Because German has a gender for everything - unlike english. So they have 3 ways to say 'the' and due to this also a bunch to say everythign else related to the word. I never figured out why all windows are female, all cars are neutral and all dogs are male (I think). Just seems unnessesarily complicated to me. French and other latin based languages are the same but only male/female.
Ah ok, thanks
Damn it, now I'm gonna have to go back and colour-code gender words![]()
But that's because you're a native speaker!
We have to learn a language based on another language, which, to us, has normal rules as in pronounciation etc.
In Dutch, a vowel is always pronounced the same wey, exceptions excluded, thich are mostly foreign words.
In English however...
Just read/read as an example.
Nope, it's "das Fenster", so it's neutral. And to make even harder there's a difference between the real and the grammatical gender.
If your dog is female, you say "der Hund" (the dog, male) or "sie" (she, female).
The most annoying case of a difference between real and grammatical gender might be the following one:
"Mädchen", the word for "girl" is a diminutive
(to "Maid", in english the best translation might be "wench", it's archaic and no one really says it),
and all of them are neutral, so grammatically all girls are neutral. If you're talking about a girl, you say "das Mädchen" (the girl, neutral), and if there is a personal pronoun later in the same sentence, it's "es" (it, neutral), because it's referring to the neutral word "Mädchen".
If there is a relative pronoun referring to the same girl one sentence later, it's "sie" (she, female), because the word it refers to is "mädchen", which means a female person, a she.
Did you understand it all?
Why?
![]()
I guess, sometimes the rules are a little odd ;p
I guess that goes for every language, you just need to learn some stuff outside of rules.
I don't. But then again, my surrounding language here isn't Dutch. So I'm kind of "stuck" in my own.'s morgens/middags/avonds is getting less common over here I guess (in the past few years). I usually say "in de ochtend" rather than " 's morgens"
(same goes for middag and avond)
time for the beergarden now!
Rules are ment to be broken right?!![]()
depends on the amount of beer...![]()