jeff_lindqvist wrote:I've met natives who referred to the cases as Wer-Fall, Wessen-Fall, Wem-Fall and Wen-Fall.
That's not a bad thing (but it still doesn't necessarily solve the order issue). We do this in Czech too.
Vast majority of the Czech natives doesn't remember what is nominativ and what is instrumentál. But people tend to remember (and many even apply, in case of need) the questions. Just asking with the pronouns is a good solution, based both on some understanding of the grammar explicitely (mostly forgotten by most, but it still counts), and from tons of normal exposure.
1.kdo,co; 2.koho, čeho; 3.komu, čemu;4.koho, co;
5.pádem voláme, oslovujeme (that's an annoying one, there aren't a simple interrogative pronouns, just that we call and address others with this); 6. o kom, o čem;7. s kým, s čím
kanewai wrote:Rant away. I'm having the same frustration with Greek. Some courses don't want to confuse the student with grammar so they actually make up their own terms, which makes it difficult to transition smoothly between courses. It's almost deliberately annoying.
Yes! Good I am not the only one, who finds that most attempts to not confuse the learners end up confusing learners much more! The problem in many coursebooks I know is usually chopping the grammar in too small pieces, so that the bigger picture gets totally lost. So, if you present 4.case in unit 2, 3.case in unit 4, you make partial tables with only some, it is bound to be a chaos.
And why do they invent their own terminology, that's horrible. And why do they do it in Greek? Isn't the terminology sort of greco-latin? So why?!
These are some of the real reasons, why so many learners hate grammar learning. I insist that most people can only profit from some explicit grammar learning, most of us are not too efficient with just comprehensive input or example memorisation. But then some authors, teachers, and publishers decide for such a sabotage.
PeterMollenburg wrote:This is in a similar vein to language courses such as Hugo ... in 3 Months creating what they call 'imitated pronunciation'. If you're going to go to all that trouble why not just use the standardised IPA? At least then it would be useful for other resources and even other languages and not open to different interpretations.
Additionally, it also reminds me of the Norwegian courses (perhaps most) that completely ignore tone. I want to attempt to sound Norwegian or at least have the option to. If you wanna save time, sure don't learn it, but for the rest of us at least have it in your course so that we can choose whether we use it or not!
I dread the day I decide to learn German...
"imitated pronunciation"
Well, there are alternatives to IPA, such as relying more heavily on audio without phonetic trascription, or it sometimes makes sort of sense to make a transcription based on the supposed native language of the learner (but this is fortunately rarer and rarer). But Hugo seems to have gone much further away from the common sense than others.
Well, many authors think the learners are actually stupid, so giving us any choice would just scare us away. And teachers will use the same approach and later just really believe a learner cannot learn such difficult "details". Well, not if they have no resource.
...............
Not sure whether I've written about my sis switching to German at school. It was due to the teacher being a total unprofessional moron, who not only teaches badly (chaos, mistakes taught, lack of progress, lack of clear idea on what is really taught etc) but also let the animosity get so far, that my sister could either answer badly and be treated like an idiot, or answer correctly and be treated like a cheater.
My younger sister is much happier with German now, I'm so glad dad convinced the school to let her switch languages. Don't get me wrong, she isn't too thrilled to learn anything these days (the covid world added to various other issues. Demotivation seems to be a worldwide problem now). But she appreciates exactly the fact, that her coursebook is easier to use than the French one, that the teacher actually teaches and tests grammar and translation, and that she can see some progress.
Yesterday, she got B for a bigger test, I'm proud of her! Yes, it is clear that the teacher really wanted to be kind and for sis to succeed, it could have been harder. It will be a challenge to catch up with the rest of the group, but the motivation to get rid of the stupid and mean cow that "teaches" French is very strong. The German teacher really cares about the students and about teaching well, and it makes a world of a difference. It is still not enough, catching up with a class requires a lot of other support (self study, also an external class that approaches it a bit differently because sis doesn't want to purely self study, and so on. And our "help, what does the textbook mean" calls
)
Really, why are so many French teachers in Czech schools so stereotypical? Dumb, not that good even at French, flooding people with chaos of copies instead of sticking to a good book, and always blaming failure either on the students or on the difficulty of the etherical and emotion filled French language. Why can't they be more like the stereotypical German teachers? I've heard the same description of a French teacher far too many times! A good French teacher is very rare in my country, most are just morons, who want to appear romantic and elite or something.
Another kid in my sister's situation would be excited to learn French. To learn a language of a country they have a family member in, who can welcome them for some holidays, who will share their fun library, etc. Nope. Instead, she hates French now. Congrats, teacher, great job as usual.
So, there are two main points:
1.learning out of spite sometimes works the best
2.I need to really work on my German, not only for my carreer, but also to be good enough for the consultations