How to Learn Any Language 38
NOUN CASES
Just as ice, water, and steam are merely different forms of the same thing, I, me, my, and mine are merely different forms of the same word. You pick the form according to what CASE you need. (Yes! You already do this in English.) Let’s advance on case now and destroy its mystery before it destroys your enthusiasm.
Noun (and pronoun) cases turn more people away from learning languages than boot camp turns away from joining the marines. And the same reason underlies both. Those who’ve been there enjoy boosting their own glory by exaggerating the difficulties involved to the intimidated uninitiated.
“Wait until those drill instructors at Parris Island get a hold of you!” is essentially the same comment as “Wait until you run into all those noun cases!” You may recall with distaste the trouble you had with Latin’s six noun cases. Russian also has six noun cases. Serbo-Croatian has seven. Other languages have even more.
Anyone studying a language bristling with noun cases knows the sinking feeling of leaving warm, shallow water and running into wave after wave of charts showing nouns that change their endings for no apparent reason!
You can ride those waves. Those nouns, in fact, change for very good reasons, reasons that are easy to catch on to provided you’re not labouring under the spell of a showoff know-it-all who tells you, “Finnish! Forget it. They have fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural!”
Fortunately, English has just enough of what we call noun cases to prove they’re nothing to fear.
Let’s play with the word house. “The house is large.” “The exterior of the house us green.” “Let’s go to the house.” “I see the house.” In all of those sentences, the form of house remains mercifully (for anybody learning English) the same. If there were any reason to strain a point and prove that plain English nouns can have case too, we could confect the sentence “The house’s exterior is green,” and point out that house’s is the genitive case of house.
To get a fuller example of case, we have to go to our English pronouns. “I have a pen.” “My pen is good.” “Give the pen to me.” “Do you hear me?”
Look what happened to I as it changed roles in the various sentences. In the sentence “I have a pen,” I is the subject of the sentence. In the sentence “My pen is good,” I has changed to my to express the concept of possession. In the sentence “Give the pen to me,” I becomes the indirect object of the giving, and in the sentence “Do you hear me?” I becomes the direct object of the verb hear.
If I wanted to discourage you instead of inspire you, I would say, “We have now met the NOMINATIVE case, the GENITIVE case, the DATIVE case, and the ACCUSATIVE case, and we’re all going to stay right here and not come up for air until you can decline (give
me the lineup of) 189 nouns in all those cases in the language you’d like to learn!” Instead I say let’s move forward and learn how to say things and read things and understand things in the language. You can learn about noun cases and other grammatical complexities exactly the way you learned your uncles and aunts when you were a baby – one hug, one kiss, one lollipop at a time.
When we carry the noun through all its cases we say we’re DECLINING that noun. Noun cases tip you off to the role of the noun or pronoun in a sentence. Many languages need them to tell you who is doing what to whom. Approach them with a good attitude and you will feel the wisdom of Mark Twain’s little sermon, “Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there.”
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