German is infuriating. Today we had a quiz. When asked what we were supposed to know for the quiz our professor said “Everything!” Story of my life. We had a list of 121 words. Not only did we get to learn each and every word but we had to know the article for each word. Sounds easy right? Woman= das Man= der and neutral= das. Problem is there is NO actual rule to explain which nouns are feminine, masculine, or neutral. So, a coffee table is der Couchtisch because tisch (table) is masculine. Why is a table masculine you say? Well, I have no idea because the sofa, das Sofa is neutral and lamp, die Lampe is feminine. Also, all nouns have to be capitalized, but not article that goes with it. You have to memorize the articles because the word is almost no good without it. Speaking the language depends on knowing the article. Confused yet? It gets better. Essentially we have to know all those terms including the article that goes with it which has to be memorized because there is no other way to remember them. Then comes the plurals. Not only do we have to memorize all that but we have to know how to make each word plural. There is almost no rules to this either and you can’t just ad an ‘s’ or and ‘es’ at the end of words. You can add an ‘en’ an ‘s’ an ‘n’ an umlaut ‘e’ an umlaut ‘er’ or nothing at all depending on the word. And when you make something plural you have to change the article too. Luckily it always changes to ‘die’ but why in the word would making something plural automatically make it feminine? I ask myself this every day. Also for this quiz we had verbs. You don’t have capitalize or memorize an article for these….you just get to conjugate them. There are 270 irregular verbs in the German language. And for this quiz, after just figuring out how to conjugate normally I had to conjugate about 10 irregular verbs. Our teacher is lovely. Just so she can make sure we learn more efficiently she will count THE WHOLE QUESTION wrong if we:
1) 1) Spell the word wrong
2) 2) Use the wrong article
3) 3) Put the umlaut in the wrong place
4) 4) Don’t capitalize a noun
5) 5) Don’t make it plural correctly
6) 6) Or other random reasons like not using the “best” adjective to describe myself. (I happened to tell her on a test once that I was old. Partly I couldn’t remember a better word and “alt” is easy to remember and partly because in this group, I actually am pretty old)
The best part is…this all is part of a vocab quiz. Just imagine how our tests are. What possessed me to learn German I will never know. I just hope that someday I will look back on this daily torture and think “this made me a better person”…..right.
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