German Nouns DON'T Change Gender (And Why It's Not That Interesting)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 18 січ 2023
- NO HATE to any of the people mentioned in this video. peace and love to all. | Response to comments on the video: • Some Italian Nouns Swi...
Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Thanks to my patrons!!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
I wonder if calling this video kind of uninteresting would be a compliment or an insult.
Hypothetically of course.
It's interestingly uninteresting
@@sponge1234ify Stating the obvious for the people who missed it
As a German native speaker, I'd never consider the genitive feminine singular "der" in "Das Haus der Frau" to be the same as the nominative masculine singular "der" in "Der Mann ist hier." They just happen to look the same, but it doesn't mean that the "masculine" article somehow becomes a "feminine" article.
It's like homophones. Just that they're spelled the same.
That's right. Otherwise, you'd have to assume that a row for boating, a row of seats and a scandalous row are the same thing. In fact, they are three totally different words. So are _der_ and _der_ in German. Such words are called homonyms.
upd.: fixed a typo
the reason we natives don’t consider it the same, is because we automatically and subconsciously associate der Frau with a different case than der Mann.
Mmmh yes, der Frau
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx They're homonyms, yes. That's the word you're looking for.
Broke: German nouns become feminine in the plural
Woke: German nouns lose their gender in the plural
Bespoke: German nouns have four genders, with plural being one of them
Grammatical DID
I identify as plural
@@sirlord7145 Your name name is Legion, for you are many.
@@sirlord7145 To be precise, it's "We identify as plural."
BTW I can hardly see a reason to object identifying oneself using a second person pronoun. **I mean, people refer to you as "you" all the time when they're talking to you.**
@@__koaaa_9619How about we/us/our?
you imply it's not that interesting and then make an entire informative and interesting video about it
never change
ahahaha thank you
you can tell it's not that interesting by the video length
more people need to understand and embrace the fact that language isn't so cookie-cutter and simple, because it's human. it has exceptions and weird features and one of those is that german just reuses its articles in different places depending on gender, number, and case. there's no simple "they become feminine" answer in this case. people act like language was created in a lab and have a meltdown when it doesn't follow strict rules; language is an ever-evolving almost living thing. great vid!
German using sie to mean formal You, they, and she is pretty interesting
truth has been rebuilt
I totally Agree.
The plural article in German sounds like the feminin article because of sound changes
In Old High German all three genders had somewhat of a destinct article
- Masculine: dē, dea, dia, die
- Feminin: diu, dei
- Neuter: deo, dio
These article merged in middle high german
- Masculine: die
- Feminin: die
- Neuter: diu
Articles in Singular as comparision
- Masculine: der
- Feminin: diu
- Neuter: daz
in modern german it completely colapsed due to the new high german vowelshift
die /die/ became /di:/ and diu /dü/ or /diü/ became /die/ and then /di:/. so feminin singular and plural articles merged together to die /di:/
forgot to mention that the articles in old high german are just plural in my text.
Interesting mate thanks
Where did you learn this? A book, a subject at school? I‘m so interested. I will do a minor in Germany and one of the school subjects I can choose is Old-German. Definitels going to do that
are there any dialect that keeps plural forms distinct?
@@fransgreidanus5678 users.clas.ufl.edu/drjdg/gerdut/pubs/WrightMHGPrimer.pdf Page 54
users.clas.ufl.edu/drjdg/gerdut/pubs/WrightOHGPrimer.pdf Page 67
you can learn about the new high german Diphthongization and Monophthongisation (vowelshift) here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_New_High_German
I have spoken german ever since I was born, but I never noticed that all plural articles are the same
That's actually the very reason why you didn't notice. Native speakers don't tend to notice such things, unless they're explicitly taught in school.
@@TheRavenir Agree. As a French learner, the first thing I noticed was how bizzare their number system is.
However, when seeing natives talk about it online, I saw that quite a lot of people never noticed it until explicitly told about it.
@@Orincaby Did you notice how bizarre the french numbering system is then? xD
@@Orincaby Although note that it's just the French French numbering system, while the Belgian French has a more common system with other languages, with words for 70, 80 and 90.
Didn't you guys get declension tables in primary school for one single column for the plural compared to three for the singular
keep making 1 minute long Linguistic vids to correct extremely minor things (I'm still excited for that sequel to the Piraha video)
it's coming it's coming... next month hopefully, I have another project first
You pronounced Den like the English “Den (of Sin)”, in German the e in den is pronounced brighter and a little longer.
yes it's the Swedish accent actually lol, we say "den" like that in Schwedisch
you have to dehn the den
@@Ass_of_Amalek Das e bleibt erhaltehn.
@@SchmulKrieger ...because. then = dann
I have a suspicion that this has been bothering you quite a bit for a while to make you film this video 😂
But really interesting to learn nonetheless, specially since I have no knowledge of the German language ☺️
A situation like this where several forms of a paradigm are the same, usually through historical sound changes, is called syncretism btw.
I agree with everything you said. As a German native speaker, I would have never thought of these as feminine, ig it's just learners that look at the nominative form and think that it's feminine.
Nominative, genitive and accusative, just dative switching it up for articles. For adjectives it's a bit more messy: dative for when no article is used, but nominative and accusative if either article is used. They align a lot, so it will take a while before a language learner see that it's not the same all the way.
Thank you for making this into a normal, regular youtube video rather than that loud auto-playing, user-unfriendly mess that is a UA-cam Short.
I hate yt shorts so much aha
Can vouche for it as a german. On the other hand I can understand why someone would think that without the certain knowledge etc.
But thanks for this informative video and your videos in general. I enjoy pretty much all of them. Keep it up!
Finally, it's critical and good explanation. I took German as my minor at Uni. I'm not sure non-German speaking countries how they teach in class. In Taiwan, None of lecturers and Professors in here would say German nouns would change their gender, they change because they have to show the condition and comprehension for communication. For example: Ich gehe an die Ostsee, weil ich an der (oder: der Ostsee) Urlaub mache.
As a native German when I see such a table I panic and hide under a stone. Huge respect for anyone who actually learns this and can use it while speaking. I think I couldn't do that without becoming completely crazy. Der becomes die in Plural and die becomes der in Dative or sth. like that. WTAF is this language we have created. 👻💀
It's actually worse for many languages, English just decided it would ditch the system in favor of auxiliary words. Can't argue which is better, I personally like the cases, but non-natives seem to mess them up all the time.
Ich habe Italienisch gelernt und dachte, dass Deutsch ein Spaß und noch einfacher wäre... jetzt glaube ich, es will mir umbringen... ähm, mich. Vergib mich... mir... 🥲
@@whohan779
What do you mean by ‘auxiliary words’?
@@John.T. Usually possessive relationships are indicated by 'of', 'by', etc.
Those are somewhat superfluous in German through the cases, but often sound strange without an article.
Example: "the king's reign" = "(des) Königs Herrschaft"
I cannot explain it better on the spot
@@whohan779 And even though German doesn't need those pesky auxiliary words, more than a few native German speakers for some reason prefer to say absolutely stupid sounding sentences like "Dem König seine Herrschaft".
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod. (The dative is the genitive's death.)
Left a like before even watching the video for the title alone, which made me (spiritually) cackle with laughter, I love it
I get way too excited when you upload
This is just my way of picturing it but I almost imagine that the plural is its own gender in German. I know that isn't exactly how it works but thinking of it that way has helped with learning for me.
Yes, seeing plural as a separate gender and not the feminine gender does help learning. Instead of thinking "die" is the nominative article for masculine, feminine and neuter in the plural. It's just the nominative article for the plural gender.
Could you cover the ongoing removal of -ough in informal written language? I find it really interesting that the ending are being replaced by -u, -o, -uff, & -off like in ruff, tho, and thru, but the vowels characters aren't consistent when you add the fricative. So
/o/: -o ➝ ‐oaf
/ʊ/: -u ➝ -oof
/ə/: -uh ➝ -uff
/ɑ/: -ah ➝ ‐off
Also funny thinking about how donut lost its -ough to -o, but the word dough doing so would look like "do", as in "to do" which sounds identical to due and dew. We could always try to change it to "du" to or make dough change to "doh" tho.
in Brazil everyone says "duh-nut". that pisses me off
just do oe and ue for dough, through. doe, thrue, *dofe, *thrufe.
however with the strUt and lOt vowels, even though in american english they can come at the end of a word (since they've merged with commA and pAlm), in other accents of english you just can't end with the strUt or lOt vowels. so maybe you could remove those two rows.
i actually had a german teacher (via lingoda) describe the plural as feminine.
it stuck out in my memory because it was very strange, and utterly inconsistent with how over the past two years every other teacher (on lingoda, or now on italki), book, resource, podcast has handled german with me.
In the middle ages, the nominative plural form was "Diu" while the feminine nominative article was "Die". German just have so much similar articles because of the final vowels loss (that happened in all Germanic language, with the exception of Icelandic), that means that a word who ended in -I, -Us, -O, -Ir, -Or, -Ar and -A in the middle ages, like "zonna" (son) either lost the vowel "zonn" or the vowel became an -E "zonne".
Old High German: Thar Thē Thas Thiu
Early Middle High German: Ther Thē Thas Thiu
Middle High German: Der Die Das Diu
Modern German: Der Die Das Die
The same happened to Old English and Early Middle English, but we see little about it, cause the French influence was so great, that when we started writing English again, that vanished, but I theorize it was something like:
Old English: Se Seo Thaet Tha
Late Old English: The Theo Theat Thes
Early Middle English: The Thiu That Thes
Middle English: The The That The
There's people that think that some Spanish nouns change gender, like "agua" (el agua clara). However, it has only a masculin article because it begins with a stressed A, although the word is feminin.
So:
•Singular definite and indefinite pronouns "el" and "un" are used to avoid a cacophony (el agua, un águila)
•The rest of words that interact with this noun are used in their feminin form: plural articles (las almas, unas águilas), demonstratives (esta agua, esa águila, aquella alma) and adjectives (agua clara, águila voladora).
Same thing people keep saying that some countries in Portuguese are genderless because they don't have the article, but all other words still behaves based on the gender. This misconception is however widespread.
It’s a good day when K Klein uploads
I learned German up to A-level in school (18 in UK) and I don't know if this confusion might have something to do with the educational system? I.e. trying to simplify something and causing more confusion in the long run.
Basically my brain is lazy and goes ' plural is feminine+' and adjusts for cases, but I know the nouns themselves are not feminine when plural, as evidenced by 'den' in the dative case, and different adjective endings.
Also your table completely messed with my head as when I learnt German it was always in the descending order of nominative, accusative, dative, and then genitive lol. Cool video!
I am used to the “Nominative - Genitive - Dative - Accusative” order, so it used to confuse me when I saw it ordered in a different way. But now, I’m used to checking the order first.
hey can you update the link for the discord server, its expired i think
I'm confused, I was pretty sure there was only one common German article for all of those cases and genders?
That article being "guess-something-and-hope-it's-correct".
😂
Since you mentioned it briefly in this video, can you make a video on why some languages reuse the same pronoun/article for different roles? examples being der (used for nominative masculine singular and dative feminine plural in german), le (definite article for feminine singular and indirect object pronoun), des (indefinite plural article and contraction of de + les) or ona (feminine subject pronoun and feminine demonstrative pronoun in various slavic languages).
It probably isn’t as deep as I think it is but apparently the french one day noticed that hui and oui sounded too similar so they changed hui to aujourd’hui so I wonder why some languages tolerate having homonyms when it comes to articles and pronouns
the quick answer would probably be something like "sound shifts completely collapsed these categories"
Sometimes it’s not actually the same.
For example, in Spanish, masculine *el* and feminine *el* (the latter is only used before words beginning with a stressed A) have different etymologies.
This is usually because they used to be different but became the same over time because of sound changes. This is called syncretism, by the way. Yes sometimes words change in order to be more distinct from others, but not always, since obviously homonyms are still pretty common, and I think within one paradigm something like the hui > aujourd'hui change rarely happens. There are also suppletive paradigms of course, whose forms come from different sources anyway and are thus often more distinct, such as english distinguishing forms like "be, am, are, is" whereas most verbs just have two forms for these like "go, goes".
It's interesting that somebody came up with this in the first place!
thank you!! just because the word sounds the same and is spelled the same doesn't mean that it's in fact the same thing!!
just like "you" (singular) and "you" (plural) isn't the same thing
homonyms! in the "you" case i think they have the same etymology, but there's also ones like with "corporal" (of the body) and "corporal" (the rank)
This has amazing I am willing to die on this hill energy to it.
Great explanation thanks!
Wait. If you can essentially look at plural as being a different gender category, could you say that nouns change their gender to plural?
Man
Woman
Trans-gender person
People
We say that the plural forms are "gender-indifferent", because they're the same no matter the grammatical gender of the noun.
Grammatical gender is defined as an inherent category of the word (that is, as speaker you learn by heart what the grammatical gender of any given noun is). So it's still "there" even when it isn't unambiguously expressed in a particular inflected form.
that makes sense
Watch the "Swahili Has 11 Genders" video, what you said is the noun class analysis - German has 4 noun classes: 3 singular classes and 1 plural class.
0:45 I literally just looked at this chart for five minutes and thought about how you got so much wrong here. Only to realise that you write the cases in different order than we Germans get taught in school. It’s always fascinating to get this different perspective on your own language from other countries.
I’ve seen NGDA NAGD NADG for cases
Also for genders MFNP MNFP PMFN NMFP.
I don’t think it’s too consistent
Not German btw.
Learning German it's just kind of best (for me) to treat plural like its own gender.
Thank you for this video. I can't believe that so many Germans don't know this, we learn it at school. They just believe, what they want to believe.
...I got caught off guard by how short the video was.
In Plautdietsch, a the feminine & plural are actually the same because we lost all our cases, (besides oblique in the masculine singular)
Sing. , Plrl.
Net.- Dat grote hues, de grote hieser
Masc.- De groter apel, de grote apel
Fem.- De grote kar, de grote kare
The plural thing is also something some Slavic languages do. Speaking about Polish and Russian in particular, they are very often described as languages having three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Some grammarians, though, describe them as having 3 genders in the singular and one (Russian) or two (Polish) in the plural.
intresting, in czech this also sort of happens to some extent in informal speech
I am familiar with Russian's way of doing it, adjectives only have one declension pattern in the plural regardless of the gender of the noun, does Polish have two based on the gender of the noun?
@@pxolqopt3597 Polish has two plurals: one used exclusively with nouns referring to a man (animate masculine) and another one for all other genders (feminine, neuter and inanimate masculine). I must add, though, that they are clearly distinct only in the nominative and the accusative, the other cases are pretty much the same.
It's the same with Russian, in that the plural effectively kind of acts like the 4th gender since all adjectives have declensions irrespective of which gender the noun actually is
Dutch has two definite articles, and they do change in an interesting way depending on the form a noun takes. These don't "just happen to be the same sometimes", there's 3 different characteristics that matter. Gender is only one of them. The others are whether the word is diminutive, and whether it's plural.
But that said, these words don't really "change gender" either. It's simply the context that changes. We can see this because the possessive pronoun that can refer to these nouns does not change as the article does. So it's more of a flowchart that you go through that determines which article you use: "de" if the noun is plural, otherwise "het" if the noun is diminutive, otherwise "de" if the gender is masculine, feminine or common, otherwise (i.e. only singular non-diminutive neuter nouns) "het".
you pronounce den and denn the same, but they shouldnt be.
I noticed this whenever you say "Ofen vs Offen" you pronounce the same o but make it longer/shorter lol, but the sound actually changes.
A single vowel is basically the same as two vowls, as in: Den rhymes with Seen.
You somehow also manage to do this with ö and ü which is honestly so impressive to me that i dont want to correct you on it
There's a similar situation in Welsh, In Colloquial Welsh at least, I'm not sure if it's the same in the Literary form, Where plural nouns effectively aren't gendered. Since it's mostly just the feminine that affects other words I guess you could argue that all words become masculine in the plural, But I would disagree with that. What's particular interesting is that some Welsh words have the base form as the plural, And add a suffix to create the singular, And while there are different masculine and feminine suffixes to do that, To my knowledge most words of that type only have one singulative form, So you just need to guess if it becomes masculine or feminine when singularised.
as a native german speaker who already knew all of this, this was indeed not an interesting video. good job
Ah, one area where Norwegian got it right. Depending on which written version you pick. Unless you're using a mod. Because of course we have a modding scene. (Riksnorsk, Høgnorsk, and more!)
To add something that actually _is_ kinda interesting: Lithuanian has exactly one noun that does change gender between singular and plural. The word for "human being", _žmogus,_ inflects like a masculine in the singular but like a feminine in the plural. It always has masculine agreement though, so if we want to be pedantic we can say that, synchronically, it's a masculine noun in a special inflection class all by itself whose plural just happens to look exactly like the plural of the e-stem feminines.
Amogus
@@DokterKaj I knew there would be one. I just knew it would be the reply.
@@DokterKaj bmogus
cmogus
@@k.umquat8604 dmogus
This is a case syncretism, lack of difference between 2 grammatical categories, in this case between feminine and plural definite articles.
What at least to me is a more interesting oddity of German articles overlapping, is that in most cases the neuter article is the same as the masculine. They only differ in indefinite accusative, definitive nominative and accusative, and definite suffix nominative and accusative. I don't know the linguistic background to this though.
maybe something similar to how "man" used to be gender-neutral and over time became masculine?
That's always how I thought of it, and yes it's very different from Romanian and Italian. I should know, I speak some.
If you are a native german, and still get confused by the table he showed:
I kind of wonder if English went through this process as it is a Germanic language at its core. While we still have gendered pronouns, we basically don’t use gendered adjectives anymore and don’t have gendered “the’s”
yes it did basically. Old English still had an equivalent of "the" that inflected for gender and case.
@@b4ttlemast0r Oh wow, that’s really neat! Thank you :D
From the Wikipedia article about Old English grammar:
"The definite article is sē, which doubles as the word for "that." It comes in eleven different forms depending on case, gender, and number: sē, sēo, þæt, þone, þā, þæs, þǣre, þām, þon, þȳ, and þāra."
At 0:44 I got a very dark memories from the past. This we had to learn in high school. 12 years old, imagine how horrible this is. 4 years of misery, then I could fortunately drop it.
Only French to struggle with. Greetings from the Netherlands
Dutch people to me always sound like drunk Germans trying to speak English, so just sober up and German shouldn't be too difficult for you. :p
Deeeeeen nicht denn😂😂 its a long e on the article
Das wort vs die antwort
I found a gender change.
Reading Gregorius by Hartman von Aue
He describes the sea as der See, while in modern German der See is lake and die See is sea.
True.
İ teach Deutsch, and İ tell my students, that the (gender) distinctions simply disappear in plural.
Kocaeli'den selamlar
Do non-natives really think that? Ngl I never thought that about my language, it's just... we have 3 grammatical genders, 4 clauses and all of those can either be singular or plural.
Yeah sure, to learn all those must be difficult (I cannot honestly judge this, for me, all of this "わあ、ドイツ語はとても難しいですね" is basically just hearsay), but at least it means it's clear what we intend to say. I love languages and I love German the most simply because it is my language.
It's due to learning nominative first as well as accusative, where plural and feminine are the same, while masculine and neuter are different. People make the conclusion that they turn feminine.
What‘s more is that our articles are distributed randomly at best. No logic whatever and thus no information encoded in them at least regarding gender. And yet we have a wild discussion about adapting the language to a logic of gender it obviously isn‘t designed for. Never open comment sections, especially under german videos -.-
Do a video on Somali or Afar
TDIL german articles also decline according to the grammatical cases
In many cases (pun intended) the article is the only way to tell the case, since the noun itself will often stay the same or have an ambiguous form.
Wow that was a quick vid
Äntligen någon som bemötte det här tramset
Some consider plural to be the fourth gender
this very easily shows that most folks don't understand the diferences between homophones and synonims
*homonyms
wow, i have corrected people many times to say "homophones" when they said "homonyms", but this is the first time it's the other way around
@@notwithouttext ok im SORRY i'm not a native english speaker. no need to brutally expose me to the townfolk (i'm just kidding i'm not mad)
@@macizogalaico yeah it's fine
@@notwithouttext
Wrong, they are both homonyms AND homophones. Shame on you for not doing your research properly while correcting a non-native English speaker.
• HOMOPHONES are words that are *pronounced* the same way but have different meaning. (It *doesn’t matter* if they’re spelt differently or not.)
• HOMOGRAPHS are words that are *spelt* the same way but have different meaning. (It *doesn’t matter* if they’re pronounced differently or not.)
• HOMONYMS are words that are either homophones *or* homographs (not just both).
The definite article “die” is an example of all three of these terms.
@@KasabianFan44 i'm fully aware what all of those words mean, but by context they meant "homonyms", not "homophones". even though they ARE homophones, that doesn't make sense for this video's context.
I can say that, and henceforth I will.
i studied german for just over a year on duolingo and i never thought the nouns were changing gender lol
Or you could say that plurality is a separate nominal category, a fourth gender.
Best comment of the week so far
this video is so good it makes me want to eat cheese
Me too
Within 6 months!
🍉
Glad to know that English speakers aren't the only ones who don't understand their own language.
Wow, how not that interesting!
Kinda like Arabic, where nonhuman plural nouns all take singular feminine agreement (with verbs, adjectives)!
Wait until they find out about the diminutive
yeah no shit. who the goddamn hell thought this?
Bulgarian is similar. When any gendered word (masculine, feminine or neuter) they lose their gender complete
?????
Ja der do
(I tried)
Ich nicht spreche deutsch
* Ich spreche kein Deutsch
looks like you're translating it word for word from English. But it should be "I speak no German", as in you don't have knowledge in it. You can also use "Ich spreche nicht Deutsch" which means you're not speaking German at this moment, but you do know German.
@@Liggliluff yeah, i, agree?
Anyways. Gotta watch videos now.
wait till this guy finds out about the -in ending
i mean sure, you can derive words from other words
@@kkleinwhen i saw this video, the title made it seem like there was some secret to german where the gender could never be changed even through derivational morphology, so i commented this lol :) i do love your content though!
the -in suffix changes it to a different noun
It's still more messy than it should be though
Welcome to the wonderful word of homophones!
I get very irrationally pissed off when people spread misinformation about German.
Is there any evidence of languages making gender somewhat less relevant in the plural? Sicilian does this too
The general pattern for human languages is that the plural tends to have fewer distinct forms than the singular. So you're more likely to have identical-looking gender or case endings or whatever in the plural than in the singular.
German nouns do change gender due to affixes such as the diminutive umlaut-chen construction i.e. die Katze -> das Kätzchen
It might be much more useful to say that German has 4 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, at least for teaching the language, but it definitely isn't how things are being understood by native speakers so probably saying that they don't distinguish gender in plural is more useful.
0:49 the german horror. Who in the world thought it was a good idea to do this?
This is interesting!
Just sharing: There's no masculine (he) or feminine (she) pronouns in the Filipino language. *Example: "He/she is happy." In Filipino: "Siya ay masaya." [We only use 'siya'.]
And as you showed, saying it becomes feminine in plural is a dangerous misconception. It's "den kleinen Mäusen" not "der kleinen Mäusen" because it isn't feminine.
I'm german and this just fucked my brain
I am German. The "problem" is genus vs sexus. It's similar to the pronoun debate in Germany. The word "Lehrer" means "teacher". But in many cases for words of professions, jobs etc, we also have a female pendant, e.g. "Lehrerin" for a female teacher. This rarely also exists in English, e.g. "actor/ actress". The "problem" here is that there are people (roughly 30% of Germany the last time I checked) who say that women can't identify with "Lehrer" because they'd rather want to be adressed as "Lehrerin". As if talking about "actors" would exclude all "actresses". So in that sense, since some years now, people came up with different solutions. "Lehrer*innen"; an English aquivalent would be "actor*esses" to be able to adress everyone, "not just the male population". But I don't think its sexist to speak only about "Lehrer" (aquivalent "actors"). When I do so, when I use the male genus, I don't automatically mean only the male Lehrer.
It can change with time. We actually were very similar to you in the past, but what percentage of English speakers even know the ending "'trix" nowadays or affix -ess/ette in everything when referring to women.
that's not the topic of the video at all lol. I do agree with you tho
Thema verfehlt
Did you comment under the wrong video my dude?
To say German nouns lose their gender, in the plural, is to ignore everything other than the definitive article. There is a lot more, to German noun genders.
no, when nouns become plural, you may be able to discern what their gender is - but there is no grammatical distinction in the plural between masculine feminine and neuter
@@kklein Hm... **looks up** Yeah, I suppose that's right. Thanks for the correction. I should have double-checked before I posted my comment ... I really should brush up on my German and study it again. It's sad how I barely ever listen to or read German, much less use it myself.
@@ZarlanTheGreen Just read "Buddenbrooks" by Thomas Mann in German. It is very difficult, but if you can get through it, your German will be better than what most native speakers speak. Oh, and it is a good book, one of my favourites actually.
Das Mädchen: is her pronoun "es" or "sie?"
"Es ist schön."
"Sie is schön."
Sorry, I don't have the German quotation marks.
That'd be "es", since "Mädchen" is neuter. Doesn't make much sense, logically speaking, why a girl would be neuter and not feminine, but remember that this is grammatical gender and you should not invest to much thought into that.
Also, there's plural words (like "news" in English) in German, such as "Leute", "Kosten", "Ferien", "Eltern", and naturally all of those words do simply not have any grammatical gender. Nice exception to the "all words have a gender" claim.
Leute is masculine, since it comes from masculine Leut
Kosten is feminine, since it comes from feminine Kost
Ferien is taken form Latin and made plural in German, so its gender in undetermined, and not really needed anyway. But technically it should still have one.
Eltern is masculine, since it took the masculine form of 2 when it changed based on gender, but the back-formed Elter is neuter, so it could be considered neuter as well. Some words do have multiple genders.
I think you could even argue that the plural in german is its own gender.
so you see, if german was like spanish where literally everything was gendered for no reason, i would never have started learning it. :) now im gonna go cry in spanish class
Also in spanish when referring to a group of people of indeterminate genders you can use the masculine plural form to refer to that group
German nouns don't lose their gender. The gender is defined by the singular nominative form and is inherent. Meanwhile, German adjectives _do not_ have inherent gender, therefore, in singular, adjectives switch between three genders and have no gender in plural.
We’re not stupid mate, we all know that. What he meant by “nouns lose their gender in the plural” was “nouns lose all their gender-related distinction in the plural”. Every semi-intelligent person understood this, and you smart-arsely picking on Klein’s choice of words is helping absolutely no one.
Wow