Der, Die, Das: The Secrets of German Gender - Softcover

Vayenas, Constantin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3952481009 ISBN 13: 9783952481004

Verlag: Constantin Vayenas, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The challenge that English-language speakers face if they want to speak German well, is to accurately map German nouns to one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Native German speakers acquire their knowledge of the grammatical gender of German nouns from early on. They are not given formal instruction at school about matching nouns to their correct gender, and the topic is not covered in standard German grammar books. For the same reason, native speakers who give German language lessons to foreigners do not teach their students how to match nouns to their gender: One cannot teach what one has not been taught.This book fills that gap in that it explains, in plain English, the principles that map German nouns to a specific gender. This allows foreign students of German to unlock the gender of entire categories of nouns, thereby enabling students to speak German more confidently.

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Constantin’s quest to improve his German led him to publish a book about the ground-breaking discoveries of the connection between German nouns and their gender. Having studied Greek and Latin – which, like German, also have three genders – he started by looking for similar patterns between German nouns and their gender. It was, however, much easier to identify the gender of Greek and Latin nouns – the clues were in the noun endings. This made the connection between nouns and their gender logical in Greek and Latin. German was different; it was as if it had deliberately been made harder for those outside the tribe. But given his background as a financial markets analyst in London, New York and Zurich, and his interest in a good challenge, Constantin assumed that there had to be some logic between German nouns and their gender. This issue was simply too important for the ability of a tribe to communicate with its members for it to be arbitrary. Accordingly, he kept a notebook of each and every pattern that he found linking German nouns to their gender. He found numerous blogs on the topic, but noticed that whereas they typically provided examples of patterns, they never seemed to explain the exceptions to the pattern. It was the exceptions that had always interested him. There had to be a reason for the exceptions. The more he focused on the exceptions, the more new patterns he discovered. For example, whereas it is widely known that German nouns ending on ‑ung or ‑heit tend to be feminine, the reason why Schwung should be masculine and Fahrenheit neuter, requires some work to solve the riddle. Thus, the exceptions reveal the insights that single-syllable nouns (Schwung) tend to be masculine, whereas many units of scientific measurement (Fahrenheit) are neuter. Once we know that, we can do some reverse engineering to find more patterns. Focusing on these “exceptions” reveals the important link between German gender and similar categories of nouns. Once we know the significance of similar categories, many pieces of the gender puzzle fall into place. So we now know that there is, after all, a logic to the link between German nouns and their gender – it was just waiting to be discovered. What started out as Constantin’s hand-written notes to himself, led to the publication of this book, which has been a top-seller on Amazon, and has been translated into several languages – including German. The book was featured at the Frankfurter Buchmesse in October 2018.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Constantin Vayenas
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 3952481009
• ISBN 13: 9783952481004
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 148
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg