lesson 9.1

In lesson 9.1

Ich ​war mit einer Freundin ​im ​Kino. If it is a girl friend why is it not eine Freundin.

Oh my am I ever going to understand the finer intricasies of German grammar.

Sebongela

Hi Sebongela

“Mit” is a preposition which always takes the dative case so “einer” is a femine dative form.

So “mit einer Freundin” if it was a male friend it would be “mit einem Freund”

There is a chart of endings here:

https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/grammatik/basic-chart/

I found a list of prepositions and which cases they take here:

https://www.lingoda.com/en/content/german-prepositions/

Simon

Thanks Simon

I thought it must be something weird like that. Have been avoiding the cases. Grammar is just not my favourite thing. So I generally save in vocabulary, as then those come up quite often, but with gender it is quite tricky to save, as then every der would come up as dative. Will cobble along and will eventualy get there. My ambition is not necessarily to speak perfectly, but to be able to help myself, even if it does come out wobbly at times.

Sebongela

Yes, like you, my aim is to be able to converse and be understood even if I make mistakes. Unfortunately the gender of nouns is very important but I struggle with it too. 

I have found it useful to associate a noun with an adjective or short phrase, eg schönes Wetter or bei der Arbiet. You just have to come up with things that are meaningful for you. I have been trying colour coding nouns although I still haven't decided if it helps but it looks nice.

Simon

Hi again Simon

You made me smile “It looks nice” My German penfriend is very encouraging. She is from around Hanover and speaks a high German. As well as excellent English. her English is amazing and I am quite envious. Even if we don't get gender correct when speaking ,people may snigger but still understand. When we were last in Germany I had very, very basic German. Had done Rosetta stone German. It was a free course via a local school. Even so got around and understood in small villages where no one spoke English. I cringe as I absolutely crucified the language. I am so glad I never invested money into Rosetta, did several languages through them and didn't find it great. Rocket is so much better. Just been offered an amazing offer for all Babbel languages, so am brushing up on Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and Russian. Also use it for Italian and German.  I also use Duolingom for revision. I find different programs all have a different approach and it all adds to the puzzle. 

My garden has been put to bed and have more time too.

Sebongela

Hi Sharon, 

it's looking a bit like you're all trees and not enough forest. 
 

If you say you've been avoiding the cases, sometimes it's a matter of waiting for the right time, and the time for cases for you is just about to come, 

As Simon says, prepositions can help a lot, because many of them are always one case or another. So looking at your prepositions as a gateway into the cases could be really useful to you, and you can get to your direct and indirect objects later. 
 

You probably don't want to think too hard about this, but there is a system for learning all the endings for all the cases that's pretty simple, and quite airtight. I wouldn't want to burden you with the details unless you wanted to hear them. 
 

But you may just be ready to embark on the big journey toward mastery of your German endings. 
 

Don't give up. Youve put in a massive amount of time and effort. It wouldn't take much to fill in some of your gaps! 
 

Doug

btw, 

“Ich ​war mit einer Freundin ​im ​Kino”

Good spotting! 

You're already on your way with your original observation that ‘Freundin’ is supposed to be ‘die’ not ‘der’.  Spot on. Every noun has a gender, one of ‘der’ ‘die’ or ‘das’, as defined in the dictionary.  You need to know the “dictionary gender" for each noun, and that's the starting point for navigating the table(s) of endings as they mutate through the cases.  

So good on you for spotting that. Did you also notice a less confusing version of exactly the same thing in the same sentence? “im Kino”. “im” is a contraction for “in dem”, and “dem” is the mutated article for “das Kino” in the Dative.  “das” becomes “dem” in Dative just like “die” becomes “der”  

Doug

One final observation… 

While visiting Vienna this past August, a genuine delight, I couldn't help but notice  that there were vast numbers of foreigners, and that their German was filled with grammatical flaws. Many of them were highly educated and accomplished in their own fields, but they still spoke what could only be described as “non-native” German.  

We'll never be mistaken for natives, but you won't be looked down on for flubbing your German grammar in everyday conversations.  It's so common that people almost stop noticing, and you'll receive a lot of forgiveness for all the effort you've already put in. 

Doug

Hi Doug

Was wondering how you were doing. I take it you are still in NZ. Truly a beautiful country. I would like to go back there one day and explore more.  Thanks for the encouragement. I'm not shy to speak or be corrected. As I have said before my Portuguese is not grammatically correct, but I hold my own. Have added a whole lot of new languages to my repetoire and need to spend less time on Rocket. 

I am not crazy about the Rocket grammar lessons, but am slowly forming a bigger picture by using the conversations. I also know it will all eventually come together. I home schooled 4 kids while we were in Asia and then my 2 youngest in Canada too. We took a very relaxed approach, no spelling tests for example. It all did gel eventually. One is currently doing a Masters degree in fiction writing, the other her PhD in Archeology. 

I know it will all come together at some stage. 

We intended going to Germany and maybe Austria, but just too much chaos in Canadian airports. I wanted to cycle Passau to Vienna or Romantische strasse, will do either in the Spring. May do the Netherlands if the family comes. A barge and cycling. 

Am quite envious you got to go to Austria. 

Happy learning

Sharon

A while back, my wife and I stayed at a pension in Grein, about halfway between Passau and Vienna, and we cycled from there down the Danube to Vienna, through Melk and the Wachau and no end of beautiful villages and vineyards along the way.  .  

Highly recommended! 

Hallo zusammen!

It's great to see so much engagement in the forum! 

In regard to your question, Sebongela, and to add to Simon's explanation, there are certain preposition which always take the dative (or the accusative as explained in lesson 4.9). The article eine (nominative) needs to change to match the case, which means we need to change it to einer (dative).

The prepositions that require the dative case are: aus, bei, mit, zu, nach, seit, von, außer, gegenüber (from, at, with, to, towards, since, of, except, opposite).

The prepositions that require the accusative case are: für, ohne, durch, um, gegen, bis (for, without, through/by, around/at/for, against, until/to/by).

Then, there are also preopostitions that sometimes require the accusative and other times take the dative case, such as in, hinter, neben, an, auf (in/into, behind, next to/beside, at/to/on/against, on/to/in), for example.

You can learn more about the dative case in lesson 9.11 and 14.7.

Happy learning!

Julia

Hi Sharon, 

I'm curious. Are you Apple iOS or Google Android? Tablet or phone? Or none of the these?

Thanks, 

Doug

HI Doug

I mostly use my Apple Laptop on Chrome. I don't use my Lenovo Tablet for Rocket and on occasion my Samsung phone.  Not sure I have understood your question. I have all these computer boffins in my household and so have not bothered to become very tecchie. Just not one of my interests. In fact if I could would not even have a phone. Most of the time it is in the kitchen and just can't be bothered to be glued to the hip with it. 

Maybe an age thing, but am just not intersted in any form of social media either. There you have it in a nutshell. Hope you are having a great summer in NZ. One of the most beautiful countries I have been to. Are you on the South or North Island.

Sharon

Hi Sharon,  

On the North Island, in Wellington, staring south at the Cook Strait and further from there straight out over open ocean to Antarctica.  It's the Sourthern Hemisphere, so our seasons are flipped, and we're just heading into summer in the coming weeks.  Summer Solstice is just over a month away, so the days are long and still getting longer, which I really appreciate. 

I hope I'm not breaking any forum rules by asking about your device preferences. 

I'm actually developing an app in Apple iOS that covers nothing but endings (working title: WurstHatZwei).  It's no competition to Rocket, takes a completely different angle, so I'm not worried about that. But Rocket might still be concerned anyway.  

Early stages, but I think I've got an approach to endings that cuts through the clutter of exceptions and blind alleays that seems to afflict even the best fully-authorized approaches.

And I was thinking, knowing that you've got a streak of 417 days going, and that you've been high on the leaderboard for months on end… you're working very hard on your German.  You're persistent, and probably very smart. But you clearly have an allergy to grammar and grammatical systems (which puts you in the same category as my very smart wife, btw). 

You would have made a perfect test subject for my app. Unfortunately, I'm piloting it in Apple iOS, so I'll have to wait to show it to you.  

All the best in all your language learning journeys! 

Doug 

Hi Again

Wellington is a lovely city. We stayed in lower Hutt and then went into Wellington. reminded us a bit of Cape Town. One thing I will say it is lovely that Christmas is cold. Christmas cards are always geared towards the Northern hemisphere. We always hope for snow over Christmas, but Vancouver Island doesn't get that much snow. Having said that last year we had lots of snow. My adult children were skiing down our steep driveway and having so much fu, Having said theat our Shi Zhu got was not impressed and loathes the snow, as it clumps on her fur. 

I am interested to see  what you are developing. I'm not a grammar phobe, just hate when everything is clumped together with certain concepts. Eg German adjectives. Complicated enough and I feel that gender adjective sentences should not be all mixrd up, but in sections. In German  Yours and mine they did that and one could actually follow the patterns. 

Well Rocket is great and no program is perfect. 

I have made several recommendations when I have found a good language site for Italian and German and have never been wrapped over the knuckles for it. I recommend Rocket regulary to anyone who is considering learning a language. By the way do you have children and are they multilingual, mine aren't at all.

Sharon

Yes, Rocket is great.  

I've used it for German, French, Portuguese and Japanese, usually with a visit to a foreign country in my near future.  For beginning and early intermediate purposes, and for brushing up in prep for casual conversation, I think it's hard to beat.

There are so many different ways to approach a language.  No one approach can do it all, and none of them can do it in much of a hurry. 

There's only one that appears to guarantee full fluency, and that is growing up as a native speaker. Native speakers grow up knowing almost all of their language. They speak it correctly and can reliably tell right from wrong. 

And no matter how technical the sub-topic (German endings come to mind), natives can navigate all the complexities without having any awareness whatsoever of the rules or structure of their underlying system. Their mastery seems to stem from having a vast store of language that they can play back in their heads to know what ‘sounds right’ from what ‘sounds wrong’  

The only parallel I can think of in my own experience is knowing the basic rules of grammar. My mother is a former English teacher, and she used to subject us to her class quizzes in material that was grades ahead of us to see how they might fare in class. We always did well, and prided ourselves in “knowing our English.”  But I can't recall learning to diagram sentences, and I can tell you for a fact that I didn't know a direct from an indirect object until I started studying foreign languages.  So I had a solid grasp of English without having to come to grips with grammar.  

And so it goes.  Most people who learn natively and naturally learn without having to have giant catalogues of rules and vocabulary. They just learn to talk, and grammar takes a back seat, if it's ever learned at all.  

Thus, the challenge for adults. Adults want to get there faster than children (children don't even know that there is a “there” to get to!).  Adults want to speak in full adult command within their first half-year with a language, and that's just not realistic.  

So, for adults, it's a mix of learning conversations (Rocket style), and learning the rules in the hopes of reaching their goal “more efficiently”. 

Having full technical mastery of grammar is not a pre-requisite to fluency in a language.  Thus, there's a lot of backlash when teachers and grammar geeks want to explore the technical landscape as a method of achieving linguistic mastery.  Grammar is handy to know, once mastered, but it's beyond proven to be completely unnecessary. 

Finally, yes, a stepdaughter and a granddaughter, living in Vienna, speaking German in everyday life, and English with family in New Zealand and India. I think the key to making children multilingual is simple: have them live parts of their lives in their target language(s).  If they're not living it, they won't learn it at any substantial level.  That probably applies to you and me as well, come to think of it! :) 

Doug