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February 23, 2013 05:29 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Emberblaque
(Post 133398)
The only language I've seriously studied with declension of nouns is Latin, but from what I understand, German has four declensions. Any particular reason conjugation seems more difficult to you than declension? Both seem like complicated sides of the same coin to me (the proverbial coin of inflection, if you will), as a native English speaker, since we indicate case with word order, and indicate person and number with pronouns, so there are considerably less conjugations to remember. Please excuse me if this seems like a tangential question, I've just always wanted to ask a native speaker of German.
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I studied Latin for four years, and it's still important to me as i'm a medical student.
This is right, the German language has 4 cases; nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. It also contains three grammatical genders which is just systemless. There's no rule when to use "der, die o. das". If you want to learn German, you have to learn the gender to each noun.
I also speak Serbian, which has 7 cases. The Finnish language has 15 cases.
I wouldn't say conjugation is harder than declension. We didn't even learn the cases in school properly, only in elementary school for like 2 weeks. Most immigrants struggle with the definite and indefinite genders. You get used to the cases after a while.
English was the first foreign language i learned, the conjugation was more than easy. Many native-German-speakers complain, that the English language has too many tenses, which is true compared to German.
Many people would say that Russian would be difficult. I didn't study Russian, but i could follow a conversation as it's very similar to Serbian.
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