Does the word "The" have complex rules in your language?

[Mereloshn]

Probably the single biggest difficulty I've faced in learning my chosen second language is mastering the rules of the word "The" which is complicated.  It's not impossible to learn, but it's tricky when you're not used to it.  In Yiddish, Dos, Der, Di, and Dem all mean "The" and there are rules for which nouns they signify.  Usually Di is used for plural nouns or feminine nouns but the rest are used interchangeably.  Dos is often used for neutral nouns and Der for masculine nouns but this is not always the case, they both have designated nouns to signify and they are replaced with Dem if a noun uses a verb to take action against another noun.  This is even more complicated than Spanish and French which has separate gender categories for "The" based on the noun they signify.  Are there other languages that have multiple words and complicated rules for the use of "The"?  I would be interested in learning about how it works in other languages I have never studied. 

[poftim]

Romanian, the language I'm learning, has no word for "the" at all. Instead you change the ending of the word.

Cat = pisică
The cat = pisica (the accent disappears)

Dog = câine
The dog = câinele

Chair = scaun
The chair = scaunul

Coffee = cafea
The coffee = cafeaua (four vowels in a row: nice!)

[宇崎ちゃん]

Polish: we have no "the" at all.
Dutch: we have "de" and "het", but the usage has more exceptions than rules.

We can say "de banaan" or "het banaan" (both meaning "the banana"), everyone will say only one of the 2 is correct, but they're technically both correct.
However, one of the 2 sounds unnatural. Which one differs per person.
One exception on this exception is when the word ends by "je" (meisje (little girl), huisje (little house), hondje (little dog), etc.), you must use "het".

[poftim]

Blaveloper,

When you say there's no "the" (definite article) in Polish, how do you distinguish between "cat" and "the cat"? Do you change the word for "cat" in some way like in Romanian? Or does the whole concept of a definite article simply not exist in Polish?

[宇崎ちゃん]

@poftim

Not precisely like in Romanian, but there are 7 cases in Polish.
Muj kot = my cat.
Daj mi kota = give me a cat.
Jestem kotem = I'm a cat.
5 koty stały = 5 cats stood.
5 kotów stało = 5 cats stood.

And so on.

[linguaholic]

sounds interesting. What is the difference between the last two cases?

[宇崎ちゃん]

Honestly, I don't know.
I use the right case without even thinking about it.

[Mereloshn]

Those are all really fascinating usages for The.  Even more amazing that Romanian has no word for The.

 

Some quick examples of what I use for Yiddish

Di froy- the woman

Der bruder- the brother

Dos fleysh- the meat

Der bruder est dem fleysh- the brother eats the meat

 

When you don't know which nouns have to be used or when they need to be changed, it's like a puzzle. 

[poftim]

Blaveloper,

Interesting. Romanian has a case system too that it inherited from Latin and that most other Romance languages have since lost. There are five cases in Romanian, but two pairs of them have identical forms, so there are only three forms to remember. For someone like me it's still a feat of mental gymnastics to produce the correct form on the fly. The three genders and all the different plurals are a complicating factor.

I think Hungarian has something like 17 cases! My idea of a nightmare!

[111kg]

On 9/14/2016 at 9:54 AM, poftim said:

Romanian, the language I'm learning, has no word for "the" at all. Instead you change the ending of the word.

Cat = pisică
The cat = pisica (the accent disappears)

Dog = câine
The dog = câinele

Chair = scaun
The chair = scaunul

Coffee = cafea
The coffee = cafeaua (four vowels in a row: nice!)

Offtopic: I am always glad when I see other Romanian fellows on foreign forums. Awesome way of explaining as well.

[babelle]

The definite article 'the' is also one of the challenges of learning German. It has different forms in the four cases - nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative case and each case has different forms for the singular masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural. If word order is not much of a problem in German, it's because you can easily identify who's doing what to whom because of the the cases and the articles associated with each case. 

[Victor Leigh]

From what little I know about the Thai language, I don't think there is the equivalent of 'the' in the Thai language. This always poses a problem when I teach the definite article to my Thai students. I have to stress and re-stress to them the need for using 'the' in the English language. In some ways, the Thai language is very straightforward. Supposing we say in English "Look at the cat". In Thai it would come out as 'du maeow' (ดู แมว) literally 'look cat'.

 

[Northea]

There's no equivalent of a/the in Finnish. There's no difference between the two cases either, at least that I can think of right now.

Cat = kissa

A cat = kissa

The cat = kissa

If you want to be more specific, you can add helping words like "that" (tuo kissa) (which also means "bring cat" but let's not get into that now).

[poftim]

On 18/09/2016 at 9:30 PM, 111kg said:

Offtopic: I am always glad when I see other Romanian fellows on foreign forums. Awesome way of explaining as well.

Thanks! I'm not Romanian but I'll be going to Romania for the first time in just a couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll be there a while. I'm quite excited!

I now realize how un-obvious it must be for English learners to know when to use the definite article. (Why is it "English learners" and not "the English learners"? I honestly don't know the rules.)