Languages and the future

[Churchill]

Scratches head for decent example...

Standard example from here:

Legen Sie das Buch auf den Tisch. (accusative)
Put/Lay the book on the table. (motion towards)
Das Buch liegt auf dem Tisch. (dative)
The book's lying on the table. (location)

I'll post a better example when I come across one.



You'd be surprised how many native speakers get the gender wrong. Just last week I saw die Wort in the middle of a Powerpoint slide (just to complicate things, some words have different meanings according to their gender, but this isn't one of them).

Der Wagen, so einen neuen Wagen

The thing is, if you ask a native German speaker they often aren't conscious of the grammar rules. It's simply a matter of what sounds right.

"All your data are belong to us" - As an exercise, how would you describe the mistakes in this sentence in grammatical terms?

Language and how the brain processes it is quite a complex subject.

I learned my German from "Warlord" and "Battle" - Hande Hoch Tommy!!! For you ze var is over!

[Sysman]

Anyway, these extra inflections give the language more meaning, English isn't really that expressive, other than by vocab...

I think you are onto something there. English has a fantastic vocabulary to compensate.

"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighboring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."

[VectraMan]

Legen Sie das Buch auf den Tisch. (accusative)
Put/Lay the book on the table. (motion towards)
Das Buch liegt auf dem Tisch. (dative)
The book's lying on the table. (location)

But the location vs motion thing is not really direct vs indirect objects (are they both indirect in that example? Not sure). Wasn't there also a motion case that got merged into the Accusative?

In my French class recently the teacher tried to explain about direct and indirect objects, and got 14 blank looks (everyone except me). Because I've also been learning German, I understand this stuff, but nobody else had a clue despite us all using the same in English every day. And in French it's easy because the indirect objects come after a preposition.

But anyway, ich gehe in die Kneipe. Später werde ich in der Kneipe sein.

[Sysman]

I learned my German from "Warlord" and "Battle" - Hande Hoch Tommy!!! For you ze var is over!

The Eagle and similar for me. The big surprise for me was that you don't hear Schweinehund or Donner und Blitzen in real life.

Ooh, just come across some German Misnomers, Myths and Mistakes, including Hitler didn't really snub Jesse Owens.

Jesse Owens: “Hitler didn't snub me—it was [FDR] who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram.” - quoted in Triumph, a book about the 1936 Olympics by Jeremy Schaap