I can't believe I'm doing this voluntarily
May. 6th, 2017 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitToday I have spent a couple of decades hours making flashcards for German possessive pronouns, and crying.
Okay, not literally crying, but crying on the inside.
German pronouns CHANGE. They change like Mystique on a busy day. First of all, they agree with the subject, like in English but more so, so there are different forms for my, your (singular), his, her, its, our, your (plural), and their. But then they also agree with the object in gender and number, so there are different forms of "mine" depending on whether the thing that's yours is masculine or feminine or neuter or whether you have more than one.
That's already more complicated than the other languages I know well, English and French. French has both kinds of agreement, but at least it doesn't distinguish between, say, "her book" and "his book" (both are "son livre," because the pronoun agrees in gender only with the object).
But are German possessive pronouns content to be slightly more complicated than French? No, they are not! The bastards also have four cases! And the case declensions vary, of course, according to the gender and number of the object.
Here, have a chart so you can feel my pain.
Okay, yeah, the variation is regular and I will get the hang of it with practice. But my brain was not prepared for this. Plus, in the Duolingo lesson tree all this came right after a cool fun thing, the -zeug ending which means roughly "stuff" and which you find in words like Spielzeug, "toy," or literally "play stuff." I was briefly charmed.
Okay, not literally crying, but crying on the inside.
German pronouns CHANGE. They change like Mystique on a busy day. First of all, they agree with the subject, like in English but more so, so there are different forms for my, your (singular), his, her, its, our, your (plural), and their. But then they also agree with the object in gender and number, so there are different forms of "mine" depending on whether the thing that's yours is masculine or feminine or neuter or whether you have more than one.
That's already more complicated than the other languages I know well, English and French. French has both kinds of agreement, but at least it doesn't distinguish between, say, "her book" and "his book" (both are "son livre," because the pronoun agrees in gender only with the object).
But are German possessive pronouns content to be slightly more complicated than French? No, they are not! The bastards also have four cases! And the case declensions vary, of course, according to the gender and number of the object.
Here, have a chart so you can feel my pain.
Okay, yeah, the variation is regular and I will get the hang of it with practice. But my brain was not prepared for this. Plus, in the Duolingo lesson tree all this came right after a cool fun thing, the -zeug ending which means roughly "stuff" and which you find in words like Spielzeug, "toy," or literally "play stuff." I was briefly charmed.
