I want to learn a Celtic language

Today the book showed me how verbs are written and what their endings are. It says all verbs end in -en, and a small number end in -n, but it gave the example sagen and a list of conjunctions like ich sage, du sagst, Sie sagen etc. I'm wondering why if all verbs end in -en, some are ending in just -e, or -t or -st? It didn't explain why that is. That is just a bit confusing to me

Then there's the verbs that add an -e when the stem of the verb ends in -m, -n, -d, or -t before the ending in the du, er/sie/es and ihr constructions. That had a decent explanation of why the -e was added because how would you pronounce say atmest without the "e". Still a little confusing but that seemed to have a better explanation.

Okay, I almost don't want to believe you that you've read all the text in that chapter. It must have explained where those endings come from, that's pretty essential... I'm going to give you a hint. Even though the English verb "bring" ends in "-g", sometimes we add "-s" to it...

Okay, maybe that's not fair. I'm almost tempted to get that book for myself, to follow along and give more relevant insight, but the money is pretty tight... Hindsight 20/20, I should have tried harder to persuade you to get a book that I already have, namely "German Demystified", but oh well...

So, if neither that hint suffices, nor the book explains it further, let me know, I'll do an explanation. That's a very basic piece of grammar, and I'm as confident in that as can be.

I doubt it could have been Old English, because that's pretty much a different language (incidentally, containing pretty much all the funny verb endings we've been talking about, although I suspect with Anglo-Saxon peculiarities). Nor real Middle English - I've just checked, and Faust was only written at the end or after the Middle English period... But even so, when did you last read Shakespeare? Or indeed, any 19th century book? I mean, I opened Mark Twain recently (not one of his two famous works), and that's pretty tough on the brain - all the colloquial language is different, a lot of phrasal verbs don't mean the same thing...

Okay, I suppose that infodump serves only to once again demonstrate how fascinated I am by language. I don't suppose you'd be interested in the convoluted evolution of the Dutch language?

Well, some more German trivia that fits in the present discussion:

As I understand, this is not particularly relevant for you, but I've just learned that the German translation of Skyrim was the result of a titanic effort based, in particular, on the work of the fanbase which standardized all the terms and whatnot for future translations. I was just looking around to see if I've got any overlooked entertainment that wouldn't require any more money and wouldn't feel like a waste of time. But with this information I'm feeling that I almost owe it to myself to check it out. Once I'm done with the Polish version of the Witcher... and the German book.

Speaking of which, I've just glanced again at Wolfgang Hohlbein's page... and the guy is insane. He's written more than 200 books! The Witcher saga seemed like an undertaking to me, with 6 novels (and 2 short story collections). And Sapkowski (author of the Witcher) only started writing in his 40s. Hohlbein apparently has been writing all his life... Anyway, I feel fortunate in the fact that I managed to stumble on a trilogy of his (instead of a "cycle" or "saga"). On one hand, it's great (if the writing is great), on the other - I'm not getting any more free time (not to mention money).

Okay, yeah I didn't actually read the whole chapter, just looked through it to see what comes next and see how long the chapter is. I think it goes through tenses in this chapter, past/present tense. So maybe it will get explained there, I don't know.

Right now, well today it was a brief explanation of adverbs, I don't know if that will get explained better in dept or not. But it was a little confusing the way it was explained, it gave the example word "vorsichtig" and explained that adverbs keep the same spelling as the adjectives do, then went on to say that the adjectives for vorsichtig changes its form when it becomes an adjective, so it becomes vorsichtige. Okay that was a little confusing, so adverbs keep the same spelling as their adjective counterparts yet adjectives will change the spelling of the word? It just said to go back to the section that explained adjectives to review them.

The last time I read any Shakespeare was in Highschool 10yrs ago. I'm not the most well read person out there.

Okay, I don't know if this is helpful or not, but I consider the distinction between adjectives and adverbs in German to a big extent arbitrary. There's few adverbs I can think of that can't act as an adjective (among them "vielleicht" - "maybe"). Depending on which part of speech it modifies, "vorsichtig" can mean "careful" or "carefully", except that before a noun it has to follow the noun's gender with its ending.

Incidentally, I believe there's vestiges of this situation in English (and I think it might apply to at least all of the European branch of the Indoeuropean family), when people respond to the question "How are you doing?" with "I'm doing good." And you might be inclined to correct that response to "I'm doing well." Which, in my opinion, is an artificial influence of a movement somewhere in the 18th or 19th century to make English behave more like the noble Latin, whereas by all signs a hard distinction between adverbs and adjectives doesn't come to it naturally.

And, of course, that same conversation in German would go like this: "Wie geht's dir?" "Es geht mir gut."

I've thought about it some more, and I probably shouldn't be so upset about some grammaticians' well-meaning attempts two centuries ago. I mean, now it's a part of the history of the English language, and it would be pretty hard to see adverbs and adjectives as interchangeable... Although about that -s ending for stores I'm not so sure. I mean, to the inhabitants of a certain region it comes naturally, so I suppose it's part of the dialect. Although the fact that they themselves struggle with explaining it... well, I guess it's just fascinating. The practice is probably bound to die out sooner or later, if our world keeps getting more and more interconnected.

Okay, thanks for the explanation that not all adverbs can act as adjectives, that really helps because that wasn't explained in the book. I just think I was confused on how it seemed to jump around in the paragraph with explaining adverbs, then explain adjectives briefly. The whole section on adverbs was pretty much a paragraph, I hope there might be more a in dept explanation or continuation of it later in the chapter or book, but I'm really not sure.

Yeah, adding an "s" at ths end of store names is pretty much in our dialect, I don't know if it will die out though as eceryone pretty much does it, though I try not to add an "s" at the end of store names that don't have an "s" at the end of it.

I didn't spend much time in the book today, just enough time to take a couple notes on creating a sentence, and how sentence structure can be similar between English and German but not the same. Like how the subject comes first, then the verb, then the rest of the sentence. The example sentence was "Meine Freundin hat einen Hind" - "My girlfriend has a dog". Meine Freundin is the subject, hat is the verb and eine Hind is the object, that's what the book explained very, very briefly. Hopfully it further explains sentence structure, I think it does, well it should definitely explain sentence structure further, it's apart of grammar.

I'm sure you'll quickly find out on you own, but it's "Hund" not "Hind" (unless it was indeed two typos in a row).

Anyway, what you've managed to glean kind of made me wonder, just how much such simple sentences are used. I was reading that book today, and one sentence (at least most memorably) really messed with my head... Well, of course most of the book, given the genre, is written in the past tense, and that comes with its own set of complications. But even in the present, take a verb with a separable prefix, a couple additional items, and place that within a compound sentence...

Okay, never mind that for now. Maybe I should have erased all that to avoid alarming you prematurely. But I also kind of want to vent my own frustration. So let's settle on a compromise, where I just won't list any more grisly details. Let's just say, every, I suppose, one out of ten sentences is an adventure and an expedition... At least in the written language, where the author has the (unfortunate for us) advantage of being able to refer to the start of the sentence, if they've forgotten by the end, what the root of the verb was.

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.

Yep, says there's 4 ways to make a plural:

1. Suffix -e
2. Suffix -(e)n
3. Suffix -er
4. no change

(Plus a little spicing of changing vowels.)

I suppose I have to trust them.

So I'm also trying to learn a more native-like English pronunciation (or rather, American), and while practicing, I sort of often come across words in other languages that I know, especially German. My wires then get crossed and what comes out is probably not recognizable in either language (although closer to American, I suppose, because it's hard for me to switch gears). I'm wondering, though, what are you going to do once you've got the grasp of German pronunciation, if you encounter German words within an English text... like, the name of a town in a news article? ...Well, you probably haven't thought about it. I mean, what "regular" people do is pronounce slowly and phonetically, then adding that they probably got that wrong. But what if this doesn't apply anymore? Or maybe it's not a problem. Except myself, using the German pronunciation I'd kind of feel self-conscious, as if showing off.

Ahh, autocorrect, yes it was a typo, I missed it or else I would have edited it.

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.

Oh that sounds fun, and confusing.

I don't know what I'll do when it comes to pronouncing words in an English text. Right now I pronounce words in my head, I would be too self-conscious to pronounce them out loud. I mean every time I have encountered a German word (usually one we stole from the German language), I pronounce it like it'd sound in English (which I know is not right to do but it's how it comes out in my head). Now that I'm getting better at knowing how letters are pronounced in German I might be able to pronounce words better in German that I see in an English text, and not pronounce them like they would sound using the English alphabet pronunciation of letters. I don't know if I answered your question right though.

Oh, yeah. I don't use autocorrect anywhere, so I have to wonder, how... I mean, what's your experience with it and German language? I don't know, have you had to add German as an option, or what?

Oof, yeah, that's a pickle. I mean, if I try to explain that without much thought, I fall back immediately on Russian, where those categories are... well, even more complex.

Although you do have an error in the second sentence. It's "Einen Hund hat meine Freundin."

Quite frankly, I can't come up with a context in which it would make sense. But, I think it would go better with the definite article. "Den Hund hat meine Freundin." So, "der Hund" has already been established. In this sentence you're conveying who exactly has the dog - "meine Freundin". Which is in the nominative case, whereas the dog is in the accusative (a direct object), although I imagine that doesn't help a lot. Or, following on from our earlier discussion about the multipurpose nature of the definite article, you could kind of reverse the sentence in the translation - "That (particular) dog belongs to my girlfriend." ...Let me now if that's even more confusing.

I don't know either. Did you mean words of German origin that are already well-established in English? I was talking more about a situation like if you're reading a news article, and it mentions a German city... It might already have a normalized English pronunciation, but take for example the city Stuttgart. Would you say it starts with the "s" or the "sh" sound? (Insert a devious cackle.)

Autocorrect can be finicky at times, I have it on to keep from mis-spelling words, but it sometimes likes German while other times it doesn't, I never know what I'll get. Like it is okay with words like "einen", "einem" sometimes "meine", though just now it tries to correct it to "keine", also "keinen" apparently it has German words in it so I'm finding out. Freund doesn't get corrected, neither does "Freundin", "sehen" is another on (but it does try to capitalize the "s"). So it's whatever I get I guess, sometimes it likes German, other times it doesn't.

Again the error was due to autocorrect, I knew I wrote "meine", like I said in my other post it sometimes likes German while other times it doesn't.

And yeah I'm a little more confused now on word order.

Oh, okay now I understand your question better, I keep pronouncing Stuttgart with an "s" sound instead of an "sh" sound, I keep doing that with those types of words, "Sterne" is another one that I'm misprouncing as an "s" sound instead of the "sh" sound even though I hear that word a lot because it is part of a the title of a song I like and I hear it in the song. I'll eventually get to pronouncing these words correctly.