| French | English | |

|

| | du | of the | | de l' | of the | | de la | of the | | des | of the | | au | to the / at the | | à l' | to the / at the | | à la | to the / at the | | aux | to the / at the |

French has multiple options because it has 2 genders for nouns "the chair" = "la chaise" (female), "the bench" = "le banc" (male), and it changes the article when you're talking about multiple things vs. single things "the benches" = "les bancs".

So, French really has 3 versions of "the": "le" (male, singular), "la" (female, singular), "les" (female or male, singular).

But German... ugh. There's a 4x4 matrix of German words for "the". German had the wisdom to come up with a neuter gender, but the insanity to not apply it to most common objects. Somehow a knife is sexless, a spoon is male and a fork is female. Making it worse, the version of "the" you use for an object depends on whether the object is the subject of a sentence, the object of a sentence, the indirect object of a sentence or possessive. I don't know if it's better or worse (but I'm leaning towards worse) that they re-use a lot of these articles at other spots in the matrix, so "der" is used for male objects in the nominative case, female in the dative case, and plural objects in the genitive case.

| Case | Masculine | Feminine | Neuter | Plural | |

|

|

|

|

| | nominative | der | die | das | die | | accusative | den | die | das | die | | dative | dem | der | dem | den | | genitive | des | der | des | der |

Take "Stein" which is stone, not beer glass. If you're an English speaker and are used to adding an "s" to make something plural, and you see "Der Stein" and "Des Steines", you might think that the version with the "es" is the plural, right? Nope, the plural of "Der Stein" is "Die Steine". "Des Steins" is for the possessive case. You'd use "Der Stein" for "The stone is heavy", but if you want to say "The weight of the stone is high" you have to switch to "Des Steins" -- and to add another twist, sometimes it's "Steines" because of reasons.

Any time I use the wrong definite article my German wife will loudly bark “NEIN!” It’s hot but educational.

I'm not sure any of those french phrases ever translate to "the"

I'm trilingual and two of the languages don't even have this bs lol (Mandarin, Japanese, English).

I don't even know a correct way to translate 'the' to my language, it doesn't really exist

In Norwegian (or rest of scandinavistan, as far as I know) we don't even use "the". Suffixes are used instead.

Fish = Fisk
The fish (single) = Fisken
The fish (plural) = Fiskene

Russian:

Der, die, das 👏👏...

I can see now why English is seen as more universal, even if in an alternate timeline where the Anglophones never became dominant.

Yorkshire:
T' (Glottal stop sound)

Edit: Shit, I mistook the original meme as about grammatical cases instead of articles. I think Finnish has 15 cases. 🤔🫣

Me speaking a language which uses quotes instead of the

More like: by the, of the, for the, to the, belonging to the etc.

You guys have articles?

él la los las

Ellos ellas

Eso esa

Esos Esas.

Norwegian: -en, -a, -et (suffixes)

But also -o, -i and probably other variations depending on location.

Die Nichteinhaltung der Fallzahlen von eins bis vier vom Mittelpunkt ausgehend stört mich massiv.

Der, des, dem, den

Die, der, der, die

Das, des, dem, das

Die, der, den, die

I'm not sure it's kosher to count à la and de la as separate definite articles.

In hungarian the articles are only "a"(which actually works like the english "the" but with a form that is "az" which is like "a" turning into "an" in english) and then "egy" which means "a" in english but also means the number one. Most times from what i notice it works pretty closely to what german or english does. Where my whole "it works pretty intuitively" argument falls apart is that you conjugate your freaking verbs and they work in sometimes completely mysterious ways.

"Eszek egy almát" and "Eszem az almát" -- these are just "I eat an apple" and "I eat the apple"

But "Almát eszek" also works it just sounds more like you are specifically pointing out that its an apple that you are eating(and not an orange for example) and even tho its in the indefinite form it can sound pretty definite depending on context.

But then "Almát eszem" sounds like you are eating a person named Alma because for some reason not having the article makes it sound more personal.

"Eszek" is just eating

And at last "Eszem" sounds like you are pointing out that "I am eating that" or "I am eating that". Also if its in a more rural dialect it could be just the base form.

So yeah its an absolute brainfuck in hungarian.

Polish: (null)
🫲👁️🧠👁️🫱