There are many differences between English and German with respect to the system of articles and how it works. These differences are related to number, gender definiteness and case.
Thank you very much, Sven Leukert for your excellent information. It is really interesting. Hazim.
Sven said it all, and quite succinctly.
Incidentally, it's the cases that are the real bitch re: articles.
This is b/c one must discern accurately the article's part of speech, while remembering gender forms (e.g. in direct/indirect object, etc.--something that is mostly obvious, but many times isn't...I guess we all need to practice diagramming sentences).
Add to this German rules (e.g. irritating tendency to move words all over the place [e.g. ends of sentences], not to mention frequent idiomatic phrases! No wonder Mark Twain hated the language!
Incidentally, and totally unrelated to your question....Linguistic oriented cognitive scientists [I think that's an accurate descriptor, could be wrong] have noted that native German speakers tend to imbue ideological characteristics to objects based on gender (e.g. die Brucke [sorry, can't add umlaut]). As "die" is feminine, German speakers tend to extend/associate so called "female" characteristics to the object (i.e. a bridge).
I'm no expert, far from it. But the finding is interesting, though I have to apologize for my inability to recall a citation for this.
But now one's left to wonder about ramifications. For instance, how is this exemplified in Hitler's speeches? What role, if any, did such associations play in the constructions of his speeches. I have no idea....I'm way out of my depth here....My German sucks after years of neglect.....But someone out there knows!
Thank you, Jeffrey for the nice details of your answer. Best regards.
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