readingbetweenlines wrote:
CWulf, that's impressive.
he trouble with German is not restricted to gender, in fact that's pretty universal to many European languages. And yes, there is the neutral case, plus the gender that you know from Spanish may be reversed, the moon is masculine and the sun feminine in German.
There are the cases (don't know if you have them in Spanish but I rather suspect not), ie nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, for expressing relationships between subject and object.
English has residual traces of dative (to whom did you speak?) and of course the genitive s.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, because of the cases which show as suffixes on nouns and pronouns, word order is highly flexible and for some reason the most important verb is often right at the end of a very long sentence.
Finally, the tendency to combine nouns into long, undivided compound nouns!!
What do you reckon?
I don't think the genders will be much of a problem. Actually some words which are masculine in Catalan are femenine in Spanish, for example. But it doesn't seem weird to me. It also happens in French, so I guess getting used to them is the only way to articulate them fruitfully.
We don't have any cases in Spanish. Prepositions play that role. And it's the same in Catalan. But I also studied Latin and Ancient Greek, which have all of those cases, so I'm familiar with them. At first it was a little tricky, but after using them for some weeks it became something natural for me. The structure of both of those languages is similar to German, I guess. And those endless words can be broken down, can't they?
However, I suppose the lexicon will take me long to learn. I hope knowing English helps with that. Constructing sentences will be difficult, at least at first. I'm really looking forward to starting!
31 Jan 2012, 4:53 pm
