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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

>Tangent >> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o

Well, Austrians, much to their national pride, don't really speak German, but they have their own localized dialect forks of it which are more difficult to understand for foreigners who only learned "vanilla" German, so the map is correct in this regard.

It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own American movies to German, but the studios got a German actor to voice him since his Styrian dialect was considered too strong for most German speakers.

Similar with Swiss German.

No matter how well you think you know German, you'll always run into a dialect you won't understand.

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> It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own American movies to German

Funny that they were worried about Schwarzenegger speaking German with a strong accent, given that he speaks English with such a strong accent, and they allowed that to be in the movies.

I have a friend who was born in Germany but grew up in Switzerland. His wife was born and grew up in Lichtenstein. They have been married for 20+ years and they /still/ occasionally can't understand each other when they slip into their childhood dialects.

I mean yes some Austrian dialects are hard, but the grammar is the same in Austria and Germany, and apart from certain words that sometimes confuse the other it's still the same German.

Especially at the border you can have German pupils to attend schools in Austria and vice versa and none of them needs a special class for learning the other German language

>but the grammar is the same in Austria and Germany,

Sure but that's only useful for writing, and quickly becomes irelevant in speaking when you can't understand the dialect because every word is pronounced differently than what you know. Two languages can share the same grammar rules yet be completely different from one another becasue the words themselves are different.

>Especially at the border

That's a very silly argument. Firstly, border regions between countries often share dialect similarities because d'uh, geographical proximity. A virtual line in the dirt doesn't mean two people will suddenly speak vastly different when they've evolved together for centuries only separated by a few km.

And secondly, they're both native German speakers, of course they don't need translators between each others, but that wasn't my point. My point was specifically that foreigners who learn "vanilla" German might end up needing translators when they hear some of those Austrian dialects(maybe Bavarian too, IDK).

> My point was specifically that foreigners who learn "vanilla" German might end up needing translators when they hear some of those dialects.

With respect to that map though it doesn't matter because someone learning German for traveling to Germany and someone learning German for traveling to Austria will learn the same language, so it doesn't make sense to color it differently.

The dialect is something you acquire while being embedded in the region after you already know German

>it doesn't make sense to color it differently.

It totally does, because the "vanilla" German you learn back home in the US will be less useful to you in Austria due to the difficult dialects, than it will be in Germany where you'll have an easier time.

Signed, someone who learned German before moving to Austria. drops_mic.gif

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