When I was presented with the chance to try new things to fulfil my unrestricted electives in university, I jumped at the chance to learn a new language so that I finally would have something to say to my extended family members when they say, “Oh how nice! So how many languages do you speak?” when they find out that I major in linguistics. Linguistics is more of the scientific study of language and its intricacies rather than just learning multiple languages, but I thought it wouldn’t do me any harm to be able to humour them anyway.
On a more serious note, I had been wanting to learn a new language because I always felt like languages were the key to a multitude of experiences. There is also that famous quote that goes “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” The quote expresses that people would also view you in a more positive light if they saw that you were making an effort to learn and practise their language.
Learning a new language would be able to open so many doors and introduce you to a variety of things, an example would be media consumption in that language (How many of us watch K-dramas religiously despite not understanding the language but relying on subtitles? I’ve heard so many stories of people’s elation when they realised they didn’t need those subtitles as much as they used to!)
I was so excited and there were so many options to choose from, I made the decision to learn the German language. German was one of the language modules offered in my university, with some of the more popular ones being French, Korean and Japanese. I walked into the German classroom for my first lesson 30 minutes late, because I was a freshman and I couldn’t find anything around the university. Unfortunately, I also didn’t have the forethought to survey the place beforehand. I was filled with adrenaline (both from running up 3 flights of stairs trying to be less late and also because I was going to learn something new) and ready to begin my journey into the great unknown of the German language.
Alas, it didn’t take long for cracks to appear in my resolve. There was this completely new aspect that German had and it was called grammatical gender. I knew that languages such as French and Spanish used grammatical gender as well but German didn’t just have 2 grammatical genders, it had three! The third one was called ‘neuter’ and it meant that the word had a neutral gender, ie. neither masculine nor feminine.
Coming from a background where both the languages I spoke – English and Tamil – didn’t make use of gendered nouns, I found myself in completely unfamiliar territory. There were sure to be over a thousand nouns in the language, was I meant to remember the gender for every single one of them? To my dismay, the answer was ‘yes’. I wasn’t sure how to go about learning gendered nouns because I never had to do that for Tamil and English. In the English language we have the all-encompassing ‘the’ as a definite article, and Tamil works a different way by not quite having an equivalent for ‘the’. In German however, we have ‘der’, ‘die’ and ‘das’, all of which translate to ‘the’ in English but in different genders. I found this out the hard way when I thought Google translate could help me with classwork and I ended up with “the, the, the”.
With time (and a lot of guidance from my German teachers), I came to learn that the only way to master grammatical gender was to learn the gender of the noun together with the noun itself. Even though this seemed daunting, it was the most efficient way to get the gender right. Although some word endings would always go with a certain gender, like how words ending with -chen are usually neuter, this was not always a foolproof way to guess because there were always exceptions and special cases. There was also the issue of plural nouns, but fortunately they were always feminine.
The gendered articles also do not follow a fixed form, the case of the noun can affect how it appears in a sentence. Noun cases tell us how a noun is being used in a sentence, whether it’s an object, the subject, or taking another role. Combined with the cases, German has more than just three definite articles. Even though I’ve come a long way from the wide-eyed freshman that I once was, grammatical gender still remains something that stumps me at times despite moving on to higher levels of German.
That being said, it does help to know that statistically most German nouns are feminine, followed by masculine and finally neuter. So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re forced to guess (think: German exams where you don’t have Google to help you), guessing ‘die’ would be the safest option.
I’ve learnt a lot in my journey of studying German and I still have a long way to go, but I’m thankful that I got to experience learning a language that makes use of gendered nouns. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m willing to continue despite the rising number of ‘der, die, das’ crimes I’ve committed. To answer that question from earlier, ‘flower’ is a feminine noun, ‘die Blume’. Of course, if you put it in different cases or add plurality it can become ‘den Blumen’ and ‘der Blume’. They do say practice makes perfect!
This post was written by our intern, Sheetal. Sheetal is a 3rd Year Linguistics & Multilingual Studies student, speaks English and Tamil, and is learning German!
Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!
At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
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