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How the brain processes German and Arabic

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Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#71

Post by bravura »

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven."

("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.")

An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until they're blue in the face that there's no reason not to mis-gender them. This still stumps me, because they are otherwise completely polite, elegant, and accommodating. A journalist friend of mine, when I asked him, says it's because German is so highly gendered as a language.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#72

Post by bad_alloc »

ElMocambo_x4 wrote: post #58

These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick…

> For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages.

Do you have an example for this?

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#73

Post by weinzierl »

nunuvit wrote: post #55
weinzierl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in Portuguese there's this need to keep the whole conjugation table in working memory so you can figure out the meaning. Also in Portuguese verb forms are really important to understand and communicate mean…

Conjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.

Hardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#74

Post by glandium »

valenceelectron wrote: post #47
myth2018 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My native language is Portuguese and I'm currently learning German. The separable verbs are quite a challenge for me, especially in longer sentences. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in German there's this need to keep the content in the working memory for possible supplementary info, and only at the end you can figure the meaning. Until the sent…

As a native German speaker, I have a very similar problem with Japanese. In Japanese it is possible (and popular, I'd say) to describe an object before mentioning what you are describing. For example, I can go on a tangent and have elaborate descriptions of an object ("is painted white, has two floors, a nice garden, a bus stop is close by, ...") but only at the very end of this description I tell the audience what o…

Having things like verbs, and negation at the end also allows to say the total opposite of what the listener might be expecting from the beginning of the sentence.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#75

Post by BrandoElFollito »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

French is even more gendered and attempts to introduce a neutral pronoun basically failed.

Now - English is for us a very different language that does not have declination so whatever construct there is inside is taken at face value. This is maybe why there are no particular problems using they/them for a single person.

Maybe that the closer distance between German and English is one of the reasons for what you described? (wildly guessing)

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#76

Post by lvncelot »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

Huh, interesting - from the perspective of someone about ten years younger than the friends you've described, I often had the conversation how great the english singular "they/them" is (either for an unknown or non-binary gender) and how sorely it's missing in the German language.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#77

Post by pchangr »

bad_alloc wrote: post #72
ElMocambo_x4 wrote: post #58

These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language. As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick…

> For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages. Do you have an example for this?

Gestern bin ich mit dem Freund meiner Mutter, der in dem großen roten Haus im Tal des Berges wohnt, Fußball spielen gegangen.

Literal translation: Yesterday, was I with the friend of my mother, who in the big red house on The Valley of the mountain lives, playing football.

So you get a lot of context before you actually get what happened.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#78

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

bravura wrote: post #71

Nietzsche on German: "Das Verb ist der Herr und die anderen Wörter sind die Sklaven." ("The verb is the master and the other words are the slaves.") An personal observation I've noticed from living in Berlin: My German friends over a certain age (roughly 40), who are very liberal, tolerant, totally fluent English speakers, completely refuse to adopt "they/them" pronouns for their non-binary friends and insist until t…

You have to understand that the whole issue surrounding misgendering is hard to grasp when you live in a language where everything has a random gender. It’s hard to find it important when you use the feminine for a table and the masculine for a desk. The whole thing doesn’t really carry weight. Amusingly I think people make it such a big deal in English because it actually matters so little.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#79

Post by aleph_minus_one »

BuckRogers wrote: post #56
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, in my experience as a native German speaker spoken and written German are more similar to each other than spoken and written English. Just speak German as you would write it might sound a little bit more formal than is usual, but it won't cause you any trouble to err a little bit on the "too formal" side. > I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker,…

That’s horrendous and seems like bad form in any language. I was taught to write English as I speak it. If you need to pause, use a comma. If you need to breathe, use a period. But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

> I was taught to write English as I speak it. [...] But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

This is no contradiction. In particular in formal public speaks in German it is not uncommon to use complicated sentence constructions - and the audience is expected to understand it.

In other words: the difference is rather in the mentality.

- The English mentality rather seems to be to avoid complicated constructions. This might be explainable by the melting pot of the United States, where you could not rely on that everybody is very knowledgeable in English.

- The German-speaking world was historically much more culturally homogeneous. So you could rely on the fact that the conversational partner is pretty confident in the German language; so you could use sophisticated language constructions.

Re: How the brain processes German and Arabic

#80

Post by nunuvit »

weinzierl wrote: post #73
nunuvit wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.

Hardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.

Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners.

I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans.

Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.

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