English language II.: is | are

And there everyone complains about Germans creating compound words of incredible length ;) At least we normally don't add capital letters to the midth of a word, but then I guess you had to make sure everyone knows you are an American ;)

@Moody

Whatareyoutalkingabout? Myspacebarsometimesisnonresponsive.

But she climbed the stairs feeling strangely as if she were the loser.

It seems is/are extends to the past as well, was/were

Was becomes were in third party ( and first party) in the past in subjunctive mood.
This link explains it better

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/was-vs-were/

@ Smachtai

The funny part is, that I normally used were and was correctly without knowing why it was correct or wrong. Thanks for the link.
I mostly use a word because in my opinion it sounds better than the alternative word.

Remember Lewis Carroll
"When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean

I've been married to a German for over 50 years and speak the language fluently. The grammar is very difficult to learn in the initial stages but once you've mastered the basic rules the language never surprises you unlike English which has so many exceptions. Most languages have nouns that are either masculine or feminine. German goes one better and adds a third gender: neuter. The masculine definite article (“the”) is der, the feminine is die, and the neuter form is das.The classic example of German grammar never varying is that diminutives always use the neuter definite article. So Fräulein and Mädchen diminutives of Frau (woman) and Magd (maid) respectively which obviously apply to young females, use the neuter definite article (das) rather than the female form (die) which would seem logical.

@ Hotspur

Reminds me of Robwords on youtube. In one of his videos he says that 27& of the words in English are of Germanic origin 2/3 of the English vocabulary is of Romanic origin but he still says that English is mainly a Germanic language and says that of the 100 most used words only 1 is of Romanic origin.

A native English speaker once wrote in a forum, that if you can speak a German word, you can write it and vice versa. German has lots of rules but hardly any exceptions, while English only provides some rules, but is mainly exceptions.

Article are fun, always make me remember the fun little 5th grade when we were entertained by little tasks of declining the artcles.The resulting 16 cases had 13 or 14 different artibles. Last year I saw a table comparing German with English (15x the and 1x I forgot)

Actually is it really logical that the word boy is male while the word girl is neutr. If I emember Biology lessons crorrectly girls are girls shorter than boys are boys. Wasn't it about 2 years less for girls to turn into woment before boys stop shooting duds ;)

As an American who had the pleasure of spending a year in Germany as an exchange student, I love and appreciate this discussion . It's good to acknowledge cultural differences and seek understanding.

I would argue that this is a case of a weak rule. English is odd, because, as James Nicoll put it:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."

We inherit a lot of words and techniques taken from other languages, along with a culture (in many English speaking countries) of adapting and changing things to suit local preferences. While there are firm rules, like Order Force (a positively Metal Name that refers to the exact order of types of adjectives describing something), there are also a lot of weaker rules that can often ignored or not even be known by most.

I think many of the examples here for is/are are situations where we might lean in one direction, but the other choice could work. Ambiguous, if you will

Saying "He are" would warrant a spanking, but saying "The staff is" or "The staff are" probably wouldn't ;)