What is case system in language? ?

Question

"Because you are asking for an "easy" language and since you already have studied French, I would suggest another Romance language. Unless you are familiar with case systems (used in German and Russian) I would stay away from Latin, as Latin also has a case system."

This is kind of disappointing for me. German and Russian are the languages I really want to learn some day, and if case system makes it ridiculously hard to become fluent, I don't think it would be worth it. German isn't a romance language? what defines a romance language? Thank you!

Answer 1

They're talking about declensions for a nouns or pronouns, AKA "noun inflection" :  nominative, accusative, dative, etc.

As in Latin :

homo (nominative)

hominis (genitive)

homini (dative)

hominem (accusative)  

homine (ablative)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_system

Romance languages are languages descended from Latin : Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, ...

German is part of the Germanic languages, like English, Dutch or Swedish. While the others slowly lost their case system, German kept it almost intact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_lang...

Answer 2

"Case" mean that nouns have different endings depending on how they are used in a sentence. A noun would have a different ending according to whether it was the subject, object, object of a preposition, or a possessive pronoun, for example.

English as spoken today does not use cases, but it did in the past. German nouns require the use of cases and the system is further divided up according to the gender of the noun, but once you memorize the basic framework it goes smoothly. I took both Latin and German, and after one semester of Latin, yikes, becoming fluent in German seemed like a piece of cake.

Spanish is generally considered the easiest Romance language. It also uses the case system but the language itself not as complicated as Latin or German. I would htink that Spanish would give you the experience of another language without being unnecessarily hard, and you can practice your Spanish practically anywhere. (It's hard to find ways to practice Russian or German in parts of the US, but you can always find something in Spanish to read or watch on TV, for practice.) Italian is also relatively easy, but there aren't as many opportunities to speak or read it.

German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and French are considered Romance languages because they have the same linguistic ancestors. Russian comes from a different language family.

I hope you haven't fallen asleep reading this, but I wanted to give you a thorough answer.