Hello there! Sorry for the long-ish absence… I was out of town last week, and came back home only to spend the weekend hitting the books for a German test I had on Monday. So I was holed up at home the entire weekend trying to memorise adjective endings in the dative and accusative cases, and staring into space while chanting to myself, “ein roter, eine rote, ein rotes. Der rote, den roten, dem roten.”
How on earth did the Germans come up with the brilliant idea of having different endings for adjectives based not just on the gender of the object, but also the structure of the sentence? Say you were standing in front of a red table, a red cat and a red house. In English, red is red. Be it an outrageously loud piece of furniture or an extremely bizarre-coloured animal, the adjective “red” doesn’t change. But if you had to describe those objects in German, it wouldn’t be enough to say “rot” (red). Nope. You have to be precise, you see. It’s “ein roter Tisch, eine rote Katze, ein rotes Auto.” Looks simple enough, you say? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s just the tip of the grammatical iceberg. When the sentence structure changes, so does the adjective ending. And this is supposed to be just the kiddy stuff. I wonder how bad my headaches will get as the class progresses.
Oh but I digress. I shouldn’t be boring you with my Teutonic adventures. I actually meant to write about my recent trip.
Perfecting Asam Pedas 