I'm from Bern so I speak Bärndütsch. Once I had a job where I had to go and have Workshops/classes in every Canton. In St. Gallen, Thurgau, Appenzell about 50% of the people couldn't understand and I had to switch to Hochdeutsch. In Zürich there were a lot of Germans living and working there who told me they have no problems understanding Schweizerdeutsch but they understand Züridütsch, not Bärndütsch😅. Many understand every dialect but many don't.
I am from the Berner Oberland and was working in Bern. Our Main office was in Zuerich. Well, I was talking to the Main office and the guy didn’t say anything for a long time. So, finally he asked me: vous parlez francais? Offensichtlich war mein Oberlaender dialect nicht grad einfach zu verstehen….. Schriftdeutsch hilft.
Exactly, what I was thinking about the "Artikels". People can understand you anyway - maybe they can recognize you as a foreigner - but who cares? As a native, I know the "Artikels" make no sense at all and even I stumble form time to time - especially when I was younger - over some stupid differences between german and swiss german (die Giraffe - dr Giraff). Keep going learning German!
I’m an extremely weird case. I grew up in Canada with Swiss parents (I’m actually Swiss). I can speak decent Swiss-German and understand it perfectly. I rebelled against German School as a kid, so I never learned German. It freaks people out that I can speak passable Swiss-German but I can’t speak German. When I’m in Switzerland and I stumble with words people automatically switch to German which is worse for me. Even my relatives forget themselves and do it and then they switch back. I’m really good at a language that is only useful in central Switzerland.
I studied German for years in University, even did a semester in Berlin - I just moved to Zurich and am having a TOUGH time understanding Swiss German lol!
@@jolutien0435 That could be because not all of them speak High German well and are shy. since i sometimes have to speak high german myself with swiss people ;-) so that they understand me i am used to high german
I can only imagine how frustrating the article thing must be, because there's no rhyme or reason to it, you just have to brute force learn them, so to speak.
in old German they did make sense: just like today in modern Italian these words had suffices from which it was easy to determine the article used in them. such features survive to this day in some spoken dialects and in a small selection of words.
Not really. It kinda clicks in you're head after some years spent with the language. Similar to slavik languages you just need to remember that words have genders, most of which make some sense. ...unlike English language where you need to remember not only the meaning of the world, but also it's spelling, which can be completely unnecessary complicated - that's frustrating
I find the Swiss people really amazing. They are a perfect example of a multilingual. I have a friend, who is Swiss, she can of course speak Swiss German, the high German, Perfect English, French, Italian (Perfectly), and could understand everything about Dutch. I mean, most of Swiss people can at least understand and speak 3 languages depending where they come from. It’s truly remarkable 🤩
I'm from switzerland as well. And because my Mom is from the philippines and my parents speak English, I grew up hearing and learning Swissgerman, German, English + a bit of Filipino (Tagalog). And then in elementary school I was being taught English (which was of course pretty easy for me) and French as well. Later on, in High School (or Gymnasium how it is called here) I chose Italian as my main subject (idk if one can call it like that) and Spanish as an additional language subject. So yeah it's really nice and I love to have had the opportunity to learn so many languages and being able to talk to so many people from so many places and countries.
No, I can assure you, most Swiss people can barely speak a secong langugae, except for english. Swissgerman speakers hate to learn french, and swissfrench speakers hate to learn german. We have to learn it in school, but I'd guess about 80% can't speak the language after that. Not even remotely. Which is why they talk in english with each other. Not to speak of italian, because that part almost always just gets forgotten by the others. 😅😂
@@killerpussy84 yeah that's actually pretty sad, I never understood all my classmates who hated french or italian. I've always loved all my language subjects..
I mean we have the opportunity to learn other languages but most people are just not interested in really learning and speaking another language, you know, well
@@killerpussy84 Really? This is something new I am hearing. I thought everyone knew the official languages. (at least the three) Thank you for letting me know about this. 😄
I live in the french speaking part of Switzerland (more precisely in Neuenburg), and all of the residents of the french speaking part has to learn german. I have studied it since 10 years, and I still hate it.
Well, I can assure you swiss germans feel the same about french. A terrible language to speak and to pronounce the words. The writing is made by Lucifer himself with all the silent letters and the total misspronouncing of the vowels. I mean my wife is from a french speaking african country and I chose to learn and speak their native language over french...
@@waynebrady1819 I'm from Vaud, my native language is French and it's really a pain in the ass. I struggle a lot with German but it's quite an easy language to speak
And further east it's called a Grumpra/Grundbira = Grundbirne = ground pear. Everyone seems to have looked at potatoes and had the same thought: "It's looks kinda like this fruit we have a lot of and it grows underground"
Since you mentioned "Heidi": That's pretty special: In the Swiss German dialects, the name "Heidi" is neuter, despite it's a girl's name. It's " 's Heidi" (das Heidi) in Swiss German dialect, not "d' Heidi" (die Heidi). In the famous "Heidi"-novels of Johanna Spyri, it was "das Heidi", at least in the original version. I know a similar case in my parent's dialect (Bregenzerwald, Vorarlberg, Austria): The girl's name "Mikle" (short for "Maria Katharina") is also neuter. I know of girl of this name. She moved to Vienna. She got tired of explaining "das Mikle" to each new acquaintance, so she is called "die Mikle" in Vienna now and still "das Mikle" in her home country and by relatives.
I think in this particular case it is das heidi because she is ein mädchen which has das as an article. If we only knew Heidi in her grown up form we would call her die Heidi.
this is the best rendition of our language I have listened to ..... You really hit it just perfect. Schwyzer duetsch isch ae schwaery Sprach.... And my dialect is one of the hard one to understand...
It's so funny to see this as a swiss person😂but when we get in school it's not like german is a completly foreign language, because we hear german all the time in the TV for example.
I disagree. We learn it from such a young age and we have it so much around that we are thought to not count it as a foreogn language but really I think they all just fuck with us cause I can definitely remember having to study standard German. Heck even when I went to business school my classmates struggled with German class to learn the grammar rules. It's a pitty that swiss German isn't recognized aas its own language so we don't get credit for having to learn standard German but just take it a s a given while the difference is very compareable with how different Portuguese is from Spanish.
Linguistically the swiss german dialects are part of the alamannic dialects which used to be spoken until quite recently everwhere in the Southwest of Germany, in Alsace and in Western Austria and of course in nowadays Switzerland. In fact it is a mixture between middle high german and early new high german. These dialects are therefore older than standard German (new high German) which started to develop in the late 14-hundreds.
Cool Video. I really enjoyed watching it, even more because we live in the same town. Don't worry about the articles too much. We will understand you, even if you don't use them correcly... or just add a "li" as others have already mentioned and it turns neutral.
I agree, with a Swiss German dialect as my mother tongue, I learned it pretty naturally in school but also while reading books and watching TV, where 90% was in Standard German. I even remember playing Superhero as a kid and everyone switching to Standard German as a way to differentiate our “secret identities”. But of course while reading and writing Standard German is second nature to me, I don’t have the same fluidity in Standard German, because I use Swiss German in my daily live. It’s also very hard to speak it without any Swiss accent. Therefore I sometimes even prefer speaking English or French to Standard German.
I think even harder than the articles are the Plural forms. No rules and about 9 ways to put a word in plural: -e, -n, -en, -er, -s, Umlaut and Umlaut combined with -e or -er... or the word just doesn't change....
I learned German in the uni, but I'm a native Spanish speaker, in Spanish we have only two genders, so when I was first introduce for the third German gender it was (and is) difficult to me to remember the articles. For worse, the gender in Spanish sometimes match in German but sometimes no, and it is not easy to rethink the genders of the thinks that you learn as a child (fortunately in Spanish the gender is more or less regular).
Just some comments: You as an US guy should have not much difficulties to learn SwissGerman, as most common expressions are used very close to what you in US-slang are doing when you say I wanna do, I gonna do etc. we just say I(ch) gan go.... what makes Swissgerman difficult for Germans to understand is not that they could not decode most of the words, but that we don't give or make indications as they do from which time we speak. Infact words I thought to be typical Swissgerman you also can hear in Germany even North of the Brats-Equator (river main) - sometimes the meaning changed due to different language dynamics during the past 800years. (unwritten) Grammar-wise: We are mostly using the past present - what again you as an US-English speaking person could follow nicely as it is the same as using the Gerant - the -ing form. Now the complexity is that this could be the future, presence or past and that you only get out of the context of which time context we are really talking about. In order words, our language is highly efficient and therefore requires a bit more context brain powers as other ones. and lastly: It was the language of the old (South)German knights, so we can read and understand the oldest Germans texts out there, written as Song lyrics 1000years ago as the official administrativ language in the middle ages in the Roman Empire of German nation has been Latin. NorthGerman people certainly can't understand that as good as we do. And yes, the words we are using have a blended origins from the times of the Celts, Romans, various German/Allemanic tripes, French & Italian influences and since WW2 also and especially due to the Pop & tech-culture US-English.
Of course there are written forms in some swiss german dialects. Stories, poems and song lyrics ( i.e. Mani Matter). Although there are no official rules for writing words, we have a feeling whether a written word reflects the sound of the spoken word for a specific dialect. In my dialect, baseldytsch, there are even dictionnaries, where you learn, how words are written. But these are „opinions“., not official rules.
If the Kartoffel is an Erdöpfel or Herdäpfel, it's no longer feminine. The whole secret is: There is (nearly) no connection between biological and grammatical gender. A very, very rough rule of thumb is to look at the ending of a word - it it ends with -chen it's mostly neutral, if it ends with an e its more often female than not, for example. But that does not help with -el endings. In the end, however, it's all about etymology and about what article they thought to be appropriate (or sounding about right) _before_ they invented the rules for German language back in the 19th century. Before that it was much like in Switzerland today: every region maintained its own rules. Other german words for the Kartoffel (orig. Tartuffel from ital. tartuficolo, which refers to il tartufo - dem Trüffel / truffle) are Erdapfel (like the Züri word, but without the umlauts: The apple which grows in the earth) or Grumbirre / Krumbir (the pear which grows in the soil). The word potato itself meant originally only the sweet potato (batata, ital. patate douce, dt. Batate), and the third tuber imported from the Americas to Europe is "die Topinambur" (girasole, sometimes also referred to as Rosskartoffel = horse potato). It's all not very logical - but neither are many English quirks.
I really wish people would stop teaching this stuff as if the grammatical genders have anything to do with biological genders. I'm all for renaming the whole concept, because then nobody would even get the idea of thinking about biological gender when trying to figure out what grammatical gender to use.
'Artikels' are somehow by the ending of the word determined, it's kinda hard to explain but after a lot of time you get a feeling what grammatical gender a word has. (And of course there are special cases to make it more complicated) e.g. most words that end with e are feminine :]
The potato only changes its gender abroad the border, because in Swiss German the word for potato "Härdöpfu" (where I'm from, Bern) literally means "earth apple" (what its also called in french "pomme de terre") and not Kartoffel like in High German. And while Kartoffel is female, "earth apple" in High German would also be male, just that it's not a word there... Gender do match like at 99% (Yes there are exemptions like tramway, butter or photo, but not potato!)
I can unterstand your troubel with the articels in german. I am swiss and i love your video. Specally the part with the potato. 👍 I have also a problem in english. Do you have any rules for the pronaunciation of your vocals? I don‘t get it all theese years. 😅
Disagree about there not being any rules or grammar. That they are not written down doesn't mean they don't exist. (There are linguistic treatises on these topics though, but nobody needs to read these. Languages are living things, as long as they are spoken by a large enough population they are fine.) Spelling is a free-for-all, that's true, you just write what you hear (IF you are writing it, which is rare) but as an American you should be familiar with the concept. BTW, English used to have grammatical gender and the next headache you are going to encounter, cases. But it lost it in what I would call a pidginisation when the Anglo Saxons had to communicate with the Danes. English has replaced the role of cases in building of sentences with a rigid word order. As for people from Zurich not understanding Matter dialekt: Try the same experiment with an Angelito in the bayous of Louisiana (and you don't have to pick a cajun French speaker).
Die Kartoffel (f) is called dä Herdöpfel (m) in Swissgerman. Gender is not about the thing, but about random attribution. Making mistakes with them is not too bad, it just marks you as a foreigner... which your pronunciation already does, so nothing changes ;) The cited Twain is explainable though: Das Mädchen / s Meitli (n) comes from die Magd (f)... it is a diminutiv which makes everything neutral. (Like das Kartöffelchen / s Herdöpfeli)
Sooo I want to mention that we in switzerland (swiss german) have this very funny way to show that something is tiny. Take the actual german word and put „li“ at the end Ente (duck) becomes Entli (tiny duck)
I had German languare in Polish primary and secondary school, as a compulsory subject (also Russian), German is very simple, well structured dramatically, and very good for technical description, since many nouns are compiled together in a single word. Learning cases, rules. Germ is much easier than Polish language (Slavic) which is third the most difficult-to-learn language in the World ; ) As an example in Polish each object has pronoun, but... on the end and in context. Family name: Orlowski (he) Orlowska (she) and so on to every single item! So if you make a single mistake, everyone will laugh at you straight away!
As coming from Switzerland I find this Video really entertaining! BUT I have to admit that we understand each other pretty well when it comes too the swiss language (not the others) bc basically there are just similar dialects. Of course there are also VERY FEW Words not everyone understand always bc they are too different. Coming to the point of writing German: Yes, that's true. We learn German, speak and write it in Schools and we also use it in Jobs where we need to write to other people we don't know.( E- mails an stuff like that). Mainly because we sometimes don't know who we're writing to. There are sooo many people who coming from other countries. These people don't speak swiss and it's easier to learn german for them than the swiss language. So, we show consideration for these people. We can be pretty sure it is understandable for most people in Switzerland if we write in German. BUT with each other like friends and family from Switzerland who grew up to the swiss language we write also in the swiss language. But only in personal letters or in Chats, SMS.... Also true is that we don't really have MANY rules when it comes to the writing in swiss language. We have VERY FEW rules when it comes to the writing in swiss. We also have the rules about the types of words like verbs and nouns or der, die, das... I'm also really glad that people get told here about the 4 languages and that we don't have more than these languages. People get told or think that we have an enormous number of languages in Switzerland but they don't realize there are just many dialects who are closely related to each other. No hate, but I really don't understand, when it comes to words, the grammar aside, why germans don't understand swiss. We have soooo many similar Words in german and swiss. Speaking for the swiss language speakers it's not hard to learn german bc it's so similar. We always get told that we have to learn the languages arround Switzerland but why do our Neighbours don't learn at least German? (of course I don't mean germany here) I also don't like the fact that we have areas in Switzerland where nobody speaks the swiss language but only french. They should learn german as well as we french. Well, at least I have to admit that some swiss people like me still can't speak french but that is bc of how we learn or should learn it in schools and thats a whole diffrent topic.
To be honest, i do not get. The spoken language which they call 'swiss german' has nothing to do with german, it is a different language like duch and german comparison. Why do not they make it also the written language? They use rather standard german for written language, which they do not speak at all. Would not it be more logical to give a name to your spoken, real language and eliminate the usage of standard written german as you do not speak in it at all?
they dont learn standard german aka high german in school, they learn swiss high german in schools. The video is a little bit misleading on that. ... their written german language is still a language unique to switzerland which also is spoken as fallback for whenever different swiss german dialects meet. So they did exactly what you said, they "made" their swiss german a written language (ofc it developed naturally during their development from the german language into the swiss german+dialects) ... but as that had to be a compromise between vastly different dialects it came out as a language not fitting neither of those dialects and being closer to the german origin. Germany has a similar situation in Swabia, a large german region where a unique dialect separated so far that their written language stayed behind and doesnt fit the spoken word anymore.
If you enjoyed learning the articles, have fun with the inside-out-backwards numbers. Telephone numbers are the worst - and important, 'cause if you write them down wrong, you'lll never speak with whom you want. And being a musician .... well, it's still fun after moving here in 1977. BTW - my wife is from Bern. She's sooooo fond of the folks in Zürich (dripping sarcasm).
Swiss german isn't an official language in Switzerland, it is German. People speak swiss german (different one following the canton) but officially, it is German
Hilarous .. "if you take a "GIRL Kartoffel" from Germany across the nearby border to Switzerland.. it becomes a "Boy Hardöpfel".. so greeeeaaat..hahahah.. Greetings from Switzerland ..
Well about the table im not sure 😅 but the diffrent types of potatoes have female names such as Erika or Annabelle. I guess thats why the article is female 🤔 it can be tricky even for me as a swiss
😂😂the thing with grammatical genders. Grammatical genders exist in many languages and there are generally no special rules as to what gender an object will have (though there are some word endings that might be helpful to indicate that) , but for native speakers it's just how it is and it makes complete sense for them. But the difficult thing is that when you learn a foreign language that has grammatical genders you have to learn how they are in that language. For example I'm a native speaker of Greek and I have a hard time learning and remembering the gender of each word in German.😅😥
im married with a spanish speaker. so im with 70% correct just to swap the gender. xD a fact ist too that that we say die Sonne der Mond, and the spanish say der Sonne und die Mond. This is the reason of the Gods that we apraised before. Germanics and Romans. i like to ask many times, why do we call it like that. and it has ofter a very old history behind :)
This is hilarious. 👌🤣 The genders are actually not too important... I mean we don't actually consider them real genders... We don't think of a potato as a boy or girl. it's just articles we know by heart. But obviously this must be a pain for non German speakers. Cheers from Basel 😄
The Articles don't have much sense, I mean a girl is not female it is neutral. The Articles are more chosen from the sound perspective. If you talk German as mother tongue you mostly know with article it belongs to, even when you never heard it.
It's a common mistake to mix up sex and grammatical gender. From a linguistic point of view there is no correlation so it's not helpful to think of things as "boy-things" or "girl-things" because as you pointed out it's completely arbitrary and not at all related to "sex". You're better off just learning the articles as a part of the noun.
i totally feel for you and your struggle with the gendered nouns. it makes no sense at all. also in swiss german the are actually boys haha. so no consistency either
6:22 Der, die, das are used by populations over time. The one article that sounds the best is often used. Das Madchen sounds rad. But Die Madchen sounds ... ok but not as rad as da-mad. Das Madchen is therefore selected over time. :) All gendered languages are not really gendered. In a sense they select what sounds best and make it explicit (even if complicated) while English cheates. In English "the" can be pronounced in different matters to make a sentence better sounding. The: "ze" vs "zi". It's the same, but it applies to the plural, and all forms that the verb might take... so choose well to keep it good sounding. :)
Im a french speaking swiss and in "romande" switzerland we have to follow like 7-10 years of german class but german is so difficult and different from swiss german that the french and german speakers needs to speak english to understand each other even if their from the same country. What a shame
Soo as a swiss Id just want to pick out one mistake many people do - swiss german is not a language, but an accent or what we call a dialect. It is like british and american accent. Swiss german is really close to german or what we call High German.
Uhm, swiss german does have rules and grammar and stuff. What you mean is that we have different dialects. But that's exactly the same in any other country. And people defitinely write in swiss german, there are official books on the language as well.
You only need to learn English and French too?? I had to learn not only German, English and French in school but also Italian and even fxcking Latin...
