The word “that” is either “dass” when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, “that man” could be translated as “der Mann”, “dieser Mann”, “der da”, “den”, “welcher”, or “jener”.
Die is also the plural form, so they will say “die Männer”, but never “die Mann” singular.
I’m talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought “man” rather than “Mann” would make it clear. I’m just saying the phonetic sequence “die man” is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
I’m a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isn’t amazing, B1-2ish) so I’m not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
Ah, that makes sense. Apologies for the grammar lesson :)
We don’t travel to the Netherlands or Belgium all that often, and when we do everyone speaks English to us, whereas my mom just visited us for a month, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Nah you’re good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. You’re right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesn’t have great English.
I can communicate in Afrikaans to someone speaking Dutch if both of us speak slowly and use simple language. It’s painful though, so I haven’t needed it often. Lucky me that English is so widespread :D
The word “that” is either “dass” when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, “that man” could be translated as “der Mann”, “dieser Mann”, “der da”, “den”, “welcher”, or “jener”.
Die is also the plural form, so they will say “die Männer”, but never “die Mann” singular.
I’m talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought “man” rather than “Mann” would make it clear. I’m just saying the phonetic sequence “die man” is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
I’m a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isn’t amazing, B1-2ish) so I’m not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
Ah, that makes sense. Apologies for the grammar lesson :)
We don’t travel to the Netherlands or Belgium all that often, and when we do everyone speaks English to us, whereas my mom just visited us for a month, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Nah you’re good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. You’re right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesn’t have great English.
I can communicate in Afrikaans to someone speaking Dutch if both of us speak slowly and use simple language. It’s painful though, so I haven’t needed it often. Lucky me that English is so widespread :D