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What Germans Are Reading

the-american-interest.com

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Re: What Germans Are Reading

#81

Post by blattimwind »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #78
ekianjo wrote: post #37

My German is rusty but: > Toleranz: Einfach Schwer (Tolerance Isn’t Easy) is an improper translation. That's "Tolerance: Simply Difficult" and that translates fine in English too since you can keep the same style while being accurate.

I might translate it: Tolerance: Simply Hard (Or Easily Hard ) It more closely mirrors the German cadence and I've generally translated schwer as hard. I always understood di­ffizil to be the correct translation of the word difficult. Granted, I learned most of my German from my mother (plus a little self study and I lived there for nearly four years in my twenties), not in school. There are no doubt substantial gaps…

Diffizil is bildungssprachlich and not common vocabulary. Translating schwer as difficult or hard is fine.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#82

Post by brazzy »

raxxorrax wrote: post #24
qwsxyh wrote: post #3

> Michael Winterhoff’s Deutschland Verdummt claims that German children today “have no tolerance for frustration, and they avoid all exertion.” By the time they graduate, half of them still “have the psyche of a small child.” The author of eight previous books on childhood development, Winterhoff’s primary concern is that children today have become “tyrants.” They don’t know proper boundaries; they have not been taug…

You can probably release this book every 30 years or so and have a bot replace contemporary parts and jargon. He says that the development of children is negatively affected by adults, who lack authority by elevating children to their level. Information technology had further enabled children to fortify this power imbalance. Maybe he has a point, but as a psychologist for children you probably get a warped image afte…

> You can probably release this book every 30 years or so and have a bot replace contemporary parts and jargon.

This specific author has alread done that every 2 years or so for the last 10 years...

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#83

Post by DoreenMichele »

blattimwind wrote: post #81
DoreenMichele wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might translate it: Tolerance: Simply Hard (Or Easily Hard ) It more closely mirrors the German cadence and I've generally translated schwer as hard. I always understood di­ffizil to be the correct translation of the word difficult. Granted, I learned most of my German from my mother (plus a little self study and I lived there for nearly four years in my twenties), not in school. There are no doubt substantial gaps…

Diffizil is bildungssprachlich and not common vocabulary. Translating schwer as difficult or hard is fine.

Yes, I'm aware. But, just like diffizil is a more formal word, so is difficult. Colloquially, people routinely say hard in English, as in hard problem to solve.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#84

Post by lordgrenville »

WA wrote: post #5

There has been at least one book about how "Germany/Germans are getting dumber", "The Big Crash is Coming" or something similar on the Spiegel Bestseller list at all times. So far, the big crash didn't come yet. These books don't talk about a market correction or a financial crisis like in 2008, but a total economic crash, because "a finite world can't have unlimited growth", because "capitalism", because "climate ch…

Tangent - ordinarily I would consider it obnoxious to point this out, but I learned something and wanted to share it. As a native speaker, "the crash didn't come" sounds wrong to me - it should be "the crash hasn't come", but it took me a while to figure out why. I think the idea is that since you are saying "yet", you need to use the present perfect ("has not come"), which can imply an indefinite time (it might happen at some point, but we're not sure when). The simple past tense, "did not come", would be if we were referring to a past set time when something was expected to happen but didn't. (This seems like a very subtle distinction that I would consider exasperating if I was learning a new language, but I take it for granted in English!)

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#85

Post by juanbarca »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #83
blattimwind wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diffizil is bildungssprachlich and not common vocabulary. Translating schwer as difficult or hard is fine.

Yes, I'm aware. But, just like diffizil is a more formal word, so is difficult . Colloquially, people routinely say hard in English, as in hard problem to solve.

Both of you are correct (I'm a German tutor (over here: https://lingoci.com/german-lessons-skype)).

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#86

Post by DogRunner »

ekianjo wrote: post #40

Besides the obvious sampling issue (The Spiegel as a reference), not sure there anything interesting in that list, because it's a reflection of: - What is published in the German language (much smaller than in the English corpus) - What is published at all (choices from local publishers) - What matches the political/media agenda of the day/year: people are well known to read about the topics that is being talked abou…

Totally! I am reading at least 2 books a month, and I am pretty sure not Spiegel nor the "Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels" is able to see that, because I am buying nearly all books international. ebook readers makes it easy to source books from authors directly, getting them from independent publishers and so on.

At least in my filter bubble it is pretty standard nowadays.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#87

Post by wil421 »

jaclaz wrote: post #69
thecleaner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars. Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? There seem to be very little opportunities for investment in stock market. Real estate prices too seem insane.

>Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? As a side note, the 5k are not actually "purchasing power" or really-really "after tax" as it is usually intended in the US, in the EU there is VAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax which is similar to the "sales tax" in the US but that is usually much higher. In Germany (Mehrwertsteuer) it is (relativaly…

In the US we have sales tax (and even city tax) that varies from state, county, city. Most states also have an income tax.

Do German states have income taxes?

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#88

Post by tpush »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #83
blattimwind wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diffizil is bildungssprachlich and not common vocabulary. Translating schwer as difficult or hard is fine.

Yes, I'm aware. But, just like diffizil is a more formal word, so is difficult . Colloquially, people routinely say hard in English, as in hard problem to solve.

Difficult is a common word in English, and I bet most Germans have never heard nor read the word „diffizil“.

Translating „difficult“ to „diffizil“ would be a poor translation IMO.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#89

Post by martin_a »

usrusr wrote: post #55
martin_a wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Spiegel list also does not count total sales but relative sales over a time span, so you can become a "best seller author" with rather low sales numbers, when everybody has sold only few books. Strange system.

So in a month with slow book sales, you'd prefer to see best sellers replaced with least bad sellers? But the term "best" is relative, absolutely!

Nah, but "best seller author" to me refers to somewhat like "sold 100k copies" and not like "sold better than the others in a bad month". It's just a detail in the end.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#90

Post by lispm »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #71
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just compared the two lists, and there aren't many differences: only one of Amazon's top 10 didn't make it onto the SPIEGEL list ("Homo Deus"). The lists are at https://www.amazon.de/charts/2019-08-11/mostread/nonfiction?... https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/bestseller-buecher-belletristi... It's all German, obviously. And note that Spiegel has at least two different lists, for hardcover and paperback (plus a few more,…

The Amazon list (20 top items binned across hardcovers, paperbacks and audiobooks, which is correct if your goal is to identify a "zeitgeist trend") and the Spiegel lists (for an unknown reason, separate lists for paperback, hardcover and "Taschenbuch", 60 items in 3 lists [1]) have 11 books in common right now. However if I only look at a single Spiegel list of 20 items, e.g. hardcovers there are only two items left…

Todenhöfer is not a Spiegel journalist. Not at all.

DER SPIEGEL gets its book data from der Buchreport which uses sales info from a few hundred actual bookstores.

Thus the list is not 'garbage', but a represents what bookstores sell and what is currently trending. The list is also filtered by some criteria, which are listed on the SPIEGEL site.

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