drp9341 wrote:I always hear people talking about grammatical cases as if they are the devil. However in my experience so far, the only difficult thing about grammatical cases is that it multiplies the number of words that a learner must learn.
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What do you guys think? What do people here who have mastered languages like Hungarian, Finnish or Estonian think? Am I just optimistic and "seeing the glass as half full," or have other people come to these conclusions also?
I've increasingly come to the view of grammatical cases being considered difficult in language learning as a sign of the domination of views by native speakers of English and most Romance languages, abetted by native speakers of languages which have extensive declension. I roll my eyes at Finns and Hungarians who boast how inpenetrable their native languages are to outsiders because of the volume of cases used (14-15 and 16+ respectively), to say nothing about say Poles or Russians who do similarly by trotting out
their native languages' case systems which have fewer cases but must account for gender and number.
I'm pretty much of Josquin's view that the difficulty in learning grammatical case arises in using the endings correctly (including declension per the rules) which goes beyond mere knowledge of the specific endings or the ability to regurgitate declined forms isolation. This difficulty is dependent on one's linguistic background, although I'd argue that a conceptual understanding of case only helps so much because not all case systems are equal.
E.g. “I live
in a big city /
in a small vıllage”.
- Finnish:
Asun isossa kaupungissa / pienessä kylässä (case ending is
-ssa/-ssä and is attached to both the attributive adjective and the noun. Moreover the ending here is attached to a stem which can differ from the basic form because of consonant gradation (
kaupunki "city" +
-ssa =
kaupungissa "in a/the city" i.e.
-nk- ~ -ng- or vowel alternation
pieni "small' +
-ssä =
pienessä "in a/the small..." i.e.
-i ~ -e)
- German:
Ich wohne in einer großen Stadt / in einem kleinen Dorf (case ending is applied to the attributive adjective and indefinite article but is dative feminine for
Stadt but dative neuter for
Dorf)
- Hungarian:
Egy nagy városban / Egy kis faluban lakom (case ending
-ban/-ben signals inner or interior position but is attached here to the nouns only whose respective forms don't differ from the basic form. As tarvos' has noted, adding a case ending in Hungarian can sometimes change a stem's final vowel e.g.
alma "apple" vs.
almában "in(side) (an) apple".)
- Polish:
Mieszkam w wielkim mieście / w małej wiosce (case endings for locative go on the attributive adjectives and the nouns, and reflect gender and number. Furthermore, adding the case ending can trigger changes to the stem itself. The changes here are palatalization and in the case of
miasto a vowel alternation too.
Miasto "city/town" and
wioska "village" become
w mieście and
w wiosce "in a/the city" and "in a/the village" respectively)
- Turkish:
Büyük bir şehirde / Küçük bir köyde yaşıyorum (case ending
-da/-de signals innter or interior position but rather like Hungarian is attached to nouns only (here:
şehir "city",
köy "village") whose stems don't differ from the respective basic forms. However, the stem can differ from the basic form as the case ending can set off changes to certain final consonants of a stem e.g.
balık "fish" vs.
balığın ~ "of a fish" (genitive))
Let's not muddy it further with adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) since they can impose requirements of the associated nominal to bear a case ending although the degree to which this applies varies from one language to the next. Some Hungarian postpositions are a bit like English prepositions in that the associated noun/adjective stays in the basic form (or nominative).
I also agree with a previous post that extensive declension allows more scope for speakers to use word order to convey emphasis, definiteness, quantity, rather than just make a sentence intelligible by signalling how the elements relate to each other. It sometimes reduces the need for adverbs, particles, auxillaries or pronouns, which has also been mentioned.
I think that a good way to start to teach grammatical case and whittle down the prejudice against heavy declension is to explain to the learner what's going on before plunging into details. Taking a monoglot of say English or French, it'd be helpful to compare short sentences from a strongly analytic language with those from a fusional or agglutinative language, and explain that despite the differences, a native speaker encountering the sentences would draw almost the same, if not identical messages from the sentences. I know that the first time I learned Latin in high school, I had no friggin' idea of what the teacher was talking about with the "dative", "ablative" or "vocative". It wasn't until I started learning Hungarian on my own not long after that I finally got the idea of how and why grammatical case can be used especially when comparing heavily agglutinative Hungarian sentences with their semantic counterparts in the heavily analytic English versions. I suspect that a monoglot of a Sinitic language would also find grammatical case baffling and a chore to figure out.
For more discussion on paying due care to learning any case system as a language uses it (including a few examples from Uralic and Slavonic languages) see the following:
Words to the wise from HollandAre we talking about the same thing?The original purpose of "dative" verbs