Quote:
Originally Posted by ArcheM
I don't know if I've mentioned, but I'm also studying (or refreshing, I suppose) German grammar (at a pretty leisurely pace - about once a week), with a Russian textbook that I bought once on a whim. Came to the grammatical gender, and it doesn't say anything about which one is the most common... But where I am in my learning, the endings which correspond to genders are pretty useful. I don't know how much they are to you, though - I kind of imagine that they aren't a lot more than a list of meaningless letter combinations at this point.
The weird thing is how, well, the ending -ung is counted amoung feminine. Everything's been confusing me about that recently. Both Wiktionary and Duden (the most authoritative German dictionary, pretty much) give it both feminine and neuter, I'm pretty sure... I don't know. Surely, people don't randomly switch between genders of a word.
Anyway, perhaps it helps to know that I'm suffering somewhere alongside you.  |
Yay genders, that will be my downfall (well so will everything else, but I'm still trying, I don't want to give up).
Verbs are kind of confusing, I mean they always take second place in a sentence which is easy to remember, I was learning that today. So I guess it goes subject, verb, then the rest of the sentence? Then there's inversion of the verb where the subject will follow the verb as in "Morgen fährt meine Freundin nach Dänemark". This is why verbs are confusing me, not just why I was saying when the endings of the verb change or like the example they gave fahren changed to fährt, as in "Meine Freundin fährt nach Dänemark".
Then there's rearranging word order which was really confusing and not really explained well the example was changing "Meine Freundin hat einen Hund" to "Einen Hund hat meinen Freundin". It says you change word order to shift emphasis in the meaning. So it wasn't well explained, I'm hoping something gets explained better later, but I don't know if it will, I know cases and tenses will better explain a few things I've had questions on though when I get to that part.