I've been at it for..eight years?

the first thing I learnt was "es tut mir leid". 

I did not learn German in school: I chose to learn, in secondary school, French. 

In Ireland you must learn Irish till you are 18.

 

ihr means five different things. Welcome the rubiks cube of german. Basically, imagine doing the rubicks but

each time you shift a face, a square changes colour, or a kolor changes a sqaure, or the face of your sentence

begins atars making now sense no disintegrating cure, thats what leaning in germanium is like.

 

 

ihr, put through boggle lungate is: her, their, you, to her, you all

 

that not good enough, of course. in which context does it mean each?

 

does "she" fit into the rubrick, or is she chucked in the waste bin? ask Maggie.

 

she gives to her is "sie gibt zu ihr"

 

sounds straightforward, but wait a moment. "to her" is dative, right? so does

ihr change in dative? no. In are not so useful pentalist above, we can see "to her" specifically. 

there is your dative. but if that in itself means "to her", then why "zu ihr" in the example above?

 

oh boy, welcome to the world of labyrnthial german.

 

anyway, thats, more or less, almost "to her", and "her" out of the way for now.

 

next step: their. Well, sure. Their. Nice. Plural. Simple. Right?

 

Wrong. This is german. the mutation that just didnt quite mutate the way you wanted to. 

 

Because in german this could be Formal and Informal. So What. I hear

you say: My language has two hundred and forty three different types of formalities...

Well, "their" in german is both formal and informal. You might want to bear that in mind. 

Still gets me.

 

right so three down, two to go. It also means You. It means You plural, informal. It does

NOT mean You plural, formal. No no. That's Sie. Forget Sie for the moment. Because Sie 

means lots of stuff too. It means She...

 

on it goes. bored yet? confused? you should be.

 

what else does ihr mean? ihr means.....well I'm lost. Back to the five. 

 

1. ihr Vater... her father

2. ich hilfe ihr....I am giving help to her

3. ihr Vater....their father. 

4. Woher kommt ihr?:  where are you all from?

5. Ihr...with a capital "I". in other words, in a middle of a sentence,

or at the beginning, it always has a capital.

It might seem like an obvious thing to say it has a capital at the beginning

of a sentence, but once again that can trip you up, for obvious reasons.