This is not pedantic at all. It should be “Es war kalt” if you are talking about the weather.
“Er war kalt.” implies that the (male) body had been dead long enough to cool to room temperature before it was found. If you want to say that someone male perceives the temperature as cold, it’s “Ihm war kalt.” This is usually taught as a personal dative construction or experiential dative construction.
Further evidence that Duolingo is a bit of a crap product.
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It isn’t Duolingo that’s crap, it’s me making mistakes. In my justification, however, I have to say that I was overcome with confusion over the reference to the weather as being cold. 😁😁
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Yes, the app corrected me. I’m still figuring out the German word order, which is lovely but not intuitive to me. I’m trying to make it intuitive, so I’m not looking up the foundational principles of how it’s done.
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German word order follows very consistent rules, but it always takes learners forever to really absorb and apply them. It’s one of the things that I see as a clear proof that language learning is more complex than just learning the rules. People need tons of exposure and practice to master some rules that are really very straightforward.
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On a positive side, yesterday I read a Wikipedia article in German about Eva Menasse and understood almost everything. 🎊🎉🎊🎉
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I’m approaching grammar similarly. We’ll pretend it’s for high minded reasons like yours rather than just laziness 😛
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“German word order, which is lovely but not intuitive to me”
I remember a conversation with an English speaker who was living between Germany and Poland (he preferred Germany but needed the two gigs to get by).Despite is strong affection for German he said he had trouble with extended speech because without warning he’d find himself in a word order trap that seemed to have no exit, even backing up didn’t help.
I sympathized…. For years German worder influenced my Polish and I had (among other things, a tendency to put the infinitive last) Muszę się na zajęcia przygotować (I have to for class get ready)…
Have you heard of TEKAMOLO? It’s a common mnemonic acronym for word order in German: TEmporal-KAusal-MOdal-LOkal (time-cause-mode-place).
It’s not infallible but it helps.
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Strangely for a lifelong language teacher, I am very bad at language rules. I never learned all the cases of the Spanish subjunctive or preterite/ imperfect. Students tell me these rules and mnemonic devices that they learned with other teachers and I know nothing about them.
The way I learn and teach is by getting the feel of the language. I struggled a lot with the rules for the Spanish preterite and imperfect,for example, until a Mexican friend told me he can explain the entire thing in two words: interrupted action. The imperfect is interrupted action. Once I heard that, I never made another mistake.
Of course, many people learn through rules, exceptions, etc. But I have a piss-poor memory, so it doesn’t work for me. I need to get where it becomes intuitive.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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