The Awful German Language (1880)
cs.utah.edu
cs.utah.edu
That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every word.
Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a German word, it will be pronounced "ee".
Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye."
Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same combinations:
"Neighbor" uses "ay".
"Albeit" and "Atheist" uses "ee-i".
"Caffeine" uses "ee".
And so on.
Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive?
To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain:
> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)
It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.
Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.
However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").
There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).
BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!
Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.
Languages are funny.
They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).
But English has a consonant between 'b' and 'p' ('pʰ' in IPA) as well. Just consider the difference between 'ban', 'span' and 'pan'. The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.
An awesome language to learn easily or to express yourself with full capacity? Those could be different qualities...
But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.
Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die.
I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did.
There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1]
To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society.
[1]: Lexicon Valley's episode on how English lost its genders is worth listening to: https://overcast.fm/+Noxtqh7oc. Dave Wilton's analysis is also interesting: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/loss_of_g...
[2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/will-new-law-for...
I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely. As a native speaker you will barely notice it, unless foreigners remind you of it.
> "To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society."
I can hardly imagine a force strong enough to change the way people speak to such a fundamental degree, as would be the removal of noun genders in German.
Advocating such force comes with a stench: It may have more todo with projecting power over the people you interact with and less with interacting itself. Which is why proponents of gender-neutral language in German often fail to not come across as snobbish. Which is why the only people in German speaking countries that speak gender-neutral are politicians or ideologues in academia.
Agreed. I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
My German may not be perfect, but I have never heard anyone fudge definite articles in a way that makes them indistinguishable from each other (or drop them altogether).
Exactly. Who'd be insulted by the moon being male in German and the sun being female? The sun, men or the moon?
Languages represent a form of continuous application of voluntary cooperation. Which is why almost no native speaker will think of his words he uses as an insult (either to a gender or that gendered word) but as a means to deliver information.
Using gender-neutral German in every day interactions will automatically make you come across affected. It is a linguistic Clinton-Thumb.
>> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)
And we should also look to George Bernard Shaw. He proved that, in English, "fish" can be spelled "ghoti":
gh (= f) as in "laugh"
o (= i) as in "women"
ti (= sh) as in "nation"
"Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up […] Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee."
Language is dynamic and cannot be controlled.
Writing needs to be adapted to fit that.
In English, the writing has become detached from the writing to the point where it is not possible to write a word upon hearing it the first time or to pronounce it upon reading it.
This is unnecessary and could be fixed.
Fixed how? By revising the orthography to accurately reflect pronunciation? (If so, whose?) Some English words have major variations in pronunciation in different regions (of the world, or indeed just of England). Should the revised spellings differ between regions?
Yes. That's a normal thing that most languages do every century or so.
Of course you have to compromise between dialects, but that's doable.
You could also start by just removing some of the worst insanities.
How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on.
In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
They're not completely useless.
"Det regner." - It's raining. "Den regner." - It's calculating.
The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut.
Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it abstract or inanimate? Probably neuter. Is it alive? Can it move? Probably masculine or feminine.
Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example.
> Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
Acquiring a language as a native speaker in childhood is a significantly different experience from trying to learn one as an adult.
As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.)
For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.
This was a common sentiment I heard from Russian students when teaching them English. The concept of articles is absolutely maddening, I think, when your native language does not have it.
I recall trying to teach it with a simple explanation. “I heard a dog walking outside. The dog pushed the door open and entered.” By switching from “a dog” to “the dog”, I expressed that the dog I heard was the same dog that entered. We translated the same sentences into Russian and they expressed that it was natural to assume, without the articles it was the same dog. I then asked them “but what if was a different dog that entered?” and they indicated the speaker would likely add a clarifying clause to the statement to ensure that there are two different dogs in scope.
It caused me to ponder and I came to the realization that some of these elements of language while seemingly “useless” (meaning, you could clearly make a language work without them) are what add subtle richness to a language. Just as I can do without a ternary in JavaScript, I enjoy its succinctness even if it might be a bit confusing for a new learner.
I recall comparing some of my own difficulties learning Russian as a native English speaker. My head literally exploded when I realized for every verb I had to learn a perfective and imperfective aspects. Something simple like “I did it.” What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often asked. To Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.
I guess what I learned is that in language “not needed” does not mean “useless”. I learned to love the richness of the Russian language and began to better appreciate some of richness of my own language that I previously took for granted.
"THE door"? Which door? Why is "the" there? Seems as yet another case of "tautological article", as the answer is "that exact door that was opened by the dog", so why not just write "[The] dog pushed door open and entered."? No extra information is conveyed by "the".
Of course it's maddening since no explanation makes full sense.
> I then asked them “but what if was a different dog that entered?”
Indeed, what would you say in English if it were a different dog? "I heard a dog walking outside. [Another] dog pushed the door open end entered."
Writing the second sentence as "A dog pushed the door.." if there were another makes absolutely no sense to me (because: which dog? -- another one or the same one?), so when writing "Dog pushed door.." it's very natural to assume that it's the same dog.
> What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often asked. To Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.
Ah, but aspect is more than just subtle richness: it's a tool that it makes it possible to succinctly express complex temporal relationships.
I wonder how the native language you learn as a child impacts the way your brain not only expresses concepts but how it even perceives them.
If I walked up to a my friend, a native speaker of English and said “I like dogs” he’d probably respond with “that’s nice”. If I walked up and said “I like the dogs” he’d probably ask “which dogs?” because the use of “the” conveys that it is a specific group of dogs. In a language without articles you might use “I like those dogs” or “I like these dogs” to call out specificity among dogs in general. That’s great. There’s lots of different ways to express the same concept in virtually all languages. Redundancy in expression doesn’t remove meaning from any method.
My whole point was there is no requirement for articles, many languages work without articles, but just because they don’t convey meaning to you doesn’t mean they don’t convey meaning to someone else. They add specificity and relatively that is subtle yet important within the language, even if it could be accomplished by other means.
I heard another example last night when watching sport news and am curious your thoughts. The announcer said:
“This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is being expressed.
[I seriously cannot decide whether "it's noise" or "it's a noise" is correct in the previous sentence because it makes sense to put "some" in front but putting "a" "feels" wrong.]
> "The dog opened the door and entered."
Why "THE" door? It's not been previously introduced and it refers to the very door being opened by the dog. SUCH use of articles is confusing and nonsensical when set against all of the examples where "the" _does_ make a difference.
Similar examples: "I'm on the phone", "I'm in the shower", "The food is in the fridge", etc. By the same "rule" that requires "the" in these examples, you should be supposed to say "I'm at the home", which is for some reason wrong.
Next, should one use "the" / "a" or nothing here: "I'm at the post office." [Which one? There are tens if not hundreds in a large city.]
I've learned those and many others as expressions by heart, but use of "the" is a mystery to me.
As for "a", I have two simple rules: nouns (usually) cannot stand naked, and "a" is appropriate if "some" would be appropriate as well.
Or, if I imagine a teacher saying: "Today, we're going to learn about the animals that ruled the Earth 100 million years ago."
Why "the" animals? Why did I put it there in the first place? Because if I read the sentence silently, it feels "wrong" without an article before "animals", yet I cannot put "a" since it's in plural.
Or, even more amusingly: why "THE Earth"? We only have one.
Or, contrast with: "that ruled planet Earth 100 million years ago". No "THE planet Earth". Why? Or is it correct to say "THE planet Earth"? I seriously have no idea.
> “This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is being expressed.
If you drop articles, it'd be ambiguous in English because it could be interpreted as "This is not (story of night) [i.e., story _about_ night] but it definitely is story."
The ambiguity in Croatian is resolved by declension; "night" would be in genitive case which seems to be the role of "the" in that sentence.
"A" in "a story" doesn't seem to have any purpose (to me).
EDIT: So, that's my perspective. I can't describe it in a better way than listing examples where "THE"/"A" is somehow required (or, worse, it must NOT be there), yet the use doesn't have anything to do with "specificity".
As an amusing anecdote: A couple of years ago I attended a course on scientific writing in English and we had to write an essay. The teacher returned the essay to me, it was full of red ink, and the vast majority of the errors (like >80%) were wrong use of articles (missing or wrong).
EDIT2: As for my native language (Croatian), definiteness is mostly implied. When you feel that specificity is needed because there are multiple potential subjects/objects, you use "THAT/THIS". For example, say you were at an animal shelter and you wanted to take some animal home. If there only were one dog among the animals, and you liked that dog of all animals, you'd say "I like dog, I'll take it home." If there were multiple dogs, you'd point and say "I like THAT dog, I'll take it home."
That’s a great way of putting it.
Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not.
Take a hypothetical phone conversation, an example that nobody has managed to explain to me satisfactorily: A: "Where are you?" B: "I'm in [the/a/(nothing)] shower."
People tell me that "the" is the correct thing to use. But A is none the wiser; B could be at home, in a gym, at work... A is none the wiser about _which_ shower B is in and the shower has not been introduced previously in the conversation. It's tautological "the", B is in that shower that he's currently using, so he could just as well say "I'm in shower".
Or, similarly: A: "Where's my food?" B: "I've put it in fridge." If A is at work, he'd go looking into fridge at office. If at home, he'd go look into fridge in kitchen. If there are two fridges nearby, he'd ask "Which one?"
Even though I deliberately omitted "the/a" in the previous paragraph, I don't think you got confused about _which_ office or _which_ kitchen fridge A would go looking in. And personally I cannot imagine that A, upon hearing "it's in fridge" while being in the office, would go home and look into the fridge at home. Or that he'd even have to ask "which fridge?" if there only were one at office.
So there's an attempted answer.
EDIT: one of my rules of thumb is: if I can put "some" in front of a noun without changing the meaning, then it's most probably appropriate to use "a".
This doesn't work in English, because both speakers are not assumed to have the same knowledge of context. The "the"/"a" distinguishes between something that describes and something that also determines.
Alice: Did you see any of those movies?
Bob: I saw the good one.
In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" can be figured out from context. In other words, Bob is saying that there is only one good movie in "those movies". Alice may or may not be aware of this from context, but she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".
Bob: I saw a good one.
In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" describes the movie he saw, but he is not saying that this determines which one he saw. He is not making claims about context.
What the parent post was saying was well described by his examples of where the article is obviously superfluous and doesn’t provide contextual information - which is the majority of their uses. There are situations where articles carry information (nobody disputes that I think), but they are used far more frequently as grammatical filler.
> Bob: I saw the good one.
Weird. Before I read your explanation I interpreted this as Alice and Bob having a prior mutual understanding about which of the movies was good and Alice immediately knows the particular movie he saw. Also, she knows that he decided upfront to watch (only) that movie.
EDIT: last point, if they don't have a prior understanding about which movie is "good", Bob would have to have watched _all_ of them to be able to say "THE good one". (Because, if he only watched a subset, an unwatched movie could be better than those he watched and would make him change his mind about which one is "good").
> she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".
According to your explanation, she still doesn't know _which_ movie he saw. She knows that only one was good and that it was the movie he saw. But then you could just say "I watched good one".
> "I saw a good one"
.. here, he picked a movie at random and it happened to be good. Yay, "a" does make a difference! :)
It's the (sorry) obligatory "the", because "the shower" has been lexicalized. This is very intimate, because the situation in which one talks about the shower, especially when still learning the language, will virtually always be at home with family. But enough talk. I will go to bed ... to bed myself. First I will go to the shower, an' shower, though. It's overall very unlikely I will have an in-shower phone call.
The given explanation is not satisfying. There's a difference between rhetorics and grammar. The common denominator is syntax (phonology, too, to a degree) but it differs between vocal and written speech. The semantics are the same, but you can take a look at the wiktionary page of [a] to get an idea of how diverse that is.
Not a very reliable tool. At least "bring THE table" introduces some error correction in the sentence.
- "Come by the shop tomorrow. And bring THE table".
(confused by the explicit "THE", the error correction kicks in:)
- "Huh? What table?"
- "The one we talked about last week on the phone",
- "A, yes!"
Exactly. Alternatively (note the missing "THE")
> "Come by the shop tomorrow. And bring table"
then, confused by seemingly nonsensical request of bringing some table along [why "some" -- because he doesn't remember the earlier conversation]: "Huh? Why, what table?"
As rytis pointed out, if the "sender" wants to emphasize the context, he'd say "And bring THAT table."
On the other hand, if the sender and receiver are thinking of a particular, but _different_ table, neither "table", nor "THE table", nor "THAT table" helps. (E.g., the receiver has one table that needs painting and one that needs to have its leg replaced, where "the" for the sender is the first and for the receiver the second table.)
Also, in your example, what is the purpose of referencing particular phone with 'THE'? Why not just 'on phone'?
NB. Just like zvrba I was (still am) having troubles with As and THEs. Baltic language speaker here btw.
Other questions that make language fun. Any ideas where eenie meanie miney moe comes from? Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)? How many dialects of various languages are spoken in the Alps? Why do we call different Chinese dialects "dialects" and not "languages"? Which language has the most diverse set of conjugation rules? But I digress.
Even if you don't fully understand a word, you can piece together from the context what was said.
In German for example, they're IMO total overkill (as in cost far outweighs benefit).
But then, you have to take into account that over-engineering things is a national hobby in Germany.
The question becomes chicken-and-egg: did the language induce the cultural trait or did the cultural trait structure the language.
I'm not a linguist by any means but as I understand it's a separate language with its' own dialects. Lower saxon nowadays might have a gradual dialect continuum in the West into the Netherlands but in a days of Hanse it was a widespread language around the Baltic sea and had a huge influence on other languages and cultures. Even today part of it's dialects are closer to Swedish than high German (specially Pommern which was part of Sweden for quite some time).
One differentiating example could be:
One person says to another:
1) Put it on the table.
vs. saying:
2) Put it on a table.
(Where, in both cases, by "it", they mean some object, say a book or any other thing).
1) would imply there is only one table in the room, so "the" was used.
2) would imply there is more than one table in the room, so "a" was used, meaning put it on any table you wish, it doesn't matter which one.
* ten/ta/to = der/die/das (the)
* nějaký/nějaká/nějaké = (irgend-)ein/eine/ein (a, some)
In my course there's the example “nějaká paní se ptá na cestu" (A woman asks for the way). Not sure what is different if the nějaká is left out.
* ten/ta/to = that, not “the”; I.e. literally or figuratively pointing (including e.g. referencing previously mentioned object and not wanting to repeat it)
* nějaký etc. - some, not “a”, i.e. explicitly strongly expressing vagueness. “A” in English is automatic grammar construct, “some” is explicitly expressing uncertainess. That sentence would correctly be translated as “SOME woman asks for directions” - I.e. a woman you don’t know, some rando that walked in the shop for example. A more real sentence: “some woman is asking for you” (you don’t know her, never seen her, she just walked in and asked for your colleguae), “nějaká paní se po tobě ptá”. You would use “a” in English here, it warrants clarifying the situation with “some” - and in Czech, that’s the only situation when you need these, when you are pointing to/referencing something or expressing vagueness.
> ten/ta/to
are you sure it's not "that" (dies(e,es,er)) instead of "the"?
> Not sure what is different if the nějaká is left out.
I'd interpret it as "The woman asks for the way.", i.e., a particular person is contextually implied. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
EDIT: alternately, it describes an abstract event of woman asking for directions. Putting it as "paní se ptá na cestu" would make perfect sense in, say, a movie script.
Say a friend observed you from the other side of the street talking with her, approached you and asked what was that about.
You could say "[nějaká] paní se ptá na cestu" both with and without "nějaká". WITH "nějaká" you'd be emphasizing it was a random woman. WITHOUT "nějaká" it'd be that particular woman he saw you talking with. though, I'd use "she" for describing the event, i.e., "she asked for the way".
About dieser/diese/dieses, that would be tento/tato/toto (this/that here).
It's all a kind of ouroboros of languages - if something gets simplified, something else appears there
"Bring the table", "Bring a table".
Do I ask you to bring some table we've already talked about or I can expect you to remember the reference to,
or do I ask you to bring any table because any table will do?
"Clear from the context" is a low bar. In languages, as in parsers, we should avoid it if we can.
For example, why not introduce gendered nouns - they often help to clarify references? "The door and the window are open." - "Well, close es (=das window)" vs "Well, close sie (=die door)".
Other languages indicate evidentiality (that is, how a speaker learned about something) by a verb suffix, eg Eastern Pomo:
* -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), * -ine (inferential), * -·le (hearsay), * -ya (direct knowledge)
Now, I might say, in English that is clear from context, or expressed in some other way, but according to you, "we should avoid it if we can". Thus, better learn Eastern Pomo?
I might do. But I don't wish to add my static preconceptions upon an evolutionary evolving thing like language and its linguistic community.
That said, I speak a language with gendered nouns, and they're fine.
A lot of redundancy in human languages seems to be related to disambiguation and error correction.
What a peculiar comment. It's like saying, what's the use of termites? No, seriously, why _do_ we have termites? Do we really need termites?
Natural languages aren't designed, which is why the comment above is so odd.
That is a really strange angle on the subject of native language. If there's any language my society has made me learn, it's the one I'm writing now, my second (and absolutely indispensable) one. The gendering of nouns (in my national case, two genders) and sundry other weird historical linguistic baggage is just the way things are and ever were.
Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there).
For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language.
Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well).
(In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").
School children are very low in the social hierarchy, of course, because they cannot defend themselves. Of course they are going to be oppressed when they note that there's no system behind and when they say it's too complicated they will be called lazy. The parents had to wade to shit, so they don't even notice the smell anymore, and now the children have to, too.
On the other hand, conservative orthography can help to learn the related languages (ie. French, Latin), serve as interesting step into history, exercise memory, and what not.
There could be no regular spelling. That's an illusory proposition, given the breadth of dialects that exist. So next you will require all the poor children to learn a new dialect, basically. Is that any better? It would be a loss of diversity, each one preserving a little bit of historic language development - and status. It's really a shame that status varies. Learning a language properly might give some stability.
That's not true for German, e.g. in some loanwords:
"Atheist" and "Koffein" (= caffeine) use "eh-i"
> I've never understood the need for noun genders
Sometimes they show different meanings of a word:
German:
Die Leiter = the ladder
Der Leiter = the director
French:
la tour = the tour
le tour = the tower
le tour = the trick
It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases)
In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same.
That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt understanding.
I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.
For a Finnish speaker, the pronunciation of most languages seems illogical, because things are pronounced differently as they are written, depending on the word itself. One might think: why are they so illogical? Of course, this is not how native speakers of German, English, etc. see things; for them, the words are spoken exactly as they are written, as they are used to it being so.
When I was learning English at school, I thought it was odd to sprinkle all the small articles and words all over the speech. And this thing with British vs. US spelling. Later, when I studied German, I thought there were so many concrete rules, yet every rule was followed by a number of exceptions.
I don't think one can say grammar/pronunciation of language x is universally difficult or easy. It depends so much on the linguistic background of the learner. For example: those skilled only in Japanese will likely have an easier time learning Chinese than me. But I will likely be able to pick up Estonian or proper Danish/Norwegian easier than them because of my background.
PS. Speaking of illogical things: "pronunciation" and "pronounce". Why not "pronunce" or "pronounciation"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
We just changed how we pronounced
And months should be represented as numbers instead of names in spoken languages too which is easier to use and remember to have a globally common form.
Also, as a Japanese, I'm not sure if singular and plural forms make much sense as we mostly don't have it and I doubt it's any source of confusion.
You mean "they", used as far back as Shakespear?
Singular they has been in recorded use since 1375, it's only been the last couple of hundred years people started trying to insist it wasn't valid.
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
IMHO the need for genders, cases etc. becomes obvious in spoken language where these things serve to guide the listener's expecations. "Simpler" languages often use redundant wording, formulaic constructions to make up for them.
I’ve never understood the need to pronounce completely differently from writing - and irregularly, too - as you guys do in English. Or throwing the the everywhere, or having a gazillion of bizarre tenses.
English is simpler in some ways, terribly overcomplicated in others.
It always winds up either as something ugly with a lot of diacritics (like Polish/Hungarian) or having a lot of double/triple-letter sounds (e.g. `sh` instead of 'ш', `ye` instead of `є`, `shch` instead of `щ' and so on).
Thanks, but no, I'll take our 33 funny Cyrillic letters over a Latin alphabet.
Yup: https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
I've read refreshingly concise modern works in both and English and German and can assure you that style is the writer's fault, not the language's.
To be fair that could describe a lot of philosophy in just about every language.
I can imagine that this ability makes different thoughts possible.
When looking at programming languages, it is indeed the case that your "lingua franca" limits the imagination of what software architectures are possible to solve the problem.
https://aymara.org/biblio/html/igr/igr3.html
Or just use of 無 in (ancient) Chinese for a simple example (in the sense of "unasking the question").
I always thought it was remarkable how much human thought was imprisoned by language, and it really makes me wonder what a human 'without language' would be capable of thinking.
No expert and not disagreeing with you, but I'd be very interested to read any literature you can recommend on the subject.
Linguistic relativity
Very well modernized, from the already simple chinese language (not the writing, just the spoken language), transported into simple and regular syllables. Extremely easy to learn for foreigners or aliens from other planets. The shape of the letters mimic how you speak them, the three major families - | or O. horizontal, vertical or round, like in chinese earth-water paintings.
It's much more regular than separating vowels and consonants into single letters.
Slight exaggeration.
I do agree that German is a beautiful language, though, and highly recommend reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to anyone who does or does not agree with me on this one.
"Don't always make this about you!"
There is no exactly matching equivalent in German. You might say something like 'this isn't about you', but there is no term for calling someone out on it so beautifully and bluntly.
But to me it makes no sense to make absolute statements on conciseness. In my opinion societies are concise in language on topics on which a great common focus lies upon.
German: Es geht nicht immer nur um dich!
Not a 100% word for word translation, but what I would yell when I meant to say something similar to the English version. Instead of "make it (about you)" I switch to something that reverse-translated ends up more like "it is not about you" because trying to use the "make" part in a 100% word for word translation does not seem to lead to anything I as a German might say. Still, I'd say my version actually is an accurate translation, so I would dispute your claim that "there is no exactly matching equivalent in German".
As a native German speaker, I disagree. German allows a really concise nominal style that is hard to express in English.
I'm reminded of my former neighbors, who would switch between English and Spanish mid-sentence. I asked them about it once and they expressed a sentiment similar to yours.
As an English and German speaker, my kids would tell you I sometimes do the same thing. Bad drivers get yelled at in German ;-D
But on the other hand that makes german much longer. Translations into german (e.g. SW or movie subtitles) are the longest in german than in any other major language. You need much more room to express the same. E.g. in SW translations this conciseness strikes back, the english original form is often preferred, as it is easier to understand and not as baroque as the german form.
In Japanese forced with the same problem of having to import many new foreign terms ("lehnworte"), they chose a better way, Katakana, which is almost as well modernized as Korean. In German it backfired, and instead of chosing modern shorter and more precise forms, they want for the longer nouns, adding to it.
I can believe that if you translate texts that are written in idiomatic English into German, they get longer. On the other hand, if you have a concisely written scientific text in German, translating it into English leads to something between gibberish and something barely readable. So you often have to completely rewrite/reexpress large parts of the text so that it looks like idiomatic English.
An example: https://medium.com/dropbox-design/design-for-internationaliz...
From what I can see guidance is that Finnish and German are typically quite a bit longer than English...
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I used to believe that "Latin is a dead language" - until I learnt more about the subject. It was spoken everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the local differences evolved into the Romance languages. They are what Latin is today. And it (the relatively fixed 'classical' version anyway) was a universal language for a long time....until the 19th C in maths and the sciences. Thousands of years is a long time in language-years, and nothing stays still for that long, but changes totally. Latin's dead in the sense every language must be after thousands of years of evolution. English will be dead in that same sense in another 2000 years, and so will every other language of today.
The interesting part is they do not invent new words but find existing Latin expressions and combine existing words. That alone speaks a lot of how universal the language was and perhaps still is.
Link: https://areena.yle.fi/1-1931339
An example of the Indonesian tsunami catastrophy: "Plus mille quadringenti homines perierunt, cum fluctus tsunami ex motu terrae ortus in insulam Sulawesi Indonesiae (28.9.) incidisset. Magistratus timent, ne numerus victimarum in multa milia ascendat. Maxime afflicta est urbs Palu et proxima illi Donggala. In regione motui terrae et fluctui exposita circiter sescenta milia hominum habitant."
That’s the same as looking at a tree and saying, “This is what I will be in a hundred years.”
It's more like, say, there was jazz in the 1920s, there are many types of jazz today, evolved from that early jazz but all very different from it, and different from each other.
I alternately love and hate German. Sometimes I have to fight through sentences with 5 clauses, and sometimes you get a beautiful and concise statement.
Who is "they"? As a German who also has one friend (fluent in two other languages and living abroad most of the time and married to a non-German) who is in that camp and who even collected money to give to a local German language society, this is a small minority. The majority of people could not care less. Proof: Use of English words and phrases is ubiquitous, used for shops (even that exact word instead of the German "(der) Laden"), signs, marketing campaigns, everyday language. If it didn't work or if it caused any backlash they would not do that. We even have "fake English" words: "Handy" for mobile phones (and that is the word almost everybody actually uses) :-)
There are at least 3 ways to say "the". Der, die, and das. Which one you use depends on if the object you're talking about is femanine or not. To top that off some geographic areas use "das" for everything.
It also has words that are similar to English; toilette (toilet) and hast (have) as a couple similarities.
some geographic areas use "das" for everything - yeah good point. If you ever tooled around the German-speaking sections of Switzerland you'll still find locals complaining that they have difficulty understanding the dialect of another town only a few km away.
The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the noun as the full "der/die/das ________". Where it gets tricky is when an article (like "der" or "einer") is overloaded and applies to one gender in one case (male, nominative) but to a different gender in another case (female or plural, dative). I wish the mapping were one to one.
It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)
I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)
If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.
On the other hand, Russian might be an even harder language to learn than German, given that it's Slavic and uses a different alphabet. There's always Esperanto, which has more than 200,000 articles on Wikipedia; more than Latin even.
The alphabet is trivial on the way to learning the language, constituting maybe 2% or so (unlike in Chinese).
Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the language will be easier to learn once it's gone. As the cases are lost, preposition will be added in many places. The choice of prepositions will likely come from English, which means it's arbitrary from a grammatical point of view.
I claim that reaching spoken proficiency requires the same effort in all human languages. If you want to speak at the level of a native, prepare for ten years of study. As a learner you'll use strings of terms that don't follow the arbitrary conventions, and people will have a hard time understanding.
It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn all while using unfamiliar preposition-verb combinations in unexpected order. You can't leave hard parsing work to the recipient and say it was easy!
People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent.
One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing ). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.
There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic.
In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words. The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency.
I used simple in reference to "gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages". In that specific context, it does make it easier to learn english than german or spanish.
> There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic.
English is a germanic language and hence a synthetic language. Not sure why you lumped it with Mandarin. I don't know mandarin but I've heard that spoken mandarin is easy to learn since it very regular and has fairly limited vocabulary. Their tonal system make it extremely hard for people from non-tonal languages and their writing system is notoriously difficult.
> In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words.
Yes. It is easier to learn english on the front end because we lack the gender+conjugation+declension. My point is that what makes english difficult is the irregularities and exceptions.
> The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency.
In other words "simple is easier to learn"?
This is nonsense. Morphological strategy is not a strictly genetic trait. This is like saying "your name is Baker so you can't be a barista". Every other Germanic language is far more synthetic than English, and English is the most analytic language in the Indo-European family.
> and their writing system is notoriously difficult.
Writing is not language. One is an invention, the other is a natural phenomenon.
> In other words "simple is easier to learn"?
No, simple morphology makes a language easier to learn for adults. Complexity can come in many forms.
Mandarin is easy to learn for the same reason that English is easy to learn: the bulk of the linguistic complexity is in the vocabulary, which is easy for adults to learn, not the morphology, which is easy for kids but hard for adults.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0114...
At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.
At some point I accepted that this is true for every language. First there's training basic grammar and initial vocabulary (a few months' study) and then there's mastering the long tail of idiomatic expressions (years of study). The first gives you the ability to talk about any topic. Only the second gives you effortless communication.
And all languages with wide geographic dispersion have a disconnect between the spoken word and the written spelling, the most extreme example being Chinese.
You imply the goal was to be precise. The crux is, what you call slightly different connotation is often enough ambiguity and the goal is to be as ambiguous as possible to be understood by as many people as possible without loosing precision, that is without mistakenly falling in the trap of a nuanced connotation.
Point in case for you, my spelling correction does not know "connotated", so that may be a nuance of the English language I was not aware of. Point in case for me, connotated nuanced synonyms (or synonymous nuanced connotations) is a redundant bag of words with something for everyone, yet unspecific enough to leave me guessing, finding no difference between those my two expressions above. ...
People say English is easy to learn because it's both fairly easy and very useful in the modern world. There certainly are languages that are even easier (e.g. Spanish, as soon as I've started learning Spanish I found myself wondering why would somebody need to invent something like Esperanto (which has cases!) when there is Spanish already).
Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Without this, we couldn't follow a conversation. You can decide faster on what you heard the more the words preceding a noun preclose on the choice of noun. So gender can make communication more robust over a noisy channel, or more compact over a clear channel.
In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough.
I'll go further out on that limb conjecturing that if you haven't been exposed to a gendered language as a kid, that facility will be untrained and quite the bother to acquire as an adult. If acquiring it as an adult is possible at all.
After all that wild guessing, I should close with the observation that in this case German would be more difficult to learn than ungendered languages, _for untrained adults_.
To close off (and to partially answer your question) I'll just say that gender takes little neurons overall in the habit that is language. Whether it'd come out a net plus in syllable economy I can't say.
This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I also noted the ease that comes from omission of a noun after an article if the grammatical gender hinted at by the article already indicates the noun (Was there anything else you were trying to say?). It's comparable to use of the indefinite it. I've seen that exposed as "omitting a word if the article makes it (word) clear" - you'd use "the" instead, then omit the noun, getting "... makes the clear".
It's used especially in subsentences "_Der_ Hund in dem Haus, _der_ dieses und jenes tat, ist ...", so the referred noun does not have to precede the subsentence directly. However, I find this a bad use of the language and think it's unnatural for spoken speech.
I suppose relational algebra would be informative to understand the problem better. One thing I remember from a first course is the limitation of one primary key per table. I like to liken this to the definite article. Hence, I find your first sentence is missing a definite article, but I don't know where to put it (there's so many options).
I'll reword it for you: While we're listening to a German sentence, the choice of the next noun can be restricted by gendered articles and adjectives.
E.g. female sun, male moon, female night, male day. Those examples might stem from codified personifications (e.g. nox).
In many cases though, I suppose it's a case of vowel harmony. If there was only one article, it would be "d'" with a semi-vowel ablaut, schwa, as in English "the". I don't know exactly why, I just recently heard of vowel harmony (ie. part of the native speaker's feeling for what sounds right) existing.
Gender has a minor advantage in some situations, I guess. I'm not sure whether the free word order is an advantage, but it helps for parsing this one: "Der Frau gibt der Briefträger einen Brief." - (to) the women gives the postman a letter.
Conversely, I find totally odd the neuter pronoun used on dogs. However, I do call all dogs "he" no matter the genitals, so that's no better, also because I don't exactly look for it. Whereas cat's are a priori female. It's not OK to neutralize (pun intended) a human person in any case.
Defaulting to "es", "they" or any alternative is still a crutch, as long as the inflection remains. And that has probably some reason to be there. Indo European had a two case gender system distinguishing animate and inanimate, female being a later innovation. In fact they had two words for fire, whence the ignition (animate) and the fire (inanimate). I do not know much about the case system, but taking Latin for example, that clearly got out of hand.
So, "die Flasche" (bottle) holds spirit. "der Wind" (wind) acts. But "das Wasser" just sits there waiting to be consumed. If it flows, it's "der Fluss". The sea is weird, "das Meer" is neuter, perhaps because as diminutive (Märchen, nightmare ...?), but "die See" is an abstractum (die Nordsee, rarely Nordmeer), whereas "der See" is any determined lake. Der Teich (pond), die Leiche (corpse), das Reich (realm), der Streich (trick) seem to resist the argument for vowel harmony, but if Streich and trick are from frankish or French, estrich, estriquer or sumsuch, then that's a different matter, same if Leiche was Lyke or so ... I don't know much about that.
Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation — think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough — Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!
(Apparently excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.)
The English spelling is a different problem set because it often reflects how a word was pronounced centuries ago. It has no connection to the current pronunciation, so learning the correct spelling of a word is basically like learning Chinese characters.
The written language is a subset of the language, spelling is a subset of written language; so, English spelling is part of the English language, there is no confusion.
Ok, I had to google that, having never seen it spelled this way. Merriam-Webster agrees that the etymology of hiccup/hickup is imitative of the sound. Wiktionary says "hiccough" is a later spelling, folk-etymology.
Fun, but this one's not to blame on the English language :)
"She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
This is an excellent German stand-up comedian who plies his trade in London: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48gV9W9UZHk
A curious thing that I have noticed that when Germans speak and write English, they often don’t differentiate between 2 previously mentioned subjects or objects. For example:
Dave and Andy went to London with lunch and a book. He forgot it at the train station.
Is it something in the structure of the German language that means this confusion is created in translation? Ie we are left unclear as to whether it was Andy or Dave who forgot something and whether it was his lunch or his book.
Dave and Andy each went to London with a pencil and a book. He forgot it at the train station.
Dave und Andy sind mit jeweils einem Stift und einem Buch nach London gefahren. Er hat es im Bahnhof vergessen.
Here it is NOT clear who forgot (they are both male), but it is clear what was left behind, because 'es' refers to the book (neuter), otherwise a different article would have been used for masculine pencil.
In careless English translation one loses the distinction because English uses "it" for all inanimate objects.
Also, you should maybe consider an analogy less extreme than _sexual assault_ for people using grammatical constructs you don't prefer.
I have a large red ball.
I have a red large ball.
I imagine german has the same, and I wonder if it's one of those cases. For example, to a german speaker, it would be completely clear that Dave is the one who forgot the book because the first subject mentioned is always the relevant one, or something like that.
For example, size precedes color, hence "large red ball".
It's worth checking out all of his language videos if that sort of thing interests you :)
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 as a single compound word without spaces. You get used to it fast and then get to (maybe) impress your friends by belting out insanely long words in German.
Very intuitive actually!
Looking at the various translations on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang-Utans#/languages), that could be because they took the word from different languages. For example, Bahasa Indonesia has “Orang Utan”, Bahasa Banjar “Uranghutan”
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...
Geology is the study of the earth.
-plane / Flugzeug / flight stuff
-lighter / Feuerzeug / fire stuff
-light bulb / Glühbirne / Glow pear
-eyeball / Augapfel / Eye apple
So Flugzeug is really flight begetter (or perhaps flight creator)
And Feuerzeug is fire creator.
Much more sensible!
- plane - flat surface
- lighter - a lamp
- light bulb - empty bulb
- eyeball - a sport
(Non-native speaker).
Like, why would you add a space between two words that are meant to be read together?
https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1705/w%c3%b6rter-...
(replaced with better link)
English has tons of ambiguities, including many possible parsing ambiguities of this kind, but written English would have many more ambiguities without a delimiter between words.
I'm not sure which is worse.
But written German already distinguishes nouns from verbs with capitalization; can the grouping problem be made worse by spaces in the absence of ambiguities about which part of speech a word is? (Obviously the German convention doesn't totally eliminate all such ambiguities, since "wie" 'like (preposition)' and "mögen" 'like (verb)' are both lower case, although "Fliegen" 'flies (insects) and "fliegen" 'flies (verb)' can be distinguished sufficiently to remove the specific kind of ambiguity present in this particular sentence even if "wie" and "mögen" were homonyms.)
(corrected thanks to commenter below!)
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
Reading Spanish has no such difficulty for me. The word order is much more like in English.
I would do away with the 'formal' form of addressing people (Germans have two ways of saying 'you') which serves no real purpose.
I'd also get rid of gendered articles and finally simplify word endings (adjective endings can go for a start)!
Or when a couple came apart (in conflict). He started to formulate the letters/emails in a overly formal addressing - she was really furious about that, because this sent a clear message to her.
I like having a second person plural. I sometimes say "you guys" (although this is becoming less acceptable) or "you all" since we don't have one.
Compare that to English, where the mastery of the tenses (i.e. when to use which tense) is essential. Distinguishing the use of the simple forms from the progressive forms can be tough for non-native speakers. And then there are all the different past tenses: simple past, present perfect, past progressive... in many cases it sounds really strange when these get mixed up. Think of something like: I have gone to the store last night. Or: He never was in New York. (When the speaker means that he has never been.)
Imho as a native German I have the impression that with German it's the other way around. In the beginning it's hard. But once people attain a basic level there is not much to learn anymore.
Had a French girl friend for a time who was studying English and linguistics at Agrégation level (masters) - she would sometimes ask me was it better to say X or Y in English. I would usually prefer one because "it sounded right" but often couldn't come up with a reason as to why. Then she might tell me the rule according to her professor - and I almost always found them very convincing!
http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/mtrdg1.html is better.
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.
Is it das Nutella or die Nutella?
Kein Geheimnis dagegen ist, dass das Genus für den Marken- bzw. Produktnamen nicht festgelegt ist. Häufig wird die weibliche Form die Nutella verwendet, wohl abgeleitet von der aus dem Italienischen stammenden femininen Endung -ella. Es tritt aber auch die sächliche Form das Nutella auf. Das Neutrum wird häufig auch bei Fremdwörtern gewählt, wenn es keine starken Gründe für das Maskulinum oder das Femininum gibt. Seltener kommt der Nutella vor.
It translates to:
It's not a secret that the gender of brand and product names is not defined. Often, the female form of "die Nutella" is used, most likely derived from the italian female ending "-ella". The neuter gender ("das Nutella") also appears. The neuter gender is often chosen for borrowed words when there's no strong reason for masculine or feminine. "Der Nutella" is rarely used.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden
[1] https://www.duden.de/aktuelle_meldungen/Alles-Gute-zum-Gebur...
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nutella&oldid=181...
:)
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 overthink it too much.
That was probably the most reasonable way to learn German outside Germany in 1880. It is not today.
If you are interested in learning any language, I recommend the book "Fluent forever". It tells you how to start leaning a language and all the resources to learn on your own.
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.
Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun, disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".
The Swiss do not speak German at all.
They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.
And very wisely, Swiss-German dialects have entirely done away with all the useless grammatical garbage German is settled with.
As a result, Swiss-German - while being far from the most aesthetically pleasing thing to hear - is way easier to learn than hochdeutsch.
Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction ... sorry I have to call BS.
> They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.
These statements are at best wrong, but actually not even that.
There is no hard difference between languages and dialects. Whether a variety gets called "language" or "dialect" is mostly a matter of convention.
The Swiss German dialects are obviously not Standard German. But neither are the dialects spoken in Germany. They are still German dialects.
Also, I'm pretty sure that all German-speaking Swiss also speak Standard German even if it's not their native dialect.
> Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction
There is a difference between "you cannot express complex thoughts in Swiss German" and "Swiss German does not have a particular method of error correction that Standard German has". It's not like Swiss German were just a simplified variant of Standard German.
Interestingly, this grammatical rule has changed since Mark Twain's times - minimally in spoken language where the Dative case is commonly used. But also in more formal or more educated contexts, standard German allows the Dative case after "wegen" in certain cases.
In general, the Genitive case is used less and less, it seems that German will in the long run only entertain three grammatical cases instead of the current four.
The very idea that one is "allowed" to say or not say certain things is just so deeply wrong ...
How about this criterium instead: did the person you are trying to communicate with actually understand what you wre trying to said.
One of my favorite German words is entschuldigung, for the sound of it.
There's a ring to the thing.
Have you seen what I mean?
:)
hand = hand schuh = shoe handschuh = glove
schlaft = sleep anzug = suit schlaftanzug = pajamas
Zahn = tooth, Arzt = doctor, Zahnarzt = dentist.
https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...
Also, the orthography had been standardized since 1901.
The house of a German professor is on fire. He runs in, shouting "I need to rescue my work from obliteration!" and comes out with a huge tome. He runs in again, mumbling about his magnum opus, and appears again with another volume. The fire fighters warn him that the house might collapse anytime and it's dangerous to go in, but the professor exclaims "But I need to save volume III, it contains all the verbs!"
Oh, and while we are at it: My mathematician friend claims that Latin is closed under permutation, while German is closed under concatenation.
https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html