I agree but he put a lot of effort to pronounce it. I can't imagine someone who speaks like that all the time. I'd rather hear imperfect pronunciation and be more relaxed than this, but it's only my opinion
Only mistake he made is that he put accent in the wrong place. In Polish accent is nearly ALWAYS on the second sylabe counting from the end of word. In that case it is "piszę PIÓrem", not "piszę pióREM".
Oh the fun of learning the 7 Serbian cases in school as a native speaker.. Nominative (Who? What?) Genitive (Whose? \ From who?) Dative (To whom\what) Accusative (eg. "On" who? what?) Vocative (Hey who? What?) Instrumental (With who? What?) Locative (About who? What?) Plus many many many other changes to the nouns and verbs depending on the case such as Jotovanje (Don't know the english word,where the sound J merges with other sounds in very specific situations forming another sound),Sibilarisation (K,G,H change to Č,Ž,Š),Palatalisation (K,G,H change to C,Z,S)which represent different degrees and ways of vocal changes in words. These changes inflect numbers,gender,nouns,pronouns,personal prononouns,genders (we have 3 of them) and the 3 plural forms of the 3 genders which are all different,and the adjectives before every noun and everything changes according to the case as well. For example,the word "vojnik" means "soldier". Here's how it changes through the cases. N. Vojnik G. Vojnika D. Vojniku A. Vojnika V. (Hey) Vojniče (Example of vocal change Sibilarisation K>Č) I. (Sa)vojnikom L. (O) vojniku For example,the most drastic example would be the changes of the personal pronoun " Ja" which means "I" N. Ja G. (Od) mene D. Meni A. Mene V. - (You can't call youself) I - (Sa) mnom L - (O) meni And numbers. "Jedan" means "One" N. Jedan G. Od jednog D. Jednom A. Jednog V. - (It doesn't really work with numbers) I. (S) jednim L. (O) jednom The most fun part of Serbian is that it can be written in both Cyrilic and Latin alphabet,letter for letter,since every letter represents one single sound.For example: I am going to school. Ja idem u školu Ја идем у школу. We learn both in school at the same time... I hope I didn't scare anyone. :)
in romanian we have the word "voinic" loaned from slavs, but it came to mean "a strong, fit or healthy young man". i never knew it meant soldier originally
I'm Polish. We have 7 gramatical cases too. We have learnt this questions in primary school. In Polish it looks like this Mianownik - Nominativ kto? co? Dopełniacz - Genitiv kogo? czego? (nie ma) celownik - Dativ komu? czemu? (Przyglądam się) Biernik - akkusativ kogo? co? (widzę) Narzędnik - Instr. z kim? z czym? (Idę) Miejscownik - locativ o kim? o czym? (myślę) Wołacz - vocativ o! (or "Hej ty!" With this is easier to find in mind the correct ending :)) But the Vocativ is used very rarely in speaking, espescialy with names, but some very, very old people still uses vocativ. Eg. Cześć Radek! But correctly is Cześć Radku! BTW it means Hello Radek! (Radek is a Slavic name, shorter form for Radosław)
Happy New Year, guys!! This is a "quick video" about grammatical case, because I often get asked "What does 'case' mean?" by I talk about it in a video. This video might not be a masterpiece, but hopefully it's useful and/or interesting for some of you.
Modern Greek has 4 cases; nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative. Ancient Greek had one additional case and this was dative. What's interesting is that dative was eventually replaced by accusative in northern greek dialects, whereas in southern dialects it was replaced by genitive. So, nowadays, people in northern Greece will say "I'm telling you", whereas people in southern Greece will say "I'm telling yours". (Not the best example, but given the lack of cases in English, it's hard for me to think of a better one.) Καλή χρονιά σε όλους! Happy new year to all of you!
My native language Slovak has 6 cases Nominative, Genitive Dative, Acusative, Locative, Instrumental. We used to have Vocative but that's not used anymore, now only in words like God, Father, Son etc. I don't know how you guys manage without the rest od the cases :DD
As a native English speaker cases have always terrified me. Opening a book to learn a new language and just seeing a brief explanation followed by pages of tables finished more than one attempt to learn a new language. But, as others have said, this 6 minute video gave me a better grasp of them than anything i've ever read in a book before.
Can you talk about Native American languages in an upcoming video? it would be great! Especially if it's about Quechua or Nahualt. Happy New Year, Paul!! 😊👌🏼
Where was this video in 2010 when I was trying to learn Latin?!?!?! This taught me more in 60 seconds than 6 months of university Latin. Awesome video!!! Trying to learn Irish now. Slowly!
I've studied Arabic (3 cases), German (4 cases), Latin (5 cases), and Russian (6 cases). The most daunting is German, because the three genders all have various case forms for nouns, adjectives, and definite and indefinite articles. "The young professor gave the poor widow his old mother's blue car." AAUUGH! When you first look at the spreadsheet of German case forms, it looks like a joke that somebody made up, or a plot to keep you from learning German. But after you use and manipulate them for a long while, they start to feel natural. They just "sound right." It's pretty remarkable.
I've only touched Russian but there are endless ways to conjugate not only the adjectives but also the nouns. German felt like a warm-up to slavic grammar imo. Is Russian really easier to learn?
No, Russian grammar is a LOT harder than German. But Russian doesn't have articles (a/the). German has ein eine eines einer einem einen der die das des dem den. They're extremely common, and each must be plugged into its proper place depending on the complicated system of gender, number, and case.
Yes, most definitely. In Turkish we have grammatical cases. The easiest example: Ev (nominative) Evi (accusative) Eve (dative) Evde (locative) Evden (ablative) Love your channel, Paul! I've been following since a very long time now. Thank you for every little thing you've taught us!
There are also the genitive (evin, the house's), and instrumental (evle, with the house), right? I know the instrumental is basically just slapping a postposition onto the word, but it does kind of fit that paradigm.
@@GlaceonStudios Well, in Turkish those two cases are not a part of "ismin halleri". That's why I, personally, don't count them as one of the original grammatical cases in the Turkish language. :)
talking about grammatical cases, i can't help but tell you something i learnt about my own language just a few days ago. so, polish is a highly inflective language and we are taught we've got 7 cases, but it is not entirely true. under some circumstances, a number of polish nouns get an accusative form when genitive should be used, and that is how a partitive, or a genetivus partitivus, is created. as far as i know russians have the exact same problem. the other thing i wanted to mention, due to my experience with learning german, is that usage of cases differs in different languages, for example when you use genitive in polish, you probably will use accusative in german.
Nothing unusual. A lot of foreign people know the structure of a language better than the Natives. For a simple reason: they studied them in theory. There is a reason why university studies of my mother tongue has a branch for the natives and for teaching them to foreigners.
Dz Youth well that's not accurate at all , standard Arabic isn't dead it's widely used in formal speeches, news, weather, university, school and other formal government departments. the things that we in our daily lives using the local dialect does not mean we do not use standard one. after we study the grammar it depends on your position and job to use it or not. and even though we use the Levant accents it's kinda close to standard Arabic. by the way I'm Palestinian. Egypt dialect still Arabic with enormous amount of shifts in letter
Michael Meier actually it depends on your job if you need standard Arabic or not like a formal government or something like that. but can't agree more.
This is so true! I study Polish in my university in Brazil. My professors, who are from Poland, always try to give us examples comparing Polish with Portuguese (like: "Eu vou DE ônibus"/"I go BY bus" = mean of transportation = instrumental case. "Essa bola é do Jack"/"This is Jack'S ball" = possession = genitive case.), since do not have cases in our language. So I always realize that they understand the structure of Portuguese much better than us, natives. They show things to us about our own language that we never stopped to thing about, we just naturally use the language. It's very interesting and funny when we learn something so obvious about something that we say everyday, but never realized hahah
In Ukrainian we use 7 cases. I remember looking at English sentences as a child all the time and thinking "How do they manage it without case endings?" 😂
@DIORDOL VON GIOHEIM Well, do you think your worldview would change if you grew up speaking a tongue with many case endings and laxer word order, such as a Slavic language or Latin?
Finnish language (a Uralic language) has 15 grammatical cases. Veps language, which is closely related to Finnish, has 23 grammatical cases. Unfortunately, Veps language is only spoken by about 5000 people, 1500 of them are native speakers...
the point is, that as Veps language is only spoken in a small region south to Lake Onega, there is a huge risk that it might go extinct within a few decades: majority of the Veps speakers are elderly people and younger generations are not that fancy to study it due to _Russification of ethnic minorities_ (mostly Uralic and Turkic peoples). Livonian language has already died as a first language, but it is still taught in Latvia as a second language.
In Spanish and other Romance languages (Romanian may be the exception) we don't use the grammatical cases, whereas in Latin if they used those cases and the syntax is different. I don't completely understand that change 🤔
Alfredo Pastor I understood cases after taking classes of Latin language. In Spanish we use articles and prepositions to give some coherence to the text, in the case of Latin they didn't have the way to use it. They had to use them to show when the noun has, for example, the "de / of", "con / with", "para / For ", etc.
Alfredo Pastor, the reason, of course, is history of language and it development. All below is only my opinion though, I don't know how it really is, but I tell what I think. Word order in Latin was pretty flexible. Because of this, cases was very useful. I believe when word order became strict, people tend not to use cases more and more, because word order gives enough information about grammatical meaning of words.
lutin grognon, as Russian speaker, sometimes I have difficulties with English, because in my language cases have much more meaning than word order. These difficulties are coming when I trying to say complicated phrases. I do not know sometimes which word order is proper.
Anyone else having a New Years marathon session of watching Langfocus videos? Seriously, they are so educational and entertaining that I just rewatch (I think I just made up a word) episodes for fun!
In my native German we have four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) but we are in the process of losing the genitive by using constructions using the dative. Contrary to common belief this is not a recent trend. It happened throughout the centuries and is already complete in many dialects like Bavarian, which hasn't had a genitive for a long time. I have read somewhere that probably the only reason why the genitive is still in use today is because it was declared "proper" usage when the german language was standardized.
Das ist nicht wahr. Dass der Genitiv verschwindet, behaupten nur Sprachpuristen, die schlecht recherchiert haben. Das einzige, was richtig ist, ist die Tatsache, dass wir den Genitiv kaum noch als Objektkasus nach Verben benutzen (wie z.B. in "wir gedenken seiner"). Das liegt aber daran, dass es heutzutage viel mehr Präpositionen mit Genitiv als früher gibt und dass wir den Genitiv sehr oft als Attribut verwenden (z.B. "das Buch meines Vaters"). Im Großen und Ganzen verschwindet der Genitiv also ganz und gar nicht (zumindest nicht aus der Standardsprache), sondern es hat sich nur seine Funktion verändert.
Question: Do you know anybody that still says (not writes) "das Buch meines Vaters"? I think I have never in my life heared somebody actually saying something like this outside of formal occasions.
even if the use of the genitive case were restricted to formal situations only, you would still have to acknowledge that a complete standardized language does not only contain coloquialisms and slang, but can also be in all situations including formal ones. You should also keep in mind that German is a pluriscentric language.. so the frequency of the genitive case may also differ depending on the region in which you live.
I read that the genitive is diminishing everywhere in Germany. It is just the speed with which this happens that is different depending on where you actually live. And yes, I agree that as long as it is still in formal language, it is still in the german language. However, in the long term, it is unlikely that the official language will not adapt. It has done so many times in the past since german is not a language with religious significance. Also, keep in mind that I am not talking about decades here but about centuries. My personal, non-scientific guess is that the genitive will vanish from official language except for remnants in about 150 to 200 years.
Yiddish and Bavarian have already lost genitive case and it's German's turn now I guess. Quite the opposite, English lost all other cases except for possesive / genitive and in English the genitive form is considered more casual.
In Polish (my native language) there are 7 cases when a noun changes. For example - all of the cases for "hand" (in polish "ręka"): Singular Plural nominative: ręka ręce genitive: ręki rąk dative: ręce rękom accusative: rękę ręce instrumental: ręką rękoma locative: ręce rękach vocative: ręko ręce Hey Paul! I hope you will make a video for Polish Language :) ! Happy New Year to all of you guys! May everybody here learn a new language ;)
This was a great video! I think it would be cool if you made a mini series in which you explained these kinds of things, like case, voice, person, etc that other languages have that english doesn't.
In German we have actually 4 cases, which we use in syntax:- Nominative: (Who?/What?) Accusative: (Whom?/What?) Dative: (To Whom?/What?) Genetive: (Whose?) Other than that there must be a declination for the 3 genders of the german language: Masculine, Feminine and Neutral, with their article or sometimes the noun itself
I know nominative and accusative and my class just learned dative- but I have trouble with dative, ): I am very sad to read your comment and find out that I will have to learn another case called "Genetive", das ist nicht gut fÜr mich.
You should do a video talking about the Greek language! I'm learning it now and it has 4 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative. Great video as always! :D
Serbian has 7 gramatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative. While Macedonian has only one case. Generally, the more you go south in Serbia, people use less grammatical cases in their speech.
I'm sure u were gonna go for a full playlist for inflections and stuff but i'm more likely to ask about if it takes less cognative stress if u don't havve them something and if the Isochrony of the lang helps too
Colloquial Arabic doesn't use cases either and they are sometimes dropped in MSA as well. Old English - Modern English relation is different from Arabic - Hebrew relation. Old English and modern English are same languages in 2 stages while Arabic and Hebrew are seperate languages. English does technically have 2 cases in the form of Genitive and Unmarked Nominative and Accusative. You normally say "The cat's food" and not "Food of the cat". That's a genitive case.
I'm not a native Finnish speaker, but I can tell you that noun cases are quite numerous in Finnish. In your Finnish video, you mainly talked about the grammatical cases. There's also 6 "locative" cases, that show movement and position. There's also 2 essive (sometimes 3) cases, that indicate the state of an object. Other obsolete cases exist, like abessive, instructive, and comitative that are pretty much only used in specific contexts or old sayings.
Portuguese (Brazilian) has no cases whatsoever, but grammar can still get fairly complex. I remember in school studying a grammatical thing called "oração subordinada substantiva objetiva direta reduzida do infinitivo". Not having cases makes German and Russian harder, this video was of great help to consolidate the concept! Thanks!
Like "Conseguí aprender español en poco tiempo. / Conseguei aprender espanhol em pouco tempo" ? My native language is Spanish, by the way. Spanish LOVES "oraciones subordinadas" a lot XD XD
Portuguese has cases. Comi-o (ele) I ate it. Amo-te (tu) I love you. Isso deixa-me feliz (eu) That makes me happy. Notice that the pronouns are changed depending if they are an direct or indirect object and not written in the normal form eu, tu, ele
@@joaocorreia8106 Same with Spanish. However, both Spanish and Portuguese only have cases in their personal pronouns, which makes things a little easier.
@joaocorreia8106. Do you call this case. In pali language, there are three gender and 8 cases and 7 declensional ending. Musculine, Divas.(god) declensions. Nom. Divas. Divai. Voc. Diva. Divai. Gen. Divasa. Divanam. Dat. Divaya. Divahis. Acc. Divam. Dive. Abl. Divaham. Divahom. Ins. Divana. Divanamis. Loc. Divasmim. Divasus. This is masculine declensions of Divas (god). This is real cases.
Don't know if there are other comments like this one, but in Modern Greek we have dropped the Dative (δοτική) case from Ancient Greek and we have retained a pretty unique case called the Vocative (κλητική) case which is used to address somebody or something. The other three cases we have are the standard ones mentioned in the video, Nominative (ονομαστική), Genitive (γενική) and Accusative (αιτιατική). :)
Για την ακριβεια στα νεα ελληνικα η δοτικη ισοδυναμει με εμπροθετη αιτιατικη :) επισης υπαρχουν ακομη καταλοιπα της δοτικης,αυτουσια. π.χ ελαφρα τη καρδία,ποιητικη αδεία,εν εξάλλω καταστάσει και παμπολλα αλλα ;)
This has been melting my Romance language brain because I’m learning Greek and there’s no such thing in Portuguese (or Spanish and French, which I’m also learning and are part of the same family).
In my language, we have the three most common cases, nominative, genitive and accusative, as well as an oddball, the vocative case. It's used when you address someone directly, to signify whom you're speaking to/call someone in general. Although, it's only remained separate from the nominative in a certain subgroup of the masculine nouns. In addition to that, we have many phrases that are for the most part used as stand-alones in the old dative case. It's Greek!
@@belle_pomme there are two different ways. In general we use the preposition σε which means at/on/in/to, and it can also be combined with the article of the accusative or the genitive. Σε+accusative can be an indirect object or a locative expression, while σε+genitive always has a locative meaning. The second way to form the indirect object is with the genitive case, but you can only do this with personal pronouns, person names or animate objects.
Inflection of words is a cool thing, because it allows for a more elastic word order. You can reorder the words in a sentence according to their importance, because the various endings will tell you their grammatical function anyway, no matter where they are in the sentence :) Languages which depend more on the word order usually have to invent different tricks to overcome the limitations of grammar, to be able to put the more important words first (e.g. passive mode etc.). It would be cool if you made a video comparing different languages depending on the number of cases they have and which cases they use, or perhaps showing some weird cases ;) I wonder which language has the most cases and why ;) Happy New Year :J
za909returns It's called vocative and isn't case in rigorous grammatical definition. In live speech they are anachronisms and cound like nominative case, mostly used in proverbs.
Greek has a rather unusual case, the vocative, which is used when you want to address someone. For example "friend" is φίλος (filos) and when you want to address him you say φίλε (file).
Stefos Polish also has this case. In Polish we call it "wołacz" /vouach/ (the verb "wołać" /vouac'/ means "to call someone"). For example: "a human" Mianownik (Nominative) - człowiek /chuovyek/, Wołacz - człowieku! In Polish we have seven cases. How many cases do you have in Greek? Could you give me an example?
There are four cases in Greek. Nominative (subject), genitive (possession), accusative (object), vocative (calling). I'll give you the same example for "human": άνθρωπος /ánthropos/ ανθρώπου /anthrópou/ άνθρωπο /ánthropo/ άνθρωπε /ánthrope/ (btw I always wondered how that peculiar Polish ł sounded like :P)
And they are problem even for some journalists (probably summer interns). At least once a year there is a head-line like "poliisi ampui miehen" (police shot a man; accusative case), when it should have been "poliisi ampui miestä" (police shot a man; partitive case). The difference is that in the first one the man died, but in latter he didn't, he was just wounded. Other things, which leave foreigners baffling: "I love you" = "rakastan sinua" (partitive), but "I like you" = "pidän sinusta" (elative) "nain sinut" (accusative) = "I married you", but "nain sinua" (partitive) = "I f*ed you" "kuusi" = six, the number (nominative) -> "kuuden" (genetive), but "kuusi" = spruce, the tree (nominative) -> "kuusen" (genetive)
Wow - that was the best, most comprehensible summary of grammatical cases that I've ssen so far. Great in it's shot explanation, as well as the more in depth exploration of the most common casi and in different languages no less. In my language (german) we have 4, but most people who havent had a higher education don't know about them as concepts and simply use them how it feels correct, furthermore the Dativ is almost never used, execpt in very formal, written german. Thats qhy I struggled sometimes to explain to german native speakers what grammatical cases are and what theyre good for. Then again I never learned the cases in arabic, which is my second language, because they are never used when speaking informally.
Russian has 6 cases, almost exactly the same ones as in the video, working in almost exactly the same way. The only difference is that the latin locative case is replaced with the prepositional case. It's the same as the locative case but has an extra meaning besides location and is always used with certain (not all) prepositions. The extra meaning is using it with the "about" preposition when directing to a subject of thinking, talking or writing.
We have 7 grammatical cases in Czech. As mentioned in the video, the cases apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs. Different cases for singular and plural variant of nouns. And not to forget, all nouns inflect differently, according to its grammatical gender. (E.g. chair = feminine, car = neutral, curtain = masculine form...). Every gender group has several model words. So all in all, there are 13 sets of 7 cases for singular, 13x7 for plural. Perhaps is sounds complicated but the language is incredibly rich, colourful and pictoresque like this. As far as I know, all Slavonic languages still keep this system (not exactly this but a system of grammatical cases - some languages have less of them or they would not have cases for all of the word categories etc.). And Happy New Year, Paul! I like your videos a lot.
Yes definitely it has, but the number of grammatical cases in Turkish is still controversial. Check out the link here: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Cases
Musa Umut Akdeniz Dogan really? I've studied both german and turkish and the turkish cases where much simpler. plus theres none of those mind-boggling articles
Latin was pretty tough for me too. Even though my native language has cases too, I was confused by the fact that some of them function differently in Latin(bigger emphasis on Accusativus, confusing use of Dativus etc).
Congrats! As a native Polish speaker,, I think your explanation of the case system was excellent. The only comment I would like to add is about the terminology. You could have mentioned that inflecting nouns is often referred to as declension, especially when one wants to contrast it with the conjugation of verbs. PS. I must tell you, Paul, that, as a fellow Canadian, I am very proud of your hard work to popularize all the world languages.,
I have studied Sanskrit for 5 years in school, and there we have 8 cases, and what's worse, there are different forms of the cases for different types of words! It's tough to memorise, but once you do Sanskrit becomes a piece of cake. 😊
If you learn German (Die Fälle) all of this would be easy for you to understand! If you're struggling to learn some grammatical concepts (including cases) ask me here in the comments and I'll be glad to try and explain them to you. :)
7 лет назад
in my language (turkish) we do the grammatical case allso for verbs 😉 and in my second language (german) we do the grammatical case very similar like the one in english and a happy new year
J'apprends le francais. Mais mon francais est merde. I have no idea how languages are supposed to be learnt, despite speaking English as a second language at a B2-C1 level (I've no idea how I did that). You got any tips? But I mean something specific, like where to get vocabulary to learn and what I'm supposed to do during these 30 minutes a day I devote to French?
Big Bad Wolf What I like to do is to try to say the same things I'd say in my native language in the target language as well. For example, when I say things like "I've already eaten" or "I'm coming back home in an hour" I always think "hmm, how can I say it in x language?". This helps me to learn phrases that I *actually* use on a daily basis, which means it'll be that much more useful to learn in a foreign language as I'll probably be expressing similar ideas/thoughts. As for French, watching movies or TV shows, listening to music, and following popular French RU-vid vloggers might help a lot :)
Salut, Mercure. Je suis russe, de sorte que, si tu veux, je peux t'aider avec le langue russe. De concert j' aurai pratique avec le français. Je l'adore.
Hi, im swedish, as far as i know we dont aaactually have noun cases, apart from nominative and genitive ( and the definet particles, if that counts ) however! I noticed something interesting the other day wich is that the word "hem" = "home" has a locative case: "hemma" So when we want to say "this is my home" we say "det här är mitt hem" but when we want to say "im at home" we say "jag är hemma", wich literally means "I am home" Perhaps english has the exact same locative case for the word home in the context of this sentence, even though theres no inflection of the word home in "im home"
In Turkish, we almost have all the grammatical cases in use all the time! If we don't use them, it is no different then selecting and writing some words side by side and them not creating a sentence or anything at all but just all standing there individually. They would literally be not connected to each other in terms of meaning if cases are not used. Like: "o kız evlat bura okul gider" meaning something like "he daughter goes school here" If we use grammatical cases as we should in Turkish: "Onun kız evladı burada okula gider." means closely "His daughter goes to school in here." We used suffixes for expressing possession, belonging, locative case and dative case in that one sentence!
My native language is German, we have 4 grammatical cases. Latin has 6, Finnish has 15, the Veps language has 24 cases, and Hungarian has 31 cases. But I'm not happy about that concept of »direct/indirect object« to explain grammatical cases. This concept works in languages with a weak case-system like English where (almost) no cases exist, i.e. in languages where you don't need to explain cases. But you get in troubles when you think in ways of direct/indirect objects, when you try to learn languages with a stronger case-system like German. This direct/indirect object thinking can help at the very beginning to understand differences between accusative and dative case, but very soon you hit the limits of this thinking (because direct objects not always turn into accusative case in German). If you try to build more complex sentences, it leads you to wrong conclusions, and from this point on you learn the language slower that others who never got this direct/indirect-object-thing hammered into their heads. When German native speakers (like me) learn German grammar as a child in school, they never will be told about direct or indirect objects. This concept simply doesn't exist in German grammar. I even didn't know what this terms really means until I asked a few days ago here: german.stackexchange.com/q/34000/1487 (I asked in German and the answers are German)
+ Hubert Schölnast -- That analysis is very interesting, and I never thought of it before. I am a native English speaker and was taught about direct and indirect objects in grammar school (just in the context of grammar, not case, since English doesn't have case). Of course, as you explained, that construct is irrelevant to German speakers and hardly applies to them at all. They know to say "zu mir" (to me, dative case), and not "zu mich" (accusative), and to say "für mich" (for me, accusative) and not "für mir" (dative), without analyzing anything. There is no logic -- no direct or indirect -- about it. It just "sounds right" to them. In German class, I was taught to memorize lists of prepositions with the grammatical case they take, which I can still recite 50 years later: Dative: aus außer bei mit nach seit von zu. Accusative: durch für gegen ohne um. Either (it depends): an auf hinter in neben über unter vor zwischen. Etc.
No, »it just sounds right« is not the rule. Verbs rule the sentence. The verb is the king of a sentence, and it has supplements. One supplement, that almost always exists in a sentence is called »subject«. It is always in nominative case. The other supplements ruled by the verb are called »objects«. Each verb defines which objects it can have and in which case those objects appear. For example »sehen« (to see) needs a subject and an accusative object. So »I see you« is in German »Ich sehe dich«. Other example: »glauben« (to believe). It also has two supplements, one is the subject. The other is an object that you might call a direct object, but it is a dative object in German. »I believe you« is in German »Ich glaube dir«. There are even a few verbs who's only object (beside the subject) has to be used in genitive case. Those verbs are rare, but they exist. The verb »gedenken« is one of them. »We remember the fallen soldiers« is in German »Wir gedenken der gefallenen Soldaten«. We also have verbs that need an object in the same case as the subject, which is nominative case. One of this verbs is »heißen«. It has no exact translation in English. The sentence »My name is Walter.« can be translated as »Mein Name ist Walter« but also (and better) as »Ich heiße Walter«. Both, the subject and the object, are in nominative case. But what you mentioned is also true: Within an object prepositions define the grammatical case of part of speech to which they belong. And also here »it just sounds right« is not the rule. Each single preposition forces you to use a well defined case. Some can be used in two cases, depending if you mean a movement to a place or resting at a place. For example »hinter« (behind). Movement to a place needs accusative case: »I put the ball behind the door« = »Ich lege den Ball hinter die Tür«. But resting at a place needs dative case: »The ball is behind the door« = »Der Ball liegt hinter der Tür«. Other languages don't use prepositions to define a movement to a place or resting at a place. They have cases for it. This means you decline the noun together with its article and attributes instead of adding a preposition. The case for the movement to a place is called »allative case«. (Greek has an allative case), and the case for something resting at a place is »locative case«. (There are lots of languages which use a rudimentary locative. Latin and ancient greek are examples for this.)
+Hubert Schölnast -- I'm sorry, but "just sounds right" is where the rules come from. "Just sounds right" is what DETERMINES what the rules are. Our ancestors did not say "I saw him" because their parents or teachers told them that "I" is the subject form and "him" is the object form; rather, they said it that way because that's the way everybody was saying it when they were children. So it sounded right. Centuries later, some grammarian formulated "rules" to account for that usage. That's all the rules are -- an analysis and systemization of the things that sound right to the great body of the language's users. As to verbs "ruling" the sentence and having "supplements," this is a well known and analyzed part of linguistics called "subcategorization" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcategorization -- sorry, there is no German version of that article, but you could write one). It is not part of syntax; rather, it is lexical - part of the dictionary. A lexical item, normally a verb. will be tied to specific "arguments" (not "supplements"). You have given good examples. Another is the English verb "put" which (except in a few odd instances) must take both a direct object argument and an adverb or prepositional phrase argument of location. We can't just say "He put," or "He put the money," or "He put in the bank." The verb is tied to two specific arguments, so we must say "He put the money in the bank." It's no use trying to apply syntactic rules to this -- to find this out you have to look up "put" in the dictionary.
Happy new year! Greek inflects its nouns, adjectives, and articles (they have three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, neuter) for number (singular, plural, in ancient Greek also dual which became obsolete in Biblical Greek) and case (nominative, genitive, accusative, vocative, in ancient Greek also dative, which became obsolete in Medieval Greek)
Due to 7 grammatical cases in Polish, we find Romance languages extremely easy to learn. Especially Spanish, as the order of words in sentences is often similar.
And here I am, a native Spanish speaker who teaches Japanese and has just started to learn Polish because I befriended a Polish girl in Japan :3 I like how Polish sounds, by I'm having troubles reproducing the "some-letter + z" sounds because my language, at least in the standard form, just have "ch" ("ci" in Polish). Since I studied Japanese, I can recognize "ts" ("c" in Polish) and "sh" ("si" in Polish). And the variant of Spanish I speak just happens to have a "rr" sound pronounced in very casual contexts as the Polish "rz" sound. Still, I have problems with these sounds XD XD I haven't studied Polish cases yet, but somehow I'm looking forward to it! Spanish has grammatical cases, but only with its personal pronouns, so compared to Polish, I think it's rather easier than one would think. While it's true Spanish tends to follow a SVO word order in most situations, because our verbal conjugation system tends to be very specific, we can actually alter the order of syntagmas in most occasions without having problems of ambiguety: "La casa es azul" is the same as "Azul es la casa" and "Azul la casa es" (although these two last ones sound poetic), "Los perros comieron mucha carne" is the same as "Mucha carne comieron los perros" and "Comieron los perros mucha carne", and "Me gusta esta música" is the same as "Esta música me gusta" and "Gústame esta música" (this last one is quite old fashioned).
Thanks so much for making this video! My girlfriend of almost five years has been trying to learn my native language (Polish), but the languages she speaks (English and Spanish) don't really have cases, so she can't wrap her head around this idea at all. Hopefully this video will help :)
"Finnish has 15." - if English speakers decided that from now on, the preposition "to" will be combined with the following word instead of separated ("to the house" → "tothehouse"), would this mean English has a new case?
Another excellent video from you. Thanks so much for doing it. You are terrific. For those who would like to see a wider variety of cases, take a look at Hungarian or Finnish. Hungarian supposedly has 18 cases.
I'm Serbian and I think it's because of the bad political situation in our region. He probably doesn't want to offend anyone. Although he has a video about Slavic languages where he mentioned Serbo-Croatian. I would actually like to see video dedicated to Serbo-Croatian, it would be interesting.
First ever comment because I just found your channel yesterday. I know about 5 languages, if you count American Sign Language. Of those, I had to learn grammatical cases and tenses of two dead languages (Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek). Like you said in another video, learning a second language is the BEST to expand your mind and improve one's "weltenshcauung" (spelling?). I'm a more analytical and thoughtful person than I would be without knowing languages. Thanks, Paul!
Theophagous hey, that's interesting. do many people in Morocco speak languages other than arabic natively? what's the linguistic situation when it comes to these?
And on an official level, we have Standard Arabic and Standard Berber as official languages, while French serves as a de facto administrative language (administrations, companies, college level education especially in scientific and technical fields such as mathematics or computer science). English is on the rise as a favorite foreign language, while Spanish, which ruled especially in the northern part of the country, is sort of declining (that's my impression at least).
In Spanish: "Mi" turns into "migo" "Ven conmigo" (Come with me) and oh boy, how do you foreigners deal with the particle "SE"? It's used everywhere and in different ways, it can be impersonal ("se esperan vientos de 90 km/h" "winds of 90 km/h are expected"), reflexive ("se pelearon" "they fought each other") or just have no meaning at all ("se cayó por las escaleras" "he/she fell down the stairs").
I can tell you that as a native English speaker learning Spanish for several years that "se" and any need to use it along with lo, la, le, me, te, los, las, or les as direct, indirect, or reflexive pronouns drives me and my fellow students crazy. That's particularly true in a phrase like "Se me olvidó el cuaderno." The literal translation sounds very strange to us, "The notebook forgot itself to me".
@@GoGreen1977 Yo también soy extranjero y nunca he tenido problemas con esto. Pobrecitos anglohablantes, se puede decir que como siempre...no se les dan bien los otros idiomas :D. (I'm joking, don't take that the wrong way)
In the Hmong Language, the words in our language do not change form or don't have letters to make a noun plural or singular instead, we have words that is said before the noun that represents whether the noun is singular or plural for example, to say "the cup" it would be "lub khob" where "cup" is represented by the word "khob" and "the" is represented by the word "lub" but if you wanted to say "the cups" you would write it as "cov khob" where "cov" is still equivalent to the word "the" but it is used if you wanted to make a noun plural.
This is one of the most common mistake in Czech language when you want say something like that and people who writing to newspappers or web news are idiots very often and they can't write it correctly so we constantly have to ask Who the hell killed who or which car hitted what car or something like that. :-D It looks like Polish has same problem. :-D And you have to using commas correctly, this is problem in online writing without diactritics, people writing like little kids and you can't catch it what it means. :-)
There are only 4 in German, but the articels change with the case. Der Löwe aß den Dachs. The lion ate the honey badger. But: Der Dachs = The honey badger. Das Ende des Lebens. The end of the life. But: Das Leben = the life
@@bananaforscale1283 This with lion works when you change word order, but there are examples which don't work and it's confusing then, there is no much such examples, but newspaper writters have special gift write it wrong in all such cases. :-D I mean mostly online news servers, in paper news they have to read it few times before it's printed, but on internet, they sometimes want to be fastest and it's causing really ridiculous mistakes. That sentences with lion would be like this in Czech: Lev snědl medojeda. Lva snědl medojed. So in this case it works, but native Czech would write Medojed snědl lva in second sentence.
Hi Paul! I find your channel very interesting and though I don't have the time to watch every episode I can't resist watching at least one every week. My first language is French which you are pretty familiar with. However, I learned Armenian alongside French when still an infant, then forgot it and then rediscovered it later. I wish I knew more of it when I had my Latin classes in school, because these two languages grammars have a pretty large overlap. Classical Armenian had the following 7 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, instrumental and locative. Modern Eastern Armenian still has the same cases, while Western Armenian has lost the locative case. To be honest most of the time the form for nominative and accusative is the same, and same goes for genitive and dative. Interestingly, there is no gender as such in Armenian (even in the classical form) but verbs do have cases in certain occasions. I would greatly appreciate if you could find some time to present the language in a video some time.
Happy New Year, Paul! And thanks for this outstanding video -- very clear and concise -- quite a feat when you are addressing an audience with such a wide range of native languages and formal grammatical knowledge. I especially like that you gave examples from both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. Well done!
It's really cool to watch this video, not only because I find grammar rules interesting, but because I thought I didn't understand the different types of casing, but it turns out I do it all the time in different languages without even thinking about it as "casing."
Yes. In Serbian (Serbo-Croatian) you have 3 grammatical genders, each gender has plural form (genivite singular is used for dual) and each adjetive changes with noun. And we have definife form for masculne adjetives (Russian has for all 3 genders). N mali dečak G malog dečaka D malom dečaku A malog dečaka V mali dečače I malim dečakom L malom dečaku N mali dečaci G malih dečaka D malim dečacima A male dečake V mali dečaci I malim dečacima L malim dečacima N maloj devojčici G male devojčice ..... Got bored. You will get it.
Hey, what do you mean by defenite form for for masculine adjectives? And what do you mean by "for all 3 genders in russian"? As a native russian speaker, i have never heard of any form of definiteness or indefiniteness in my language. :D
I don't know if it is applied in Serbian, but in Croatian there could be two forms of adjectives depending on the meaning, e.g. (in Croatian we add J sound) N mali d(j)ečak G malog d(j)ečaka, mala d(j)ečaka D malom d(j)ečaku, malu d(j)ečaku A malog d(j)ečaka, mala d(j)ečaka V mali d(j)ečače L (o) malom d(j)ečaku, (o) malu d(j)ečaku I (s) malim d(j)ečakom
Mladen Milić zut/zuti zuta/zute zuto/zuta ne razumem jos uvek na sta se misli... jer ako si hteo da kazes za mnozinu, onda takodje i zenski i muski rod imaju
Yes of course :P In slovenian ( one of my natives languages) 6 cases are used: Nominativ, genitiv, datitiv, accusativ, locativ and strumental ( in slovenian: imenovalnik, rodilnik, dajalnik, tožilnik, mestnik, orodnik). The cases are applied to the adjectives, too. The language has the particularity of the "dual" noun form (to indicate two of them) so in conclusion every single noun has 18 differente form in relation to the case an number.
In Bangla we have 6 cases. 1. who/what, nominative? 2. on whom/what, accusative? 3. with what/by whom, instrumental? 4. giving to someone without condition, something like dative 5. from or to something, close to genitive 6. from.at a place, something like locative...... This is all I can remember now... I already know English and right now, I am learning German, so comparing the cases in different languages helps me a lot to understand the way they operate.
Serbian Mapping I try :) A lot of cases don't have English translation (at least I couldn't find any), so I write the Latin names, and a small explanation (except the first 3, I presume they are obvious). All cases are added to the noun as an affix. nominativus accusativus dativus instrumentalis - comitativus (with /item - with /companion) causalis - finalis (purpose) translativus - factivus (change/turn/transform into) inessivus (in) superessivus (on) adessivus (near) illativus (into) sublativus (onto) allativus (toward) elativus (from /inside) delativus (from /surface) ablativus (from /location) terminativus (how long, how far) essivus-formalis (what form) essivus-modalis (how)
Verbs (not only nouns) in Arabic can also change depending on the article before them. For example : taktobo = you write is the standard present tense without a preceding article in second person تكتب La taktob = meaning don't write (as an order for second person) The verb loses the o inflection Lun taktoba = you will not write لن تكتب The verb gets the a at the end Arabic is very complicated
just to correct, "asharabu al-haliiba" is "I drink '''the''' milk". "I drink milk" is "Asharabu haliiban" with the final nunation to indicate indefinition.
Yes, but I was under the impression that when you make a general timeless statement like this that you use the definite, even though in English it would be indefinite.
Time only affects the verb "Asharabu" which in this case is not timeless but indicates the immediate present. The Timeless form of ashrabu is "shurb". Let me take the chance of you noticing me to thanks you for making me interested in languages 😊 I am currently learning Hebrew, Swedish, and Esperanto. Overload?
I don't think that's the same as what I mean. "Shurb" would be like "Drinking", but I mean "I drink milk" as in, "I drink milk regularly". I mean "timeless" in the way the present tense is used for general statements of behavior.
Oh, I get you. You are theoretically right, but for the convenience of not confusing "I am drinking right now" and "I habitually drink" we use the word "aadatan" which is "habitually". See how I got confused without the magical word. But still, habit and time have nothing to do with the "al-haliiba" but with "ashrabu"
Happy new year, Paul! I like your Langfocus channel very much. My mother tongue is Cantonese, commonly seen as a dialect of Chinese, which has no case inflection. When learning some high inflected western languages, I might have a problem remembering the rules. I don't find any video of yours focusing on Chinese. I think you won't miss it, but I understand it's hard to give a proper quick introduction to such a big language. If you need some help, you may use mine. I'm glad to give some advice. (Though I'm sure you have many Chinese friends who are willing to :P)
Finno-Ugric languages will this "contest" easily. They all must have 10+ cases, and the immediate reason is (relatively) free order of words or word pairs. A more profound reason lays in effect of the environment where the proto language was born. Proto Indo-European was born on the open steppes of modern Ukraine. On an open steppe where everything looks the same ("that bloody grass"), movement is essential to see anything new, therefore the language got formed around verb and words in a sentence have a certain fixed order. On the other hand, Proto Finno-Ugric was born in forests where every step changes what you see ("those bloody same trees from yet another angle"). Therefore the language got formed around nouns, and to lesser extent around adjectives, but not on verbs. With a small change in noun endings and perhaps word order you can describe any situation from a totally new point of view. Something that requires a total rewriting in a Indo-European language.
The idea that the environment influences the mental models of the people living there and by that way forms the language has been studied foremost by the Norwegian psychologist Frode J. Strømnes (in Norwegian bokmål, no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frode_J._Strømnes) while he was a professor in Finland. There is a short explanation at (again in Norwegian bokmål) at www.maalmannen.no/2015/04/frode-jens-stromnes-sprak-og-mentale-modellar/ He wrote a book in English about these mental models, "The Fall of the Word and the Rise of the Mental Model: A Reinterpretation of the Recent Research on Spatial Cognition and Language" (available for instance at www.amazon.co.uk/Fall-Word-Rise-Mental-Model/dp/3631521774). HTH
If I remember correctly, Japanese uses free-standing particles to mark topics and objects (among others), right? An object marker would roughly serve the same function as (an accusative) case with the difference that cases are marked directly on the noun (or adjective, article, etc.). The connection is stronger between inflectional endings and words, nothing can go between them.
Another difference is that, because of the particles detachment from the word it marks, it should mark the whole phrase (i. e. everything that belongs to the constituent including potential adjectives and determinatives that might modify the head noun). Cases on the other hand often mark all elements of a noun phrase individually, we call that agreement. However, some languages do only mark some of the elements and only one of them is formally marked by case. Kurdish e. g. only marks the head noun, and adjectives or reflexive pronouns that refer back to the head noun are connected by syntactical position (modifiers, apart from determinatives, follow the head noun) and a feature peculiar to Iranian languages, namely the ezafe-construction (roughly meaning "addition"). So, there are differences, but particles indeed do serve the same fundamental purpose of marking the various constituents and semantic relationships between them.
Pondered this myself while watching the video, particularly since the first 3 cases sounds a lot like the use of は/が, を, and の and the end of nouns. It's complicated. Japanese doesn't use spaces between words as we do and it's quite normal to append hiragana to root kanji/word as a modifier. Are these phrases (as in English) or could they have a case together as with the massive noun words constructed in say German. The grammar does not translate well: traditionally they even write in a different direction and I've met Japanese English-speakers who struggled with the concept of formal/academic writing in paragraphs (even if proficient conversationally). Whether we see them as "separate words" would be very subjective since the grammar is so different to English. Would be curious whether anyone with more experience translating Japanese has encountered this idea. Yes these "particles" are taught separately but could you not view わたしは for "I", わたしを for "me/myself", and わたしの for "my/mine" as single words for these cases? For the purposes of teaching, I think this should be discussed more as it would be beneficial for many Japanese language learners. Whether or not it is accurate, the more widespread explicit use of particles in Japanese grammar has made me pay more attention to which usage of the noun I'm doing. It's also handy to gain confidence early on, playing with basic sentences with relatively little vocabulary, and made me think more carefully about grammar in the European languages I've learned in the past.
Particules are a bit different from grammatical cases, they are not really tied to the noun in more complex sentences. For exemple the sentence : "昨日作った料理を食べるのは難しくなったと思います。” "I think that the dish that was prepared yesterday has became difficult to eat." In this sentence what case indicate the particule の ? What case indicate the particule は ? What case indicate the particule と ? Really hard question and even if it were possible to tell, learning japanese via this system wouldn't be really helpfull as the english sentence structure is nowhere near the japanese one. Only my opinion but trying to translate systematically everything in your own language when you learn a new one is the worst you can do, it prevents you from getting used to the grammar which prevents you to be actually able to speak it.
Modern Greek has 4 cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, vocative. Ancient Greek had also a dative case. e.g. άνθρωπος (human): nom. άνθρωπος, gen. ανθρώπου, acc. άνθρωπο, voc. άνθρωπε If you're reading this, I wish you a Happy New Year!
I don't know if many will agree, but I noticed a similarity between Russian / Polish cases and Japanese markers or particles as you prefer to call it, it's a bit easy to learn if you already know japanese particles, for example, in the Polish sentences "Piszę piórem" which means "I write with a pen" in Japanese it's almost the same "わたしは鉛筆で書きます (Watashi wa empitsu de kakimasu) so, the particle "de" and the case ending "e" means "with" to indicate with what we are doing something.
