Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.
Annan:
Quote from: ZeKat on 2009 July 03, 19:23:25
Quote from: Annan on 2009 July 03, 18:43:56
If Danish is anything like Swedish, there are rules for which words are en or et/ett, but they haven't been taught in ages. My grandmother was taught it when she had grammar in school (she's born in 1919), but I don't think my mother was. In my grammar classes the teachers said it "didn't matter", "because everyone knows it by sound", which makes me curious of how they teach it to immigrants (my guess is they don't, BTW).
Yeah, I am pretty sure that there are rules somewhere, but I have never ever actually heard of them. Not even when I lived in the Faeroe Islands where Danish is taught as a second language. So they aren't taught, native Danes are just expected to know.
Fake edit: I went and looked it up, and there is NOTHING about en/et in my huge Danish dictionary. They must expect you to learn them by heart, since every single word is marked as either en or et, but there is no rule mentioned.
The closest I can get to a rule is that things with a gender is "en", the rest is it. So a man, woman, cow, girl and so on, is "en". A house or a tree is "et". However, a sheep is also "et", and a rock is "en", so the rule only takes you so far...
I am pretty sure immigrants are taught to look every single word up and memorize it, really.
Quote from: Tsarina on 2009 July 03, 19:14:14
The Danish Wikipedia is generally very bad.
Well, there's too few editors. There's only like 6 million people who speak Danish worldwide. Most Danes I know only use the English one anyway, except the ones who are 12 and no speak no English.
Possibly there are three types of nouns, then: gendered (en), non-gendered (et) and irregular nouns (whatever the fuck they want to be).
Lavandula:
Quote from: Liz on 2009 July 02, 16:36:31
I've been trying to learn Cantonese for 2 years now, an effort made more difficult by some of the local population. Certainly there are plenty of people, native Cantonese speakers, who encourage my efforts, but strangely it's often seen as something of a novelty that I would bother trying to learn to speak the predominant language where I live. This attitude puzzles me.
Regardless of what language I use to address someone here, many people will insist on responding in English. This is usually done in an attempt to be helpful, and while I appreciate the sentiment, it's hard to practice the local language when half the locals I meet are "too helpful" to speak to me in Cantonese. Others who reply in English appear to be doing much the same thing I am, taking the opportunity to practice a non-native tongue. In a third scenario, the person to whom I'm speaking is so enthusiastically impressed with my meager smattering of lingual skillz that regardless of what I just said or asked, the answer I receive is, "Wah, so good your Cantonese la!" Say thanks in Cantonese, begin to ask the question again. "You live here long time?" Two years, begin 3rd attempt at question. "Why you not speak Mandarin? Is much easier la." And there goes my bus. Thank you for your assistance.
It's so good to know that you're trying to learn Cantonese! Some of my friends have been in HK for over 10 years and they've never thought about learning it. I guess because a lot of us can speak English, my friends don't find the need to learn it.
PirateFaafy:
Quote from: rufio on 2009 July 03, 17:55:12
Quote from: Jelenedra on 2009 July 03, 17:45:58
Can be translated as follows and still be correct because "NO" doesn't have an English counterpart. It's merely a possessive marker.
"Cat of love"
"Cat's love"
No, try "love of cat(s)". That is exactly what it means. Those first two translations you gave are, in fact, wrong.
And, as I said before, the fact that you cannot translate literally word-for-word is the case with every single language.
ETA: For anyone who was actually interested in the Cantonese questions (yeah, right), this is apparently what is going on.
The headpeen has managed to start being inconsistent within the space of a single post. That must be some sort of new record.
How many topics did we manage to go through over the course of this thread?
rohina:
Quote from: PirateFaafy on 2009 July 05, 23:15:23
The headpeen has managed to start being inconsistent within the space of a single post. That must be some sort of new record.
You would think so, but no.
rufio:
Quote from: PirateFaafy on 2009 July 05, 23:15:23
The headpeen has managed to start being inconsistent within the space of a single post. That must be some sort of new record.
I fail to see how the two statements are inconsistent. The first is pointing out that (rake in face!) X no Y cannot ever be translated as X of Y/Y's X (e.g. Neko no ai -> Cat of Love). The second statement is a general truism about all langauges.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page