Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-26005008-20150326200202/@comment-1496755-20150328124536

Yeah, German's popularity is a bit of mystery to me too. It could be related to its reputation as a "technical" language or something like that.

With the Macedonians, there were a few weird situations. Like the word "mazno", which means "greasy" in Bulgarian, but "smooth" in Macedonian. Another curious difference was "mrasno", which means "dirty" in Bulgarian, but "greasy" in Macedonian. So when they wanted to tell me some food was greasy, I understood that it was dirty :)

Masculine definitive articles have two variants, whereas feminine and neutral have only one. The difference in the two masculine articles is determined by the word's role in the sentence (subject or object). The best and easiest way to determine this is by replacing the word in question with a personal pronoun. If it replaces with "he" - it's the subject, if it is replaced by "him" - it's an object. It's a neat trick, but many people don't know it.

The third case was used when you want to express an action that applies "to someone". For example the sentence "give ... to me" would be in the third case (Dativ) in German - "gib ... mir". "Mir" is the third case of "Ich" (I). The three cases of "I" would be: "I" - "me" - "to me". In German: "Ich" - "mich" - "mir".

(yeah, it sounds a bit vague but it's not easy to explain)

Anyway, we used to have specific pronouncs for third case, however most (but not all) of they have fallen into disuse and nowadays are considered archaic. Instead of these pronouncs, we use the longer form, e.g. "to me", "to him", etc. Still, there are some limited usage of some third case stuff, so it's not fully dead yet. And that's why I usually say that we have "two and a half" cases :P