Having lived in Germany and experienced the wonderful Deutche Bahn, I wouldn't really associate punctuality with being German.
Obvious in many ways once you've lived there
The reason that a late train can sometimes be cancelled is to try and stop a cascade of delays from happening. Tracks only have so much capacity, and if train gets delayed into a time-frame that is highly congested, trying to fit the delayed train into that time-frame will result in delaying other trains, which could then cause further problems down the lines and throw the entire network out of order.
They accept a certain number of cascading delays like this, but sometimes it's just known that a certain delayed train will just be too disruptive to the network, so they're forced to just cancel a train to try and save the network's stability.
I can see the cancellations as a means of stopping a cascade of delays, but it's also true that doing so means the train won't count in the delay statistics for the remaining stops. If DB doesn't want people to accuse them of gaming the statistics, perhaps they should calculate said statistics in a way that doesn't directly benefit them when they inconvenience their delayed passengers even more?
This is relative. In Germany, people complain when the train is late. Everywhere else, the train is just late.
You think people don't complain when the train is late in other countries? That's hardly a uniquely German thing
And outside of trains, my german friends run the gamut of being always on time to systematically being 30 minutes late. Don't really see much of a correlation between being German and punctual.
Japan on the other hand I do associate with punctuality, when I worked there I was made to sit in the seiza postion for the m9rniny meeting if I was late by even 3 minutes. My friends there were overwhelmingly ontime except (and proving my point) for a German coworker I had there :)
If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please?
We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
> We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps.
Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects.
That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.