• surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    try memorizing the correct grammatical gender

    Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either. We just start using words. German is the same. Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.

    And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Americans don’t memorize all that shit for English either.

      … because it doesn’t exist in English. Of course you don’t remember things that don’t exist.

      Don’t try and learn it out of a textbook, just start talking and reading.

      Yep. That’s why you can pick out every American stumbling through German even after they spent 20 years in the country, because they can’t get any of the things that you have to memorize right.

      And the best part is you can pronounce their words pretty logically.

      If you think that what they teach in American schools in German, then maybe. But seriously, pronunciation is so not the hardest part about learning languages.

      And as I said, German isn’t even a hard language either. That goes to e.g. Finnish or Hungarian (at least for western languages). But English is an easy mode language.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      What the fuck do you think learning vocabulary by reading is, if not memorization? You’re just doing it subconsciously rather than intentionally.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Language acquisition and rote memorisation aren’t exactly 1:1.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

        It’s like the difference between reading a dictionary and only going forward after you’ve learned a page by heart vs simply starting to read simpler novels even when you don’t understand all the words, and picking it up as you go along. Understanding form context.

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        That’s not memorizing the genders. You see the word, you know the word.

        I know that the Spanish word for table is mesa. I didn’t sit there and think “the base part is mes and the a means it’s female”. The word is just mesa. And la mesa looks right because I’ve seen it. I didn’t think “it needs to be la because it’s feminine”.