Also it seems there is a "standard" form of german since 1996: https://www.fluentin3months.com/german-hard-to-learn/
The Awful German Language (1880)
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Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#32As a foreigner living and working in Germany for a number a years, reading succinct explanations of German grammar is actually quite refreshing. Personally, grammatical concepts in English for me are quite challenging. Now try and learn a language that has complex grammar rules when you don't _actually_ know your own rules is quite imitating.
Same here. German always follows the rules. You might not like the rules, but it always follows the rules!
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#33German is not that hard, specially coming from English, which is a germanic language itself. The Michel Thomas learning audio programs are fantastic for getting a grasp of the language. If you read and read and watch and watch TV,without analyzing what you do you get naturally the feeling of the language, without the suffering. Mark Twain did what 99% of Germans,Austrians,Swiss are never going to do. Stop and overthi…
I don't mind most of German except for gender+case+plural+whatever variables giving you like eight different forms of "the" and similar complexity for "a" and for adjective endings, and even impacting suffixes for the noun (end declinations). Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now...now factor in the case implied by the preposition preceding it...okay it's 'dem' + '-em' + '-en'".
Like I'm sure English has similarly complicated bullshit (the spelling is obviously a gigantic dumpster fire), but wow it's like a whole grammar domain I have to think about that doesn't even exist in English. It just feels like German has way more "modifiers" and variants of words.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#34German is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-native speakers to pronounce - especially compared to English; it seems to be more resistant to frivolous changes, being sensibly conservative. It’s not perfect, but Latin is a dead language, and we did not have a will to adopt it as a universal language - unlike, for example, Israel which had enough determination to revive a dead language (I find it interesting that they, in fact, also considered German for the role of the national language).
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#35As a foreigner living and working in Germany for a number a years, reading succinct explanations of German grammar is actually quite refreshing. Personally, grammatical concepts in English for me are quite challenging. Now try and learn a language that has complex grammar rules when you don't _actually_ know your own rules is quite imitating.
I found I understood English grammar better after learning German since it's explicit about the cases, syntax, nouns etc. It sort of revealed what the underlining mechanism was that in English was invisible.
seconded; before learning another language that made it explicit rather than implicit, i sorta just took the linguistic structures of English for granted. it wasn't until I studied German that I even really began to truly understand the nature of grammar. I knew it well enough to use proper grammar but not explicitly enough to actually explain why something that was proper (or improper) was what it was
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#36Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together…
btw: "Surfen" is a lot more common than "Wellenreiten" in Germany.
Yes, just ask any of the friendly and very patient surfers waiting their turn for the standing waves in Munich's Eisbach.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#37Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together…
Then there are also slightly funny ones -plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff -lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff -light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear -eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple
Texas German has a less funny word for airplane: Luftschiff.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#38Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together…
btw: "Surfen" is a lot more common than "Wellenreiten" in Germany.
I always have a little internal chuckle when I hear "gedownloadet". I realize that English does the same thing (uses English rules for pluralization/verb modifiers for foreign loanwords), but for some reason it just sounds really funny to me.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#39Heh, its honestly not that bad of a language, and has undergone two reforms (maybe 3? I forget) since this document was created. The "awful" parts of German are in some ways its saving grace. Example: surfing is Wellenreiten, literally wave-riding or riding waves. This whole thing is all over German with compound words. Its really no different conceptually from "the old blue car" in English, its just mashed together…
Eh, it's not anything like it. German is very different from English, especially in the way you position the verbs. It's a rather silly example, with one word. Following that logic, French would be a lot easier for anything English speaking person, with all their words that are 90% equivalent to their English counterparts
The hardest part of reading (not-simplified) German for me, as a sadly monolingual English speaker, is the word order. At times you have to sort of keep a mental stack of all the dative / accusative case nouns as you read, and then as you encounter the verbs at end of the sentence you kinda pop the nouns off that stack and piece together what's happening.
Reading Spanish has no such difficulty for me. The word order is much more like in English.
Re: The Awful German Language (1880)
#40German is an amazing, beautiful language. With not much of the vocabulary borrowed from other languages, words actually make sense. From that perspective, German can be seen as the modern equivalent of Latin, and if I were to choose only one language to remain on the entire planet, it would be German (sorry English, Chinese and Spanish). Its sounds are easier for non-native speakers to pronounce - especially compared…
The absence of foreign loans in German is not due to being "resistant to frivolous changes". It's due to an explicit reform effort to root out ubiquitous Latinate loans. You can do the same in any language, limited only by how much control the government has over the way people talk.