Sir, – Derek Scally (An Irishman’s Diary, March 4th) states,“One of the greatest difficulties for Irish students learning German is facing a daunting crash course in grammar thanks to the removal of English grammar teaching from the Irish school syllabus. Compulsory Irish lessons have caused further collateral damage.”
I totally disagree. In the course of learning German at the UN headquarters in Vienna in the 1980s,where classes included people from multiple linguistic backgrounds, I noticed that monoglot English speakers were at a distinct disadvantage, relative to others, regardless of their knowledge of English grammar. While German has three genders, masculine,feminine and neuter, other languages, including Irish, have at least the first two genders listed above. English alone is without gender. Learning a noun in German must always include learning its gender. A good example is given by the three related nouns, the briefcase, the suitcase and the luggage. The three are respectively feminine, masculine and neuter. In the nominative case the article, the,takes the form die, der and das.
English speakers were also puzzled by the emphasis on the cases nominative, accusative,possessive and dative. This is because, in German, the form of the article, any adjective and the noun itself varies distinctively for each gender and for each case, both singular and plural. With a background in Irish grammar with its two genders and some variation in the forms of the article, adjective and noun which is common to speakers of languages other than English one is at a distinct advantage relative to monoglot English speakers.
So much for Irish lessons causing “collateral damage”. – Yours, etc,