Comment by samus
2 months ago
German native speakers might better understand how cases work, but it's as laborious to learn them as for anybody else.
2 months ago
German native speakers might better understand how cases work, but it's as laborious to learn them as for anybody else.
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
The cases contain actual information that give the speaker more flexibility in structuring their sentences: a German phrase remains syntactically valid as long as you don't move the conjunctions or the verb, while the emphasis of the sentence shifts.
Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.
Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.