German Question

[Joooray]

This whole thread just made me realized how little I know about German grammer, me being a native German speaker. A shame really.

But I guess when it comes naturally, you don't really care too much about why you say it the way you do.

[Husar]

This whole thread just made me realized how little I know about German grammer, me being a native German speaker. A shame really.

But I guess when it comes naturally, you don't really care too much about why you say it the way you do.

I know, neither do I, I don't know English grammar either and I forgot all the latin (and incidentally also german) grammar again. Either I get a "feeling" for it or I'll forget it.

[Joooray]

I know, neither do I, I don't know English grammar either and I forgot all the latin (and incidentally also german) grammar again. Either I get a "feeling" for it or I'll forget it.

Thanks for pointing out that my English spelling is even worse than my German grammar.

The only thing where I really miss not having learned the rules better when I was young is when it comes to punctuation. It sucks to not be sure how to use it and need your girlfriend to take a look and any important text you write.

[Husar]

Thanks for pointing out that my English spelling is even worse than my German grammar.

The only thing where I really miss not having learned the rules better when I was young is when it comes to punctuation. It sucks to not be sure how to use it and need your girlfriend to take a look and any important text you write.

First off, I don't blame you, a lot of english people seem to spell grammar wrong as well, you may have just picked it up from someone thinking he spelled it correctly.
And then at least you have a girlfriend...
What I don't really get in either language is when it's "English" and when it's "english", the built-in spellchecker here wants me to write "English person" but to me it's "english person" since english is used as an adjective of person, if it were just "the English are coming!" then it's a capital E in german since "English" is a noun now but in English (the language, thus capital E, right?) it's a capital E since it's a distinctive name like first and last names or city names, which are also capitalized.
I have to think about this for a second every time I have to decide what to do.
Oh, add to that that I have a tendency to leave the Shift key before pressing the letter key and that may explain any mix you might come across...

[ajaxfetish]

This whole thread just made me realized how little I know about German grammer, me being a native German speaker. A shame really.

But I guess when it comes naturally, you don't really care too much about why you say it the way you do.

Yeah, you don't need to have a conscious understanding of your own grammar. You know it much more completely than I do, it's just subconscious. I couldn't have described English grammar with much accuracy or depth before I started studying it.

What I don't really get in either language is when it's "English" and when it's "english", the built-in spellchecker here wants me to write "English person" but to me it's "english person" since english is used as an adjective of person, if it were just "the English are coming!" then it's a capital E in german since "English" is a noun now but in English (the language, thus capital E, right?) it's a capital E since it's a distinctive name like first and last names or city names, which are also capitalized.

Yeah, we've got different rules for capitalization in the two languages, which throws me off all the time, too. For us, it's proper names that get capitalized, regardless of part-of-speech. I do pretty well capitalizing all my nouns in German, but I always want to capitalize proper adjectives as well, like Amerikanische Studenten.

Ajax