Gender Correctness *
It grieves me to keep coming back to the notion that German
is really a hard language to learn. Actually, next to English,
it's . . . , well,
it's about the same. The bright side: you got pretty good at English.
The
hard part we'll deal with in this lesson is gender. German nouns have
three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.
This distinction seems to serve no useful purpose whatsoever except to
confuse. I mean (for Pete's sake!), in German your arm is masculine,
your wrist is neuter, your hand is feminine, your knuckle is neuter,
and when you get to your finger you're back at masculine again. A woman
is feminine, a girl is neuter; a cat is feminine, a dog is masculine.
So we shall despair of trying to make sense of the situation, but try
to find what order we can, and just make the best of it.
Another bright spot: For the most part, we'll be learning phrases that use each word in a way that reveals its gender. This is much easier than memorizing a list of nouns and their genders, as you'll see.
None of this would matter much if it didn't affect the—— the
word the, that is. The gender
of a noun determines the form of any article (a or the) or adjective that
precedes it. This is known as "agreement" of nouns
and adjectives.
We're not going to try to deal with this all at once. Instead, we'll
learn about gender as a child does, a little bit at a time from experience.
We'll discover a few guiding principles that will help along the way.
A quick, hopefully helpful, aside: In the last lesson I raised the question
of why certain colors were used for certain words. I want to try a little
experiment with you. When I was learning German from a black-and-white
textbook, this wasn't an option, but on the Web it is.
Since a big part of our memory is visual, I wonder if it might help when
learning nouns to see the words in colors that correspond to their genders.
It's just a theory, and an experiment. I'd really like to get feedback
on the idea based on your experience. So from here on, we'll color words
that depend on gender according to whether they're masculine, feminine,
or neuter.
So let's learn some things about gender. Here are the third person personal
pronouns
| memorize |
masculine |
feminine |
neuter |
plural |
| English |
he |
she |
it |
they |
| German |
er |
sie |
es |
sie |
Articles, definite and indefinite
| memorize |
masculine |
feminine |
neuter |
plural |
| English |
the |
the |
the |
the |
| German |
der |
die |
das |
die |
| English |
a |
a |
a |
|
| German |
ein |
eine |
ein |
|
As you can see, there is some order here to make it easier to learn.
Let's pick up a few other important words here, where it's easy to tie
in. The words mein (my) and dein (your)
are treated exactly like the word ein.
| English |
my |
my |
my |
my |
| German |
mein |
meine |
mein |
meine |
Moving on to some phrases to help this sink in, and to pick up a few
useful words:
| phrase |
pronunciation tips and reminders |
Die Blume ist
schön.
The flower is pretty. |
dee bloom-uh ...
sch is always sh |
Die Suppe ist
nicht heiß.
The soup is not hot. |
dee zoop-uh ...
A new letter! Meet the ß (the
name of the letter is pronounced ess-tset—the German pronunciation
of the letters s (ess) and z (tzet) .
It is always pronounced like our s.
It is often written, especially on non-German typewriters, as ss.
It is not used in Swiss German, and its use is declining in Germany
and Austria since spelling rules adopted in 1996 essentially eliminated
it from the schools. It's not really important that you know when
to use it — you can just use ss — as it is to know what
it means when you see it used by others. For more, see this
article. |
Der Hund ist
groß.
The dog is big. |
Hund has a good example of short u, as in foot.
There's another important lesson here: Consonants at the end of
a word often have a "harder" sound than when they are
within a word. A technical way to put it: if it uses the vocal
cords within a word, it often doesn't when at the end.
b becomes p
d becomes t
g becomes k
So, to say Hund, start with hunt,
then change the vowel to match oo in foot.
|
Mein Zimmer ist
kalt.
My room is cold. |
Remember the ts sound of z. |
Die Frau gab mir einen
Kuss.
The woman gave me a kiss. |
Two new sounds: au is
like ou in ouch; final b is
like p.
Dee frow gahp mir eye-nen Kuss.
|
* Another personal rant, a common one among copyeditors: Facts: People
are of the female sex or the male
sex. Ditto animals—and
plants—which reproduce sexually. Nouns
have gender. People
do not have gender, and nouns do not have sex. (So where do baby nounlets
come from?)
Some of us remember a time when
we filled out forms requiring personal information that asked for our
sex. At some point—on the scale of linguistic evolution, it was actually
in the fairly recent past—the word sex acquired
a snicker quotient that made it too risqué to use in public, because
it had also taken on the baggage of referring to the act of copulation.
And so the polite (puritanical?), though incorrect, word for referring
to maleness, femaleness or the lack thereof became gender.
So, in this language tutorial, gender refers
always to an attribute of a noun. In English, the gender of a noun and the sex
of the thing that it refers to usually correspond; in
German, as we shall frustratingly see, we can never
make this assumption.
Some reading practice
It's a little tough to practice reading when we know just one form of
one verb, and only the nominative case of a few nouns. But let's try some
different combinations of what we've seen so far, just for practice. There's
almost nothing new below, but it
might require a review of the vocabulary and the translations of the earlier
lessons. Read the text aloud to help with the eye-ear-mouth coordination
we need if we're going to converse. Some of these sentences make sense,
some don't.
Meine Frau ist kalt. Sie hat einen
Schal. Und sie ist
schön.
Meine Hand ist
heiß .
Die andere Hand ist nicht heiß. Sie
ist warm. Since hand is feminine, "she" is warm.
Mein Hund heißt
Angus. Er hat ein Auge.
Sein Auge ist braun. Winston, mein anderer Hund,
hat noch zwei Augen.
Sie sind auch braun. Meine Hunde haben drei
braune Augen. My dog
is named Angus. He has one eye. His eye is brown. Winston, my other dog,
has still two eyes. They are also brown. My dogs have three brown eyes.
Das Jahr hat zwölf Monate, zweiundfünzig
Wochen, dreihundertfünfundsechzig
Tage.
Meine Schwester ist achtzehn Jahre alt , und sie ist nicht
schön.
Die Schweinesuppe hat
eine kleine Bierblume. Hmm
. . . My
pig soup has a little beer-flower. Yes,
our vocabulary is a little overstretched. The next lesson will help a
lot. (Beer-flower is NOT a word. Don't look for one while in Germany — or anywhere else! And Schweinesuppe? Don't even ask.)
