To fulfill my language requirement, I decided to take a new language: German. I took Spanish in high school but wasn't really enjoying it so I knew I didn't want to continue at an intermediate college level. I have to take two semesters of introductory German to complete my language requirement. I've learned a lot in a semester and a half, but there are so many rules in German that just seem really weird to me. Here are some of the weird grammatical structures that make me go "German, why????" when I do my homework.
1. Three Genders
It's common for a lot of European languages to have genders for different nouns. Most have two genders: masculine and feminine. In Spanish, it was fairly straightforward to figure out the gender of a noun; most masculine nouns ended in 'o' and most feminine nouns ended in 'a', with a few exceptions. In German, there's no real reason why each noun is either masculine (der), feminine (die), or neuter (das). I'm really bad at memorizing vocabulary, so having to memorize which of the three genders a noun has is awful.
2. Plural Noun Endings
Similar to the genders, there's no reason for which ending a noun gets in German to make it plural. They can add 'en', 'n', 's', 'e', 'er', or add an umlaut (the two dots over a vowel) to an existing vowel in the word. You just have to memorize how to make every noun plural. There's no rule about how to make it plural, it's just "this is a noun and this is its ending, learn it".
3. Cases
German has four cases: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Depending on what case you're in, you have to change the article of the noun to the appropriate ending for the case. As an English speaker, where cases don't exist, this is such a weird concept to grasp on, and everyone in my German class is constantly forgetting to change article endings. Basically, you use nominative case for when the subject and the object are the same thing ("I am a student"), accusative on direct objects, dative on indirect objects, and genitive to show possession. My class just finished learning the last case, genitive, and now that I know all of them, the concept does make sense to me but I just don't understand why. I haven't had to think about direct and indirect objects since middle school grammar lessons.
4. Adjective Endings
Adjective endings exist in Spanish so I'm used to this idea of changing the ending of an adjective depending on the gender and number of things you're describing, but German adjectives are a whole new type of complicated. Adjective endings was one of the first things I learned in Spanish, and I'm just learning it now in German, half a semester away from finishing my requirement. You learn adjective endings so late in German because you need to know all the cases, so you have to change your ending based on the gender, number, and case. Not only do you have an ending on the adjective itself but there's a different ending on the article. Every time I think about this I wanna cry a little bit.
5. Word Order
German word order is pretty flexible except for one thing: THE VERB MUST GO IN THE SECOND POSITION. If you break this rule, Otto von Bismarck will personally come back from the dead to fight you. This rule makes sense, the verb usually goes second in English. What I don't understand is that if you have more than one verb in a sentence, the other verbs must go at the end of the sentence. How are you supposed to know what you're talking about? For example if I said "I must write my Odyssey article" in German, it would literally translate to "I must my Odyssey article to write" ("Ich muss mein Odyssey Artikel schreiben"). You don't find out till the end of the sentence that what I have to do is write. What if you have a super long sentence?
6. Coordinating vs Subordinating Conjunctions
Another weird word order thing. If you are using a coordinating conjunction (but, for/because, or, but rather, and) then you don't change the word order and you treat the sentence as if the conjunction isn't there. If you have a subordinating conjunction (until, since, that, whether, because, if) then you have to change the word order and put the inflected verb at the end of the sentence. Why??????
I promise you I really enjoy my German class I just don't understand all the rules. I guess you could say the same thing about English.
