The terrible German language

@Korin is a Lausbub!



Hassknecht said:
No, "Der Mann isst Brot nicht" is just wrong grammatically. Can't explain why, but it feels wrong ^^
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Probably because it would be "Der Mann ist kein Brot". I think it makes more sense to use names. Because you wouldn't say "Der Tomas isst Brot nicht" but rather "Der Thomas isst sein Brot nicht" or "Der Thomas isst das Brot nicht" and "Der Thomas isst kein Brot".

Or so I would think.

But it's good to talk about bread. We Germans have probably as many types of Bread as we do in grammatical ways to express how we eat it. Seriously. Has any nation out there as many different types of bread as we Germans do?

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And even that doesn't cover everything.​
 
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The German language is just fine. But Little Boy and Fat Man should have been dropped on Germany instead of Japan. And someone needs to take care of Merkel. I mean, needed to take care of Merkel ages ago.
 
You don't know that really.

We might as well be living in a future where Godzilla was a giant German lizard.
 
With all this Godzilla talk I've decided to google "German anime".
I have to say that I've found what I expected
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I think I'm alright living in a timeline where Japan was nuked instead of Germany.
 
"Der Bär frisst hundertdreiundzwanzig Fische."
Translation: The bear is eating one hundred, three and twenty fish

Why does this language have me doing math in my numbers? No wonder you're some kind of math genius @Hassknecht
 
Korin said:
At the very least every single noun in the German language is gendered and done so randomly (don't lie to me).
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My gosh... I had forgotten about that; French is like that too.

I wonder how the rest of the world [languages] are handling this self-identified pronoun nonsense?
 
Gizmojunk said:
My gosh... I had forgotten about that; French is like that too.

I wonder how the rest of the world [languages] are handling this self-identified pronoun nonsense?
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From what I had read it historically had a lot to do with languages that frequently were used in trade and also something about how highly/lowly that particular culture/location/people ranked for "uncertainty avoidance", so English as a language became a lot more ambiguous and a lot "dumber" so you didn't need to memorize so many cases:

 
Korin said:
"Der Bär frisst hundertdreiundzwanzig Fische."
Translation: The bear is eating one hundred, three and twenty fish

Why does this language have me doing math in my numbers? No wonder you're some kind of math genius @Hassknecht
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It's just saying the second number first, and since it's consistent it's not that hard to remember.
Dreiundzwanzig = Twentythree.
It's not like french, where it's fucking retarded.
 
Korin said:
I know there's a lot of Europeans here, so sharing my language journey... I have been dating my German-born girlfriend for almost 5 years now (and have visited her family in Germany with her several times). Her entire family is trilingual, speaking English, French and German. I am essentially a hillbilly from Canada who can only speak English.

About a month ago, I decided to fire up Duolingo and have been aggressively learning german for 1-2 hours a day (I usually marathon 3-4 hours on Sundays). I'm listening to daily German podcasts and have all my Netflix shows subtitled in German. We're visiting her family again this Christmas and I thought it would be a good present to surprise her and converse with her in her native language.

I am now on day 30 of learning German and feel that I have learned enough to form some opinions about the language. I've been told many times over that English is unintuitive, doesn't make sense (their, there, they're) and has a lot of nonsensical rules. I was told that German (like the people) was efficient, sensible, not like that filthy English stuff. I am asserting that this is actually hogwash... perhaps even balderdash.

I won't go into detail because I feel like some of you are German and know these things. At the very least every single noun in the German language is gendered and done so randomly (don't lie to me). I've never spent so much time looking at an object trying to figure out whether it's masculine, feminine or neuter. This would be fine if the gender of these words didn't affect how you need to use every other word in a sentence.

The experience learning German is such a brutal and relatably confusing endeavour that Mark Twain actually wrote a book about it:

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Right now this book is getting me through it because this shit is real:

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I will say that I really appreciate that Germans just make new words by compounding existing words. It is amazing and terrifying to encounter 20+ letter words regularly. It's also really handy if you don't know the actual word. Example: I recently didn't know the word for feet so I said fleischschuhe (meat shoes). Really does the trick.
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Got back into improving my German with all the Corona-stuff, I'm not a beginner but not really fluent either. German, and other languages, you kind of get rusty in if you don't practice them. Duolingo is ok, some things like the articles are annoying, I'm sort of trying to focus on the 'fun' stuff like phrases etc.

Tested some other languages as well, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and I presume Icelandic are so similar that just by knowing Swedish I think I could be understood in those other countries. Danish may sound funny to us Finns but it's actually a nice language, Norwegian has some strange differences from Swedish. But for an average foreigner to learn Finnish...good luck. :D
 
Update: I've continued to learn and practice this language. I had taken a break from it in early 2019 and then picked it back up at the end of 2020. Today is now my 365th day streak in Duolingo. I spend at least 1 weekend day doing dedicated practice for 2-hours. The rest of the week I play various xbox games in German, listen to German Twitch streams, read German articles.

I understand the cases pretty well but now struggle with the word order of long sentences. I would say right now that's my greatest hurdle, is being able to construct longer sentences and have the order be correct.
 
One of the best ways to learn might be to play Fallout 76 with Germans. You could kill people in your death claw maze bilingualy!
 
Crni Vuk said:
One of the best ways to learn might be to play Fallout 76 with Germans. You could kill people in your death claw maze bilingualy!
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I've actually tried to play with Germans but they're hard to find and servers are regionally assigned :-( The only speaking practice I get is mostly at the local Farmer's Market (we have a lot of German immigrants) as well as one German restaurant
 
Ever tried like I don't know, German Fallout forums? I think I learned more english speaking here than in school ...
 
Crni Vuk said:
Ever tried like I don't know, German Fallout forums? I think I learned more english speaking here than in school ...
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That's not a bad idea... do those actually exist? Do people use forums anymore? I shall go on a quest.
 
Verdammt, falloutnow.de wird schon gar nicht mehr erwähnt. Schade, dass die Seite so tot ist.
 
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