I stopped apologising for my poor German, and something wonderful happened | Hacker News Reader

I stopped apologising for my poor German, and something wonderful happened

theguardian.com

55 pointsyamrzou31 comments

Unrelated to the core teaching of the article, but German is a reasonably easy gateway language to Europe. If you know German and English, it will be easy to pick up Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Also Luxembourgish and Afrikaans. It’s easy because it’s quite regular, as far as European languages go.

Russian is another great gateway language because it unlocks the Cyrillic and Slavic worlds.

Italian then completes the picture, as it has many similarities with Spanish, French, and rare Latin-roots languages like Lithuanian.

I used to travel around Europe with my university friends. One knew Italian, another one Russian, I knew German. It’s quite interesting how you can get around most places in Europe with these languages, and consume a lot of culture.

Of course, everyone speaks English these days. But it’s a richer experience to travel when you understand what the people say and can read the signs, etc.

I recommend trying German and I can’t imagine how most people would still apologize about their Deutsch skills 10 years in — the language is really easy. Of course, the article author mentions perfectionism, which is a separate topic.

I think "gateway language" is a really powerful concept indeed! My knowing Spanish has made it much more approachable for me to pick up Portuguese, Italian, and French phrases. Also, while I'm not a native German nor Dutch speaker, when i worked for a Dutch boss and picked up a few phrases, it made it so much easier for me to pick up some German when on another job i gained a German boss.

As an Afrikaans native speaker, I can wholeheartedly recommend against wasting time learning it. Coming from Pretoria, I don't think I've ever used the language to communicate with someone who isn't a massive racist, and purely objectively speaking Dutch is far more practical in Europe.

Afrikaans is basically low German, spoken in much of northwest Europe. Although Afrikaans throws in a few peculiarities (eg piesang - also Bahasa Indonesian). I know school history likes to pretend Afrikaans is Flemish, but really Flemish is just another low German dialect. I’d also say I’ve liked most Afrikaners I’ve met, didn’t encounter much racism, and Jan Smuts is a fascinating character.

As it happens I also used to speak Indonesian, although I unfortunately forgot that somehow, despite learning it very early. German, Dutch and Afrikaans stuck since they're basically the same as you say.

I guess the racism is mostly due to growing up in Pretoria while apartheid was ending, and my stuffy old family and everyone around me was still using the k-word and stuff like that :/ Getting out of SA was my first real act of self-agency and I haven't regretted it for a second. On the contrary, when I look on social media at how the people who never left my hometown are doing... it's so grim over there. Left a sour taste for sure, and I don't mean to say that all Afrikaners are racist.

What the f-word is the k-word?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_(racial_term) which is pretty much like the N-word with hard r in America.

Everyone is just doing whatever

   nobody is focused on you because everyone is too busy with their own work. Harsh but beautiful because it gives you the freedom not to be hindered by what you don't know.

https://roose.digital/en/blog/learning/everyone-just-doing-w...

Interesting read.

My daughter commented: "I had to learn that others are probably not thinking about and scrutinizing me as much as I think they are, and that gives me freedom."

Freedom gives you ability to develop your skills

I can sympathize with the author. I've lived in France for nearly ten years, I'm on track to become a French citizen, and I've even argued a case in front of a French court and won. But, yet, speaking French still sometimes feels like wading through waist high water, like I don't really know the language, I've just memorized a bunch of n-grams.

I've sort of accepted that that's how it's going to be. I still study new French every single day, but I'm never going to be as smooth or as funny as I am in English. But it's given me a new perspective, and a new sense of understanding, for other immigrants I encountered back in the US growing up.

When I really like a joke, I attempt to translate it into all the languages/cultures I know. Some are nearly impossible, but others, like "did you hear about the cannibal who was late for dinner?" are almost word-for-word.

I've never understood this. I dated a DR that was not an English native speaker. Her English written and spoken was better than 99% of Americans. Yet on the rare occasion when she didn't know some rarely used word she always acted like she had done something terrible to everyone by asking what it means.

In private she constantly agonized on pronunciations and such that she already had perfectly mastered. I couldn't take it and had to move on. I was not interested in a lifelong english class. I asked her "do you lie to people about where you are from?" No. Then why are you trying to pretend you are a native speaker? No one cares.

I really just don't get it, people are incredibly forgiving of non native speakers most of the time. The only people that are not you don't really want to know anyway.

What's a 'DR' in this context?

A big part of someone's identity is how they think others perceive them. So, I guess it kinda makes sense that it was something they were especially concerned about.

I think "doctor" is what fits best in the context provided above, but I am not 100% sure.

I assume that the grandparent meant "from the Dominican Republic" with slightly awkward grammar

Yes a doctor. my mistake on the improper formatting.

Part of the issue is that friends and partners, and other people trying to be supportive, often lie about how proficient someone's language skills are. I see it on sites like this and reddit all the time, where commenters say things like "you're better than 99% of the people I talk to" when the poster, while mostly clear has made a lot of mistakes. It's probably a bigger issue for doctors and other professionals, because they are peppering their language with 'fancy' or 'big' words that superficially give them impression that their language stills are better than they actually are. It's one thing to be forgiving, it's another thing to lie to someone causing them to overestimate their skills and understandability.

>often lie about how proficient someone's language skills are.

I now can see why one might do that. I'm not that kind of person though. There is a mental tax to questions about structured systems that don't have always hard enforced rules.

An experience I recall from time to time occurred when I had recently immigrated and was taking beginning/intermediate language courses: our teacher just had offered us a selection of paperbacks to borrow, and when I picked a good one out she said "I thought you'd take that one"; when I asked why, she answered "even with speech alone, it's obvious which students read and which don't".

Even if it’s not perfect, don’t apologize for your foreign language skills. You are still better off than a native speaker by knowing at least one additional language. And if they happen to know another language that wasn’t learned from a young age, they will understand. I’ve noticed that people usually appreciate it, and you start to see happy smiles when you speak their language, even if it’s not perfect—except English, some even get hostile if you didn’t have the local accent, maybe a Hollywood effect that the evil guy always speaks with accent.

Ive never heard anyone get hostile but Ive heard a loooot of innocent, ignorant, midwesterners ask very silly and possibly insulting questions to foreigners when they first hear the accent.

Casually insulting midwesterners as a group is of course perfectly fine - it is moral and good actually.

are you insinuating that I am casually insulting midwesterners? If so, you misunderstand me

> You are still better off than a native speaker by knowing at least one additional language.

This will depend a lot on the context in which you're speaking. I (English native) work mainly with Germans in German. But their English is often at least as good as my German. And a number of them know another language as well (or multiple other languages).

So in that context, I am not better than a native speaker for knowing other languages.

When I stopped apologizing for my poor German, I became more confident in my ability to speak the language

TL;DR: Confidence

Yet they had to write this in english in a UK based paper

Selection bias. I don't think I've ever seen a non-English article on Hacker News.

Also, the market for English language writing is much, much larger than the market for German language writing. If you know both languages equally well, you're probably better off trying to write in English than in German unless the subject is uniquely appealing to Germans.

Also the practicality and usefulness of this information isn't there for people who already speak German fluently.

Forget about that, I have seen articles posted with titles that assume everyone one in HN is living in the US, like talking about mil internet domains, or a site for people in X city/state, etc.

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