Seems for casual reader with no knowledge of German you may be oversimplifying a little. Including the plural form and four cases you wind up having to learn 16 forms of the equivalent of 'the' which then serves as a mnemonic for adjectival endings for modifing nouns. Also compound that with gender and idiosyncratic plural forms and you wind up having to learn three aspects for every new vocabulary noun.

some geographic areas use "das" for everything - yeah good point. If you ever tooled around the German-speaking sections of Switzerland you'll still find locals complaining that they have difficulty understanding the dialect of another town only a few km away.

I've been learning Vietnamese for a few years and it seems to just fine without all the complicated tenses and cases etc in the grammar of European languages. I'm not sure if all those baroque rules really buy much.

They don't buy anything, but they don't cause any problems either. If they did, the language would have changed to accommodate it, or died out already. But since you're putting the effort in to learn it as it is, clearly neither applies...

The languages have changed - English used to have a more complex grammar (thee, thine, thou, etc) and I think it had genders, but that died out over time.

der, die, das, den, dem, des, all depending on case (likewise for indefinite articles + worse for adjective endings). German grammatical case presents information quite efficiently, often replacing the need for a preposition or other helper word, but it is mostly foreign to English speakers.

The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the noun as the full "der/die/das ________". Where it gets tricky is when an article (like "der" or "einer") is overloaded and applies to one gender in one case (male, nominative) but to a different gender in another case (female or plural, dative). I wish the mapping were one to one.

It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)

> It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)

I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)

If referring to phonetics then thee would be for emphasis to a construed subordinate with thuh used generally. Really idiosyncratic.

If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.

Well, IIRC the "official" rule is that 'thee' is to be used before a vowel and 'thuh' before a consonant.

True. The above was just for fun. But colloquial English these days behaves as if rules are to be made up as you go along. EG, locally I hear 'I'm going to thee Applebees Bar & Grill' as often as 'I'm going to thuh', but then again there isn't an abundance of Rhodes scholars in this neck of the woods.

Der, die, das makes at least more sense then the difference beteween the and the.

Curious, what geographic regions are you referring to?