Kartoffelbrei

I think the biggest problem for most people is,
that everything has a gender in German.
You say "Der Tisch" (the table, but the Der implicates, that the table is a dude), or "Die Socke" (the sock, implicating that the sock is a girl), or "Das Okapi" (implicating, that the okapi is a neutrum. which it actually isn't)




did you know... that the German language has 3 expressions for the ocean, and every expression has a different gender?
It's:
Das Meer
Die See
Der Ozean

cool, huh?

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Abra Kadabra,
3 x schwarzer Kater!


~Todos hablan de la mar, pero en ella nunca estan~

Isbjørn

Yeah, we have the same problem in Norwegian. However, Norwegian really is two written languages. There's Bokmål, which basically is modified Danish, and also the one written most often. Then there's Nynorsk, which translates to Neo-Norwegian, and resulted from the work of some pissed-off poets back in the 1800s who thought that just writing a slightly different version of Danish wasn't worthy enough for them, so they rebelled by writing a couple of dialect words in their poems and plays (yes, that sparked a lot of controversy). The "father" of Nynorsk is Ivar Aasen, who travelled around the country collecting words, and made a new grammar system based on spoken dialects and sometimes even the Old Norse language.

To the point: In Norwegian we have three forms of nouns, called male, female and "neutral". In Bokmål there is close to no difference between male and female, and writers of Bokmål tend to only differentiate between the two while speaking. But in nynorsk there are three articles as opposed to two: "ein" for male, "ei" for female and "eit" for neutral. Also, instead of using a single word like "the" as a definite article, we use endings: "-en" for male, "-a" for female and "-et" for neutral. For the word "that", we use "den" when it's male or female and "det" when it's neutral, and for the word "this", we use "denne" when it's male or female and "dette" when it's neutral.

Just like in German, there's no logic behind which words are male, female or neutral, but according to my mother (who knows German), it's often the same words as in German. I've heard that Norwegian is really hard for immigrants to learn, and I think I know why.

Also, I'm pretty sure this is the longest post I've ever written on these forums that wasn't in the journal section, haha.

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Kartoffelbrei

"dette" actually sounds like the Berlin "ditte", which actually means the same thing. It's really fascinating how similar Norwegian is to German I always wanted to learn a scandinavian language, but Norwegian is so far on top of my plan, as it's the most beautiful northern language (finnish is beautiful, too..but by the sake of ****: saying "perkele" instead of "faen" ?!)

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Abra Kadabra,
3 x schwarzer Kater!


~Todos hablan de la mar, pero en ella nunca estan~

Isbjørn

As far as I'm concerned, Finnish is not a Scandinavian language. It's not even in the Germanic language group. It's very different from Norwegian and German, and practically impossible to understand. At a summer camp I was forced to improvise a rap based on the back of a Finnish toothpaste tube. Embarrassing, but people laughed so at least I spread joy.

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Kartoffelbrei

That.is.mighty.awesome!

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Abra Kadabra,
3 x schwarzer Kater!


~Todos hablan de la mar, pero en ella nunca estan~

Isbjørn

It turned out as merely half-rhythmic reading, though

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Scarlett O'Hara

I love both Russian and Arabic. It's because I dated 2 guys from both Russia and Jordan. I think I love the look of Russian men more than the language though.

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Kartoffelbrei

I really don't know about arabic :/ I mean the scripting actually looks awesome,
and some of it sounds cool, but there are too many guttural sounds in there for my ears.

But Russian.......Ya I might also just dig the girls :P
No, actually the language sounds pretty awesome..
It's like backwards German, lol

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Abra Kadabra,
3 x schwarzer Kater!


~Todos hablan de la mar, pero en ella nunca estan~

Scarlett O'Hara

Arabic sound beautiful. Like for example, yalla means 'come on', walla means 'I swear to God', habibi means 'my love/baby'. If you see the words that are not in script it's easier to speak and follow.

Hehe Russians are so sexy full stop. The language is really hard to learn apparently. They have a lot of words that can't be translated to English.

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Freebase Dali

Nope. I lived in Germany for 6 years and if there were two words to describe how the German language sounds, they'd be, "people choking".

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