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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Most of my good thinking is done like this. Walking around the house talking out loud to myself about a topic without knowing where it's going. Over the years I've trained myself to try and speak more and more in this mode and I find it has good outcomes. It's not how it works but to myself I call it "putting my brain in analog mode". I also try to write like this for all my first passes. I also found it works for drawing, I will start drawing a random line and see where the hand takes me. I believe there's a term for art done in this way but I can't recall it now. I think Michael Scott was on to something.

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Cant do it in German.

My native language is Dutch, not German, but the word order restrictions are similar. But note that these word orders apply to subsentences: units of subject, object and verb, with additional stuff like prepositional phrases around it. Nothing at all is strict about how you combine these subsentences together into an argument: if this, then that, but maybe such, and perhaps so, thus something else — at least in informal speech.

Rank speculation-- similar type of improv is quantized to the level of a full sentence.

Even ranker-- doesn't German have the same kinds of filibuster phrases as English? Stuff like this:

"Look,"

"The point is this--"

"I think what the average American wants is..."

"If I've said it once I've said it a thousands times--"

There's a character Fred Armisen did on SNL news that eats the entire segment with these phrases. I'm sure the same can be done in German.

Yes, German is perfectly capable of these shenanigans. And some more, especially if you are trying to imitate German philosophers.

You are getting -- I think -- reflexively downvoted, but I genuinely think you are onto something. German grammar has strict word order rules as opposed to say Polish, where syntax is much more permissive ( for that one aspect of it ). I wonder to what extent native language changes how brain functions over the course of one's life.

You've reminded me of this -

> The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it's a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on ...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/23/germany.featur...

Nah, spoken German can handle that just fine. Spoken German has different rules from written German (and, of course, people have quite a bit more tolerance for minor breaks of grammatical rules in ad-hoc spoken language anyway.)

To give an example: a bog standard German sentence puts the verb in second place. Everything else is fairly flexible, eg you can either put object or subject first (unlike in written English, where the place of the subject is much more constrained).

Now, when you have a subordinate clause, written German puts the finite at the end. Like "Barbara besuchte das Restaurant, weil sie Hunger hatte."

In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.

> In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.

Native German speaker: When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated (when the person is a native speaker) or (if the person is a foreign speaker) had a really bad German teacher who did not correct this mistake.

Thus: No, don't do this. Speak the sentence as you would write it.

I suspect your memory is correcting things. As an experiment, you can try to record some spontaneous speech and really carefully listen to that.

(It's also crazy how many 'uhm' and 'äh' are in there, but you barely remember them just a few seconds later.)

Compare also the tenses in written Germany vs spoken German. Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)

Written German: Gestern kaufte ich ein. Spoken German: Gestern habe ich eingekauft. (Though there's also the variant "Gestern war ich einkaufen." which doesn't really exist in written German.)

Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.

You can occasionally hear more tenses in spoken German, but these two account for the majority of uses.

> When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated [...]

Yes, there's a huge class component involved here; some of these rules can be used as a shibboleth for social class. Btw for something similar in English compare http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/

I'm rather sure that my spoken German is on the more formal side.

> Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)

I typically indeed use Präteritum consciously in spoken German.

> Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.

Something that I am annoyed of.

Yes, different people have different idiolects, but I'm glad you can see that the constructions I gave as examples are common in spoken German.

> Something that I am annoyed of.

It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.

Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.

Of course, that's mostly just people being protective of class markers. If there's a villain in this story, it's English poorly 'designed' orthography.

Please do have a look at the Emonds paper at http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/ It's a great read!

> It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.

I have a similar opinion about such topics in foreign languages. It's just that I am much less knowledgeable concerning their subtle parts, so I as a non-native speaker can often not be sure whether I am right or I'm not aware of some subtle part of the respective language. Thus I am much more cautious concerning expressing such points for foreign languages.

But your argument

> Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.

which is about topics that you learn about in your first weeks of English lessons could indeed come from me.

So: I see things with the same "objectivity" in all languages (that I know or am learning); I'm just much more knowledgeable and thus outspoken concerning my native language.

> which is about topics that you learn about in your first weeks of English lessons could indeed come from me.

There's a difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Languages are something people, not what grammarians make up in their books.

Please do have a look at the Emonds paper. It's interesting, I promise.

Stephen King does this with whole trilogies haha

This is actually a very practical way of creating stories - set up the stage and see what the characters go about doing. The writer needs to be aware of the larger stage in order to keep the reader interested in understanding what’s actually going on and why.

I remember Stephen King writing in his book On Writing that he once deviated from this approach (Maximum Overdrive, perhaps?) and it really didn't go well. At the time, I thought creating characters, a scenario, and setting and then seeing what happened was nuts, but it's essentially how D&D works (albeit in a group setting) and that's always fun.

The term (I think) is “automatism”, popularized by Surrealists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism

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