Die, Der, und Das

OK now let me tell you what I have learned. In German you can have something that is either male, female, or neutral. At least in Spanish there are only two genders but three! Well Die is for something that is female. And silly me used to see the word "die" and think it was pronounced like the English word die, to stop living. But it is just like "dee" ryhmes with "the". That makes some sense. It is like diesel, the fuel invented by Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel.

So Die katzen, and Der hund. Well so far so good. But then my brain went into overload with Das. I remember the movie Das Boot (not to be confused with DOS Boot in computers) so a boat is neutral. BUT not if the boat has a name. But wait - there's more! Sometimes rivers are male and some rivers are female. Well I guess a lot of things are both male and female.

Anyway the whole point of how Franz and I got into this discussion and how I learned a lot of cool new stuff about the German language is because of spiders, if you can believe that. That is because we say "it" when we talk about a spider in English. And sometimes we say "it" when we talk about animals.

Well I still don't like spiders.