![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
'Line of Separation' and learning German
If you want a recommendation for a really good German-language (with subtitles) TV programme, then try this recommendation by londonkds.
The drama is called 'Line of Separation' and is on channel 4 iplayer.
It's set just at the end of WW2 and it's pretty harrowing. Definitely not for children. Well acted.
My grandparents lived through being bombed, but they never had to live through occupation - for which I am very grateful.
I'm teaching myself a little German at the moment, partly because I'm not too well at present (costochondritis). I tire easily and can only do a limited amount of computer work before my ribs start hurting.
There's only so much TV one can watch before brain rot sets in - sitting down with board game rules in German, and a dictionary and grammar to hand, at least ensures that the brain is engaged.
There's nothing quite like trying to work out the correct ending for an adjective when used before a feminine noun in the accusative case to force you to have to think...
And if anyone can tell me why it's "keinen Dank" - Ah, just got it. Dank is spelt the same whether it's singlar or plural (half the online dictionaries don't tell you what the plural is, which is a right pain). Thus, "no thanks" and keinen with 'en' is correct for mixed declension plural before a masculine noun. (I wanted something to distract me from stress, there's nothing like tables of endings...)
Why, why, why do languages have genders?
What's the point?
English is good in that regard, but has its own quirks. eg. "I hit him" - is that present or past tense? I never noticed before, until I was looking for simple sentences to translate and realised that I didn't know what tense to use in German.
The drama is called 'Line of Separation' and is on channel 4 iplayer.
It's set just at the end of WW2 and it's pretty harrowing. Definitely not for children. Well acted.
My grandparents lived through being bombed, but they never had to live through occupation - for which I am very grateful.
I'm teaching myself a little German at the moment, partly because I'm not too well at present (costochondritis). I tire easily and can only do a limited amount of computer work before my ribs start hurting.
There's only so much TV one can watch before brain rot sets in - sitting down with board game rules in German, and a dictionary and grammar to hand, at least ensures that the brain is engaged.
There's nothing quite like trying to work out the correct ending for an adjective when used before a feminine noun in the accusative case to force you to have to think...
And if anyone can tell me why it's "keinen Dank" - Ah, just got it. Dank is spelt the same whether it's singlar or plural (half the online dictionaries don't tell you what the plural is, which is a right pain). Thus, "no thanks" and keinen with 'en' is correct for mixed declension plural before a masculine noun. (I wanted something to distract me from stress, there's nothing like tables of endings...)
Why, why, why do languages have genders?
What's the point?
English is good in that regard, but has its own quirks. eg. "I hit him" - is that present or past tense? I never noticed before, until I was looking for simple sentences to translate and realised that I didn't know what tense to use in German.
no subject
The result is to make it theoretically easier to create sentences (although in practice, having discarded all linguistic guides to context, English is very heavily dependent on the subtleties of idiom and word order, which I imagine actually make it harder to construct a phrase correctly as a native speaker would say it) and harder to identify the function of different parts of sentences presented to you. In English, for example, you can't tell which noun in a simple phrase is the subject and which is the object other than by word order.
In German you can say "Der Hund beißt den Mann" or you can emphasise it by saying "Den Mann beißt der Hund" (it's the man he bites).
Or you can distinguish between "auf dem Tisch" (dative: location) and "auf den Tisch" (accusative: direction) -- or "auf die Mitte des Tisches" (genitive: possession)!
English requires auxiliary words to make any of these distinctions.
no subject
Where hast tha been since I saw thee?
Word order is certainly important in English, but I've no idea if that makes it harder or easier to learn. (Can't tell from the inside). Word order creates questions in German.
"Den Mann beißt der Hund" (it's the man he bites)
I assume that's more emphatic than "The man is bitten by the dog"?
Sounds like your German is a fair way ahead of mine. I tend to dip in and out of it, this is a dip in week. We're trying to buy a house and I badly need the distraction.
no subject
Less emphatic, I should assume (German also has the passive construction "der Mann wurde von dem Hund gebissen", but I had to look that up; I never really got the hang of passives).
It's sort of the equivalent of changing the sentence stress in English: "The dog bites the man [i.e. not the horse as you suggested]"
But none of that explains why languages have genders in the first place, let alone ones that don't necessarily bear any relation to the actual sex of the creature being talked about (I've just learnt that in Old English, 'woman' is a masculine noun, for instance).
So far as I know, they just do because they always have done since the beginning; it doesn't really contribute anything to understanding, save in the rare cases where two otherwise identical words are distinguished by different genders, i.e. "der See" (a lake) and "die See" (the ocean) -- if you're English it's safer just to use "das Meer" ;-p
I got up to AS-level German in my spare time, but that was some years ago. My German's at the level where I can make out the structure of a sentence and get the gist of its meaning provided it doesn't depend on any pivotal verbs/nouns that I don't know. I can skim this sort of thing, for example: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/mann-von-hunden-gebissen/story/31765873
(A number of dogs suddenly appeared and bit a 66-year-old-man who was out for a walk. He took himself to hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.)
And I've done quite a bit of translation from German, aided by copious dictionary usage, a skilful grasp of of the English language and a good idea of the subject matter; I can produce a good-quality translation without having a particularly fluent command of the original language.
( https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11303290/23/Imprisoned-by-Fear versus
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11171047/15/Gefangene-der-Angst )
no subject
Could 'gender' just be an old word for 'type'? Maybe we could have ended up calling the categories strange, charmed, down and up, like we do for quarks! :-)
no subject
cf French gendrer, engendrer
It means to produce, and specifically to produce more of your kind.
The word 'gender' also comes from the Latin 'genus', so they are related; in this case 'genus' as in 'sort or variety of'. The English grammatical usage is taken straight from Latin grammar terminology, which took the term from the Greek γένος, which literally 'means race, stock or kin' (according to Liddell & Scott) but was also used figuratively for grouping things in grammatical terms. According to the OED Aristotle dated this usage back to Protagoras, i.e. the 5th century BC - so linguists have been using it for a very long time.
(And yes, it is basically "an old word for 'type'", although the Ancient Greeks thought in terms of family networks rather than quarks!)
no subject
People who wanted no part of the shit raining down on the Quakers as a result of this started using you much *more*, and eventually they used it for everyone.
The quakers wrote a LOT of what we now see as traditional English hymns, which is why we now think of it as a term of respect for God.
H