The year in books #9: Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod

Language acquisition functions quite differently depending on whether it happens during early childhood or later in life. A language you learn during your larval phase is simply absorbed and becomes a native language, one that you use by instinct. At some point in the development of the brain, however, this ceases to function. From that point on, to become fluent in a new language you have to consciously memorize and internalize the vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation that make it up.

In my experience, the second process proceeds in three phases, which overlap quite a lot. In the first phase, you know nothing, and everything is a learning experience. Textbooks for foreign language learners are a phenomenal source of information at this point, but so are road signs, restaurant menus, and television advertisements.

In the second phase, you've absorbed the basic grammatical rules and the most common words of your new language. At this point, textbooks become useless. Newspaper articles, television, movies and books are your friends, providing you with enough new information to continue making progress. Since you've advanced at this point beyond the reach of most textbooks, specialized academic sources are a good source of information (for German, I have a Hammers German Grammar and Usage, which is phenomenal. For Japanese, I recommend Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui's Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar). In this phase, though, I find that the most valuable resource is a native speaker, whom you can ask specifically what a sentence means and why it's shaped like it is.

At some point you enter the third phase, where you will spend the rest of your life. This is where the big difference between a native speaker and an advanced non-native speaker of a language becomes clear: your spoken command of the language is not nearly as good as a native (and never will be), but your structural understanding of the language has surpassed theirs, rendering your questions incomprehensible to them. Imagine walking around a town in America asking people to explain the precise difference between 'consists of' and 'comprises.' At this point, you need to find a native speaker who has formal training in the grammar of their native language. And if you're learning German, when you start noticing that your questions put question marks in the eyes of your friends, you should start reading Bastian Sick's series Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.

The title of the book means "the dative is the death of the genitive." That refers to the gradual disappearance of the genitive case in German grammar, which is being replaced by the dative case, and the title's grammatical structure itself is a joke, as it's an example of precisely the kind of non-standard construct that is replacing the use of the genitive. This sort of humor runs throughout Sick's books, which are collections of the columns he writes for the Spiegel magazine on the subject of German grammar. They discuss sentence structure, the fine differences between words with similar meanings, regional dialects, the conventions of spoken versus written German, the meanings of sayings and idioms, the gender of rarely used nouns, and every other topic that could interest a lover of the German language. In short, die Dativ/Genitiv Bücher, as everyone seems to call them, comprise a slowly growing encyclopedia of answers to the questions that native speakers themselves have trouble with. In short, the questions that non-native speakers struggle to find answers to.

Bastian Sick's series is of course targeted at native speakers -- who buy his books in astounding numbers, showing that many Germans are as intrigued by their language as I am -- but in writing them, he's produced a wonderful resource for foreigners that I cannot recommend strongly enough.

And if you're a native speaker friend of mine... well, my apologies for the coming months. One of the chapters in Volume II, which I just read, concerned common sayings (like dort liegt der Hase im Pfeffer and dann wurde der Hund in der Pfanne verrückt), and I'm determined to start using all of them in my daily speech. Dann wird die Kacke am dampfen sein!