated compared with Chinese (we don't have 'tenses' nor 'grammatical cases' / 'singular/plural' won't affect anything in a sentence / of course, we don't have genders for any nouns.) Grammatically, Chinese is very simple and straightforward, but it has its own trickiness, sure.

And then German - the grammatical cases: Nominative / Accusative / Dative / Genitive all need to be changed according to the gender of the noun.

Let's see a quick example: As a jacket is a feminine word and a book is a neutral word, the gender will affect both the 'Pronouns(indefinite or definite)' and the 'Adjective'
My uncle gives me a very thick jacket. -- Mein Onkel gibt mir eine sehr dicke Jacke.
My uncle gives me a very thick book. -- Mein Onkel gibt mir ein sehr dickes Buch.

The three genders resulted in a lot of headaches along the way. Well, I don't want to go back to that nightmare.

 

[Phaedra]

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I learned French as my third language when I was a sophomore and felt the same -why is it necessary to assign a gender for a noun?

What I didn't foresee was, I would forget everything about French (very soon) and need to learn something even more complicated than it, not just feminine, masculine, but also neutral?

 

[Phaedra]

 

[digitS']

 

[flowerbug]

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it is funny to me that i've been to two rodeos but i've never been in one and yet i still use that expression frequently enough that i should perhaps find another more fitting. hmm, this isn't my first cleanup on aisle 3? no, that's not very interesting... howabout this isn't my first ant-farm? yeah, i like that one much better...

 

[Branching Out]

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It's une laveuse of course. I spent a year in Paris as a jeune fille au pair, and am always looking for opportunities to practice my French.

 

[Phaedra]

Adorable!