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Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

As a non German but someone who has lived there for 10 years my take is that its cultural part of being Germans. They always seem to gravitate towards making things just a little bit more difficult.

Sthe keyboards are not QWERTY. They're QWERTZ.

Traffic lights are in excessive combinations of green/yellow/red. Sometimes you might have yellow/red light sometimes only red.

Roads often have "end of speed limit" sign. But the speed limit might have been temporary for construction. So now you have to remember the original speed limit. Why not post the actual speed limit again?

Stuff like this is absolutely everywhere in the German society for apparently no reason.

EDIT: Adding the best for last.. in Germany when you have an IBAN bank account (you know the I stands for international) you must have German international bank account, or else it will be rejected by everyone and everything.

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I don't get any of your examples.

There are many different keyboard layouts, at least nowadays there is only one German layout. For Spanish there are 2 different layouts which are both actively sold.

The meaning of yellow on traffic lights is no problem, you'll see it for no longer than 2 seconds. Unless it flashes yellow which means that the traffic light is shut off, then "right before left" applies. Some countries only have a green light, no red and no yellow. Now that is a problem because if the light is off because you a) don't see it, you have to know that it is there, and b) don't know if it is operational.

The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads, unlimited for Autobahn. Thats why on the Autobahn there will be a speed limit indication after every on-ramp, if there is no speed limit sign then it is unlimited.

I know how the traffic lights work, point was that there are just excessively many of different combinations in Germany rather than just a single standard green/yellow/red.

"The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads,"

See, that's already wrong because the "Landstraße" may be 70, 80 or 100 depending on the exact road. If there's construction you might have a lower speed for the construction and then "end of limitation" at which point you have to remember whether the road is 70, 80 or 100.

Another example, if you have a Landstraße that is 100km/h, but you have a section that is 80km/h which has construction that has 50km/h, after construction you see "end of limit" what's the speed you're allowed to drive? 80 or 100? If you just had the speed limit sign all this confusion would simply not exist.

France does the same with regards to speed limits. There are also signs telling you the speed limit hasn't changed, or telling you to watch your speed, but without giving you the speed limit!

You are supposed to guess the speed limit from the size and shape of the road too. When I ask, almost nobody knows what is the speed of a road, they just wing it.

By law the speed limit has to be posted before an automatic speed trap (they are everywhere in France). Essentially training everybody that speeds limits are only for avoiding the speed trap "tax", but don't matter otherwise.

That explains so much about the roads and signage in Tahiti.

I can't speak to Germany, but we also have "end of speed limit" signs in California, and here they definitely mean what the other commenters have said, i.e. the basic speed rule applies. Just based on reading these comments, the German rules seem to be the same here, so I would very much suspect that that in your example the speed limit is unambiguously 100km/hr after the "end of limit" sign.

With respect, you’ve given the typical German response to virtually any outsider’s criticism anything German: no, it’s simple, you’re just not doing/understanding it correctly, just learn a, b and c, and then do d, e, f and g.

(Except Deutsche Bahn; no-one argues at criticism there. It’s quite refreshing!)

German here. Some of it I can agree with. The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”.

It’s this way in the entire country. There are many things I can get upset with in Germany (I moved abroad 10y ago and have an outsider’s perspective by now) but the traffic light example to me just indicates you didn’t ask why certain things were the way they were.

It’s so German to blame the user!

"The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”."

That was not the point, that's the standard way the lights will work.

The point is that sometimes you have a light combination where actual light post only has yellow/red for example (no green light). Sometimes you have a light post that has red only (on, off).

I have never seen those anywhere in Germany. Are you sure you are talking about traffic lights?

After reading some parts of this thread, all I can recommend is the following: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/539867-never-argue-with-an-...

(I'm sure there are various German things to criticize or to make fun of. Much of what I read here, however, says more about the (US?!) authors, though.)

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