Back to the roots and water them with coffee

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Cavesa
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jun 22, 2021 7:36 pm

The YA books are a good point, thanks. The kids' books are perhaps a bit too much, I'll see.

Nogon wrote:When I went to school in Germany many years ago, we learned about cases in (I think) third grade. Then, the teacher didn't use the latin terminology but German words.
The cases were:
1. Fall - Nominativ
2. Fall - Genitiv
3. Fall - Dativ
4. Fall - Akkusativ

(I still think that that is the "natural" order ;) of cases and get perplexed when any other order is used. I know that for example Iversen (for good reasons) puts the accusative in second place, but NOOOO - that is just WRONG, the little child inside me screams!)


Did the teacher really used some German words instead of this Latin desguised for German? Those might be fun and finish the case confusion apocalypse for me.

But as this is the "natural" order, why do people change it? Why are people even allowed to change the order? :-D :-D :-D It messes up the tables, the explanations, and so on.

It comforts me, that German is not the only twisted one. I've just looked at the Latin ones on wikipedia out of curiosity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_grammar to see whether I remember their order well, or not. I found out (and finally someone writes it clearly in a table! Thanks to the awesome person that made this wiki page!), that there are THREE "official" orders of the cases. I had been taught the traditional one (Gildersleeve and Lodge), Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Akkusative, Vocative, Ablative ages ago.

In Czech, only one order is taught (after all, it is a language much less widely taught than Latin or German. And as it was exhumated in the 19th century, therefore fairly recently, there haven't been that many opportunities to make a mess in this). It is based on the traditional Latin order: Nominativ, genitiv, dativ, akkuzativ, vocativ, lokál, instrumentál. Curiously, most people do not remember the latin based names, but they remember the case questions.

And when it comes to German, various sources really use all the variations, leaving just the Nominative first!!! WHYYYY???!!!
It looks like Nominativ, Genitiv, Dativ, Akkuzativ, are the standard, so why on earth does every resource pick their own variation? Why do they need to be original at all costs?

Lawyer&Mom wrote:The Americans have your back. The Danes, the French and the Brits however cannot be trusted…
https://latin.stackexchange.com/questio ... -the-cases


This thread is awesome and illuminating, thanks for having it found for me!
I loved the explanation of the traditional order (as from some place, in some place, to some place). It helps. and I'll just try to stick to it no matter what maddness any coursebook or grammar book throws my way.

/END RANT
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jun 22, 2021 8:50 pm

I've met natives who referred to the cases as Wer-Fall, Wessen-Fall, Wem-Fall and Wen-Fall.
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tiia
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby tiia » Tue Jun 22, 2021 9:02 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:I've met natives who referred to the cases as Wer-Fall, Wessen-Fall, Wem-Fall and Wen-Fall.

Yep, I guess that's because when you learn about the cases in elementary school, the Latin names may be considered too complicated. It's just the word you need to ask for a word in the specific case. (Because this kind of asking is how natives learn to recognise in which case a word is.)
Genitiv is also named Wes-Fall instead of Wessen-Fall at times, although that isn't even a word...
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Nogon
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Nogon » Wed Jun 23, 2021 1:38 am

Cavesa wrote:Did the teacher really used some German words instead of this Latin desguised for German?

Yes, in third grade we didn't learn the latin terminology for grammar; those we learned some years later. Unfortunately I have forgotten most of the words, but I still remember "Tuwort" (= "do-word", from "tun" = "to do") instead of "Verb". Ah yes, and "Hauptwort" instead of "Substantiv".

By the way, one of my favourite poems also deals with German cases:

Der Werwolf (by Christian Morgenstern)

Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich
von Weib und Kind und sich begab
an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab
und bat ihn: Bitte, beuge mich!

Der Dorfschulmeister stieg hinauf
auf seines Blechschilds Messingknauf
und sprach zum Wolf, der seine Pfoten
geduldig kreuzte vor dem Toten:

„Der Werwolf“ – sprach der gute Mann,
„des Weswolfs, Genitiv sodann,
dem Wemwolf, Dativ, wie man’s nennt,
den Wenwolf, – damit hat’s ein End.“

Dem Werwolf schmeichelten die Fälle,
er rollte seine Augenbälle.
Indessen, bat er, füge doch
zur Einzahl auch die Mehrzahl noch!

Der Dorfschulmeister aber mußte
gestehn, daß er von ihr nichts wußte.
Zwar Wölfe gäb’s in großer Schar,
doch „Wer“ gäb’s nur im Singular.

Der Wolf erhob sich tränenblind –
er hatte ja doch Weib und Kind!!
Doch da er kein Gelehrter eben,
so schied er dankend und ergeben.
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby kanewai » Wed Jun 23, 2021 6:06 am

Cavesa wrote:And when it comes to German, various sources really use all the variations, leaving just the Nominative first!!! WHYYYY???!!!

/END RANT
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.
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby PeterMollenburg » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:17 am

kanewai wrote:
Cavesa wrote:And when it comes to German, various sources really use all the variations, leaving just the Nominative first!!! WHYYYY???!!!

/END RANT
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.


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...
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Cavesa
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jun 23, 2021 11:17 am

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?! :-D

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...

:-D "imitated pronunciation" :-D :-D 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 :-D )

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 :-D :-D :-D
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby gsbod » Wed Jun 23, 2021 12:45 pm

Well I hated German at school because the teacher was so bad the only things I knew after 2 and a half years was that German had three genders rather than the two for French and the sentence "Ich habe ein Meerschweinchen." Even forming the present tense was a mystery and I had no idea that cases were a feature of German. I've also never actually owned a guinea pig. In contrast, most of the French teachers I had at school were actually pretty good (at least by British standards), so 14 year old me loved French and hated German, and thought it would ever be so.

Despite how much I hated German at school, I ended up finding genuine motivation to learn it from scratch as an adult, reaching a respectable level. I actually think I did a better job with German in the end precisely because I didn't learn it at school. So all hope is not lost for your sister and French, if she finds a good reason to learn it later I'm sure she'll make a success of it, and can start blaming her teacher rather than the language.

Apologies if I am missing something fundamental, but I'm not exactly sure why the ordering of cases is such a big issue with German? It's certainly never been an issue for me. I mainly used texts produced in Germany aimed at adult learners, and they all used the terms Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ and Genitiv. I think I have seen some tables where the last two have been switched around but as the tables were always labelled I never found it a problem. Maybe a lack of consistency would be trickier if there were more than 4 cases? Or maybe it's just the fact that I could straight away relate the cases in German to the function of certain particles in Japanese, which was an exceptionally useful mnemonic which will be completely unhelpful for most learners of German?
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Cavesa
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jun 23, 2021 2:27 pm

Yes, it just shows, that kids appreciate clarity and progress in language learning, just like the adults. There would be far fewer disappointed and discouraged learners, if fewer teachers tried to hide away the grammar and any logic from the kids. If teachers and coursebooks stopped underestimating the intellect of the teens, it would be a nice step towards a better world.

gsbod wrote:Apologies if I am missing something fundamental, but I'm not exactly sure why the ordering of cases is such a big issue with German? It's certainly never been an issue for me. I mainly used texts produced in Germany aimed at adult learners, and they all used the terms Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ and Genitiv. I think I have seen some tables where the last two have been switched around but as the tables were always labelled I never found it a problem. Maybe a lack of consistency would be trickier if there were more than 4 cases? Or maybe it's just the fact that I could straight away relate the cases in German to the function of certain particles in Japanese, which was an exceptionally useful mnemonic which will be completely unhelpful for most learners of German?


As I said at the beginning of my rant, I wouldn't mind using just the terminology nominativ, genitive, dativ, akkusativ, and not the order at all. But I cannot. Why? Some resources use only the numbers.

Especially Themen Aktuell, which I review and my sister uses now. So, it doesn't help, that she needs a follow up explanation of what does the book explain about the 3rd case for example. It is rather confusing to have to remember all the time which is which. Which one is the third one. The book does not use the names of the cases in most cases, but the numbers. And some grammar workbooks I've got do it as well. So, I cannot do that. And Themen Aktuell is published in Germany, even though the Arbeitsbuch is bilingual. And if I want to use some of the high quality bilingual tools not published in Germany (and I don't want to toss them away just because of one problem), I need to somehow get used to their terminology and organisation of the grammar too.

And even the resources published in Germany vary in how they order the cases, which removes one of the advantages of the tables, helping the visual memory. Because the order of the cases in the tables varies.

It will not matter anymore, once I get safely past A2, and hopefully once my sister gets there too.
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Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby gsbod » Wed Jun 23, 2021 5:31 pm

You know you're a language nerd when you find yourself searching through every German text you own to see how they deal with information about cases, even though that's all stuff you learned and internalised years ago... :lol:

Everything I've got uses terms based on the Latin case names (either in English or German). Hammer's German Grammar (bilingual English/German) is the only one I have which switches the order in the table to have genitive before dative, everything else is consistent.

I am genuinely curious as to how the case information is presented with numbers in Themen Aktuell - are there any examples you can share?

It is annoying when inconsistent use of terminology gets in the way of learning. I remember one text, possibly the Practice Makes Perfect series, describing das Perfekt as "present perfect" which is incredibly confusing, particularly if you start comparing it to use of the present perfect in English. Past tenses in German are actually pretty straightforward to deal with, especially compared to the Romance languages.
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