2009-07-11

Der die was?

I was given "Der, die, was?: Ein Amerikaner im Sprachlabyrinth" by David Bergmann for my birthday. Since I have a bit of trouble keeping der/die/das sorted out (I mean, come on, we only need "the" in English"), I thought this would be interesting.

And there was some occasional insight, but mostly it was a biography of David Bergmann. A pretty boring biography of a guy who learns German and moves to Germany. The chapter headings are good - they sum up the problems Americans have with German. But kept hoping the content would get better.

It didn't.

at 22:56

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3 comments:

André said...

you can do it even more elegant using latin languages where you feel the sex of a word just like: luna, strada etc. looks better than "der", "die", "das" etc. those things just... are horrible like O(n) = a to the power of n!

Jul 13, 2009, 8:41:00 PM
Anonymous said...

Well, there's still the text by Mark Twain about "The Awful German Language", which makes me laugh harder every time I read it, and I'm German.
Check it out here: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html and tell me if something has changed in the past 100 years.

Jul 23, 2009, 2:24:00 AM
WiseWoman said...

No, if anything, it has gotten worse with all these American words that have snuck into German and no one knows if they are der/die/das-or-was. Then they argue the merits of der Modul vs. das Modul.

Jul 24, 2009, 12:04:00 AM

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