What's the best way to learn a noun declension system?

[Gojera]

So, I've never learned a language with a robust noun declension system, mostly having studied French, Japanese, and non-European languages. But I've decided to learn Czech, which has a pretty intense declension system. This is probably an area where systematic study would be rewarding, but most of my systematic flashcarding has been with Anki/kanji, which doesn't look directly applicable.

What's the best way to learn a language's noun declension paradigm? Looking around, I find the Dowling method, which is just copying each pattern a hundred times or two. Advice?

[linguoboy]

I think the best way to learn it is in context. This is what I was counseling a friend. Memorise short sentences and phrases which exemplify different combinations of gender, number, and case and then refer back to those when encountering new nouns. You'll find most learning materials for Czech are organised this way. You read a dialogue in which nouns are used in a new case followed by a brief explanation of forms and usage. This tends to work better for most people than just trying to commit abstractly-organised charts to memory.

[Nortaneous]

The Dowling method or something like it. Context is great for classroom settings, where it's more important to be undemanding and not make stupid people feel stupid than to actually get people to learn the language, but if you want to actually learn the language, you're going to have to sit down and memorize charts, just as people did in classrooms back in the days when it actually mattered whether or not the students learned Latin.

[Dewrad]

Given that I actually teach a highly inflected language for a living, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that somewhere between the two is the way forward. It's all very well plugging all the case-forms of, e.g. dominus and femina into memrise and then having at it, but without being able to recognise and use them in context, all you're effectively doing is learning to recite a paradigm. A case in point: my father in law, having studied Latin at school in this manner could still fifty years later comfortably recite the present indicative of amo, as well as first and second declension nouns. On the other hand, he couldn't read even a simple sentence of the language: he knew that dominum was the accusative singular, but had no idea what the accusative singular was for.

[marconatrix]

Well, I suppose it helps to look over the system as a whole and note any consistencies across declensions, between cases etc. Then learn to recognise the cases in use.

The above seems to work for me with Latvian, not that I've gone very far yet.

I managed German at school OK. With Greek there is almost always an article with the noun so once you know how the article declines you can identify the noun case. With Gaelic it really just comes down to knowing the genitive of each noun as you learn it.

At different times in my life I've looked at Russian, Polish and Czech. All have entirely defeated me. My advice with regard to Slavonic languages is therefore Give Up! They simply don't want to be learnt and may seriously damage your sanity. I suspect they're actually conlangs invented by a bunch of masochists.

[Viktor77]

I learned German through association mostly. Genitive in -er, dative in -m, English pronouns her, him, etc. It just clicked for the most part.

I'm learning Lithuanian's incredibly dense noun declension system by not learning it. I'm trying what amounts basically to just absorbing the forms. I try to use them, read them, and then try to make it click in my head why one form is one way and another another way. This is the same process I use for tweaking my French. I try to get to the point where things just make sense intuitively, like for a native speaker. I'll let you know if I ever manage to absorb all of Lithuanian's incredibly dense declension system. I'm also using this same not-give-a-fuck process for the phonology, because I have no interest in learning that. For example, I never learned how to pronounce Dutch, I just heard so much of it I just figured it out. I prefer this approach usually.

Rote memorizing will work if you can stand the boredom.

[Yng]

Given that I actually teach a highly inflected language for a living, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that somewhere between the two is the way forward. It's all very well plugging all the case-forms of, e.g. dominus and femina into memrise and then having at it, but without being able to recognise and use them in context, all you're effectively doing is learning to recite a paradigm. A case in point: my father in law, having studied Latin at school in this manner could still fifty years later comfortably recite the present indicative of amo, as well as first and second declension nouns. On the other hand, he couldn't read even a simple sentence of the language: he knew that dominum was the accusative singular, but had no idea what the accusative singular was for.

yeah I agree with this. I totally get Nortaneous's frustration with all of the fashionable context-based slow-as-fuck American-style fashionable baby step classroom learning that has weaselled its way into language classrooms across the world and I agree you will go very slowly if you follow the average language textbook's idea of what is a Sensible Way To Learn Things and will probably never learn even slightly more obscure things, especially since for things like Czech there often aren't decent language textbooks past the most basic of levels. That said, although you do have to learn to recognise the forms in the first place, there's no point in just memorising them in isolation. Arabic has pretty unpleasant amounts of allomorphy and weird changes in its verbal system, but given both an initial push to understand what the different conjugations are like and, following that, lots of reading, you internalise things much better than you would without any context to help and can actually use them too.

[Bristel]

If I want to do this for my conlang Ercunic, I'll have to memorize by rote, because there are 7 declension patterns or so. Not sure if the current version of Ercunic will keep dual number or not, if it does, that'll make it harder to learn. I might end up collapsing some of the noun cases together as well.

[Imralu]

I remember when learning German, I memorised the case-number-gender pattern of articles and, eventually all the silly ways that adjectives inflect and as I spoke I'd almost visually check that my hunches were correct and then over time, my hunches became more and more accurate. Now, when I make mistakes, it's always just because I misgender nouns. The only non-misgendering mistake I make these days issometimes forgetting to add the -n to adjectives in the plural nom and acc caused by a preceding article or article-like word and sometimes forgetting that words like "many" (viele) or "other" (andere) don't count as article-like words.

[marconatrix]

I'm learning Lithuanian's incredibly dense noun declension system ...

Perhaps I should post my crib sheet for Latvian, you may be able to adapt it. I think I'll start a Declensions thread in the Museum section rather than put it here where no one will find it. The Rulers of the ZB Universe are of course welcome to send it anywhere else (including oblivion).

[jal]

Having tried once to learn some Polish, I found it far more useful to learn the forms by use then studying declension patterns. Also, if there are several genders, I found it easier to learn a case for all genders than to try to memorize all cases for a single one.


JAL

[Gojera]

Thanks for your perspectives.

It's sort of my premise that you can't learn a language by studying it, you just have to slowly acquire it with lots of comprehensible input and expressive interaction. And while formally studying grammar and noun declension tables is a way of supercharging the normal acquisition process, it has to be built on that interactive foundation.

So it seems like some people have indeed found it valuable to spend time memorizing the declension tables, but only when rooted in that contextual practice.

I do know what the accusative singular is basically for, after all.

[jal]

It's sort of my premise that you can't learn a language by studying it

I think this holds for most (adult) people, and it definitely holds for children. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some polyglots out there that only need to pick up a grammar book and dictionary and are on their way.

And while formally studying grammar and noun declension tables is a way of supercharging the normal acquisition process, it has to be built on that interactive foundation.

Without interaction, or at least source material, it's difficult to grasp the finer points of semantics and pragmatics.


JAL