26.09.11 20:18
salma 
 | Re: confusion with ein/eine Dear Sir,
In English we say a man, a woman and a child. The man, the woman and the child. but in Deutsch man is masculine we use der Mann or ein Mann, woman is feminin we use die Frau, eine Frau, but a (child = Kind or little girl= Mädchen )is neutral, in this case we use das Mädchen ,ein Mädchen, das Kind, ein Kind.
for more details see
http://www.deutschseite.de/grammatik/ges...geschlecht.html
I hope that answers your question |
06.04.12 03:45
Pithecanthropus
| Re: confusion with ein/eine Mädchen ("girl") is actually a diminutive version of the word Magd ("maid", IIRC either "maiden" or "female domestic worker"). Diminutives are always neuter, and I'm almost positive this goes equally well for the dialectical variant suffixes like -le, -l, and -li. Indeed even in Dutch, which has seen a merger of masculine and feminine into the "common gender", diminuation still results in a neuter noun, e.g. het meisje ("the girl").
Mädchen must throw a lot of people because just about everybody who studies German usually learns the word for "boy" and "girl" before they learn the how diminutives work.
I may have mentioned previously that I've always found it difficult to understand how native German speakers "learn the gender with the noun", as they say. On the other hand, thinking about how one learns the geography of the city one lives in might shed some light. Some streets are "streets", others are "avenues", "lanes", "courts", "squares", etc., and we internalize these distinctions for all the specific streets we know. I wonder if learning the genders in German, or other languages that share that feature, works in a similar manner?
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