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Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

Interestingely there is this split of the action again so you need to stash away the "let's" in your brain until you know what to "let's" which comes only at the end of the sentence.

In the english version the verb "think through" comes directly after the "let's", so there's no need to cache anything; it seems that is clearer and more direct.

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As a French living in Germany, the German sentence structure has the interesting side effect that it is way harder to start answering before the speaker finishes his sentence.

In French, you basically listen to 3/4 of the sentence, can guess the end, not wait for it and answer. This makes very "compact" discussing from the "sound" point of view. In German, you mostly need to wait before you answer. So, you have maybe more pauses in between, but then the sentences can have these "composed" words which pack at the word level a lot of meaning in little "sound".

This is the joy of speaking different languages, like the different computer languages, each one brings us diversity. For that, I am happy we do not have a single language on Earth.

Yeah, this feature of German is annoying. A very similar one is "splittable [trennbare] verbs" where one verb is split into its root and a prefix where in some sentence types, the root goes in front and the prefix goes to the absolute end of the sentence. But you need both to understand the meaning (there are often many variants of the prefixes for one verb root).

Mach das Fenster *auf*. vs. Mach das Fenster *zu*. (Open/close the window). The verbs here are "aufmachen" and "zumachen".

You will need to wait for the (sometimes long) sentence to finish to understand what is being asked for.

There is some comedy in speeches of the head of state of the GDR - former East Germany - who often read his speeches from paper, and used some veeeery long sentences, spoken slowly and with many pauses. I remember listening and breathlessly waiting for the verb, to finally find out what he actually wanted to say :) Not that it was interesting, it was boring propaganda, I just found this effect so interesting. He used a "sentence melody where every single section ended high, and only at the very end, after a looong sentence, he finally lowered his voice.

Example: https://youtu.be/a5zRik-6eVI

Even without understanding the language, you can recognize the structure. Every sentence is split into short sections, and the end of the sentence is clearly recognizable by the voice finally lowering. You do need some knowledge of German to see that the very important verb is only revealed in this very last part, only then do you know what that entire looong sentence was actually about.

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