German is hard. That is the title of this post, according to the ‘idioms’ bonus lesson I eagerly unlocked on Duolingo, only to not understand any of it. As an ignorant English only speaker, I’ve found that the thing I really struggle with learning a new language is that I don’t actually know English grammar. German, I learned early on, has three genders. What is a ‘gender’? In English I only know male and female… Do we have these word genders? I’ve no idea. German has masculine, feminine, and neuter. Der, die, das. Ok! Got it. Seems easy enough, even if I don’t understand it. Fast forward a few weeks, and it gets waaay more complicated.
I thought this little note was a brilliant idea! Little did I know when I made it that I’d need another twenty of them…
German also has things called ‘cases’. These I do not understand at all. There are four of them, genitive, dative, accusative, and nominative. So der, die, das becomes der, den, des, dem. Or die, die, der, den if we are talking plural. My Duolingo lessons have progressed to the point where I have ‘learned’ these, and a few more that I can’t even name, but I really don’t understand how they work or when to use them. I just guess or learn by rote. I don’t think this method will serve me too well…
We have covered a few of the cases in my iTalki lessons, and it is really clear that I have no idea what is going on. My teacher says repeating old lessons is good for reenforcing what I’ve learned, but I feel I am wasting my money going over the same thing each week. So my mini mission (a concept I’ve taken from Benny, my favourite Irish Polyglot) is to really go into the grammar before my next lesson and try to nut it out.
I’m a little intimidated by the thought of delving into German grammar, because I know it will also mean learning English grammar. I’m not going to be able to understand the explanations if I can’t grasp what direct and indirect objects are, or what what an article is. It turns out even my understanding of nouns is incomplete; they’re easy to spot in German as they have capital letters, but I’ve often found myself asking why they are nouns…
Good old hand written repetition. Tedious, but it seems to help.
As dull and old fashioned as it may seem, I find the best way for me to learn things is to write them down. Again and again and again. It helped me remember the correct conjugation of verbs by doing the above exercise a few times, so I’m hoping it will help with these case things too! I plan on writing some sentences and uploading them to Lang-8 for correction. I’ll write a detailed post on Lang-8 sometime soon, but basically it allows you to get written work corrected by native speakers. You earn points by making corrections to other people’s work, so the whole community works together with different languages to help each other. Pretty neat!
Well wish me luck with this grammar business, I’ll update my progress in a week or so!
Language, Learning, Laughs 
I know that you might have reached your first depression (which by the way occur regularly when learning a language ;D )
but maybe it helps to tell you that if you understand the “cases” and the genders then you know most of the german language. Compared to other languages (*cough* french *cough*) german is a quite structured language with just a few exceptions – so learn a rule and it works in 90% of the cases – french: learn a rule and in 90% of the cases you can’t use it as it is an exception -.-‘
So stay positive! If you master this part of german grammar, you actually know a lot about the language!!!
Thanks Alex! That is good to know. Ha ha yes it certainly is my first depression in learning German.
If it helps, the nice thing about these is that even if you get one wrong and say “dem” instead of “den”, it won’t change the meaning of what you’re saying at all and people will still understand you. So while it is important to learn and understand these, don’t agonize over getting one wrong sometimes. My offer stands to speak German – I can also try to explain stuff if you have a question 🙂 Viel Glück!
Danke! Yes I’m going to practise start talking aloud to myself, so that I can make German come out instead of Danish, then hopefully I can get you to ask me a few questions I’m capable of answering in a few weeks!
Thanks for the tips too :-).
Viel Glück on learning German 🙂 As Laura says it’s not a huge error to say dem instead of den. Four ‘cases’ is easy, compared to learning finnish that has 15 of them! German is a lovely language that resembles swedish quite a lot and now that Germay rules the EU is good to learn.
Fifteen cases!! I think I’ll stick to German 🙂 Yes I have some basic Danish, also similar to Swedish, and I’m always surprised by the similarities! It has made my German pronunciation awful though. Slowly, slowly. One thing to fix at a time is enough.