9 ms·
Why we should learn German
- jalayir 9y agoMr. King sounds like inspiration for some part of George Smiley's character.
- colechristensen 9y agoI came for the linguistics and left disappointed for the end devoted to politics. There's a point to it, I suppose.
- gaius 9y agoWell, it's the Graun, of course it's political Every time I hear a British politician utter the fatal words, “Let me be very clear”, these days I reach for my revolver. That's an... unexpected reference!
- Eric_WVGG 9y ago“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” — Charles V
- phasnox 9y agoI almost died right there.
- kgarten 9y agoJust wondering what you want to express with that. Do you also equate Germans with animals or why did you share the quote? (quality discussions at HN again) Edit: also the quote is not verified ... Seems like Charles V never said it :P
- smalley 9y agoI believe the implication was most likely that German happens to sound very stern and commanding to many english speakers. Presumably the speaker would want to be speaking German because they believe it would intimidate the horse into performing very efficiently.
- tomjakubowski 9y agoI would be surprised to learn that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was an English speaker.
- smalley 9y agoTrue, although I'd be equally surprised if he said exactly that as well ;)
- petecox 9y agoIt's possible he learned a few words, given that the act of Henry the Eighth divorcing his aunt (Catherine of Aragón) sent shock-waves through Europe.
- gns24 9y agoFrench was the Lingua franca of the time and probably the principal language of Henry the Eight's court, so quite possibly not.
- kgarten 9y agoI guessed so. Yet, I felt quite offended by the first post (I"m German, speak Spanish, French English and Japanese). Don't feel German is necessarily harsh. It seems the perception is mostly from Prussian German ...
- madshiva 9y agothe quote is a joke, you don't need to be offended
- hashmal 9y agoMany animal trainers (be it for circus, dogs, etc) use german because (supposedly) their animals can perceive and memorize its sounds better.
- pandaman 9y agoAlso could be a safety measure e.g. in Russia service dogs are trained with most commands in Russian except for the "Attack!" which is German's "Fass!". I figure you don't want a dog to hear a word from a conversation and execute as if it was a command.
- yorwba 9y agoMost German dogs are trained in German as well, so the "security through obscurity" aspect is probably more of an afterthought. My personal guess is that an influential dog trainer happened to be German and followers of the method adapted the commands without translating them. Unfortunately I couldn't find out who that might have been.
- nunobrito 9y agoIndeed could be the case. What I find is that German is good as an authoritative language. Makes the voice expressions deeper and doesn't include "niceties". This is also a fruit of the culture, Germans very seldom (if ever) apologise. I wasn't taken serious when arguing in German because I would apologise often (Portuguese culture) and often say: "I'm sorry, but you are wrong", just to get a rebuke such as: "So you apologize, you recognise you are the one wrong". Even translating from German to English or other languages you see how direct the language really is. For example, to convince someone to something else we usually start with "If you wouldn't mind, can you please do (...), thanks!", while Germans will often shorten to just "Bitte machen (...)" where the bitte portion is not really heartfelt and doesn't end with a thank you. You'll hear them replying when inquired if this isn't rude behaviour: "It's her job, no need to thank".
- hashmal 9y ago
- reitanqild 9y agoI can't remember who but we have something similar in poetry around here. Probably some old Danish or Norwegian poet: Latin for writing French for the women German for the dog and Danish for the servant
- snambi 9y agoNice quote... Very funny..
- mohene1 9y agoThere is a deep fallacy in his argument. The academic learning of a language teaches almost nothing. The true challenge is not foreign vocabulary it is the reluctance to engage another culture, which is the prerequisite to learning any language. The author does not make this distinction possibly because he was stationed in a German-speaking country and assumes each language learner can mimic his learning process without his experience. Often, one won't even attempt to learn a language unless you appreciate - or at least think you appreciate - the culture.
- flushandforget 9y agoI didn't read it like that. More the joy of exploring another language.
- kgwgk 9y agoMany people will learn English because they want to communicate with others (who often also learn English for the same reason). Not because they have any interest in anglophone culture (if such a thing exists).
- dahauns 9y agoTrue, but English is kind of a special case, being today's lingua franca in many areas of the world.
- tnzn 9y agoI learned English playing MMORPGs. I didn't give a damn about the culture, I just wanted to communicate with people. This means I do not understand some pop culture references, but I can speak quite fluently without having cared about English speaking countries' culture.
- awkwarddaturtle 9y ago> I learned English playing MMORPGs. I didn't give a damn about the culture MMORPGs were created by americans and is part of american culture... > This means I do not understand some pop culture references Culture isn't just pop culture. > but I can speak quite fluently without having cared about English speaking countries' culture. That's fine. But I find it highly unlikely. Especially considering "anglo" ( particularly american ) culture is so world dominant.
- pampa 9y ago"Rather than join the chorus of anti-German propaganda, he preferred, doggedly, to inspire his little class with the beauty of the language, and of its literature and culture." That was in 1940. In 2017 those languages would be farsi, russian and chinese i guess?
- microcolonel 9y agoI haven't seen any contemporary anti-Iran/Afghanistan, anti-Russian, or anti-Chinese propaganda use the language or culture against them... except perhaps the mass-media "comedy" industry making offensive Russian accents while insinuating things. I doubt most people could identify Farsi readily enough to understand the propaganda. I don't think all that many people could tell you if they're looking at Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text; Two of these languages' countries are basically universally beloved in the U.S, so it'd be hard to make visual (or even audible) propaganda out of it. I guess Russian might be the easiest of the three to use in propaganda. :- P
- awkwarddaturtle 9y ago> except perhaps the mass-media "comedy" industry making offensive Russian accents while insinuating things. Really? You haven't seen any offensive chinese/asian "accents"? > I doubt most people could identify Farsi readily enough to understand the propaganda We generally mock them as sounding arabic with harsh guttural sounds. The exaggerated "phlegm" in the throat sounds. > I don't think all that many people could tell you if they're looking at Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text; Does it matter? > Two of these languages' countries are basically universally beloved in the U.S Which two are universally beloved in the US? Certainly not japan and korea... > so it'd be hard to make visual (or even audible) propaganda out of it. You can... But we just assign the propaganda towards "north korea" because we want to sell movies in china/japan/korea. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/16/entertainment/la-et-china-red-dawn-20110316 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/16/entertainment/la-et-... There most definitely is an anti-russian, anti-china/asia, anti-iran/middle east/muslim, etc "sentiment" in the US. Just because you know a few cosplay fanatics doesn't mean the US "loves" these asian countries. The truth of the matter is that we view them as competitors at best and enemies at worst.
- geff82 9y agoThanks for sharing the article. German is my mother language - and I came to appreciate it as a beautiful language. It has not the natural beauty of Italian, it is more how you can go from sounding harsh to sounding soft, where you not only change your voice but also the kind words you say. You can make it sound and feel like the worst of all Nazi movies or as romantic as a Beethoven piano serenade. By the way, I think it is a language for men. Women have a tendency to sound too harsh with it. In contrast, egyptian/syrian Arabic or Farsi tend to let you fall in love with the women who speak it, yet men speak it to harsh (Arabic) or often strangely funny sounding (Farsi). Few languages are nice to hear whichever gender it speaks (French comes to my mind, of course its all a personal taste).
- wingerlang 9y agoCould you give an example of soft-speaking romantic german language? Like a video or something.
- omer_balyali 9y agoAve Maria by Schubert (Barbara Bonney) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0W98t9KSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0W98t9KSU
- wingerlang 9y agoSorry, but any normal speaking? Opera like this sounds exactly the same to me regardless of language so it is harder to compare.
- superplussed 9y agoI'm an American that has lived in Berlin for over 3 years now, so I'm very used to the language (if not exactly fluent). And one of the early surprises for me was how soft and beautiful it can sound when spoken by a woman. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJDJnnfRc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJDJnnfRc8 And this is more of a joke video, but it shows how most of the reputation of German being harsh comes more from its typical usage in movies than anything fundamentally harsh about the language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvL7a8Y0pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvL7a8Y0pI
- partycoder 9y agoI think to some extent linguistic relativity might be a thing. Linguistic relativity is the idea that language affects your world perspective. Some languages such as Spanish and French encode a lot of irrelevant information compared to English. e.g: objects like chairs and computers have a gender, words tend to be longer, verb conjugation is more complex... and that eventually translates into more cognitive load.
- 3131s 9y agoAll of those features can lessen ambiguity in other ways though, so that's probably the trade-off at work. Weak linguistic relativity is pretty well attested. I've seen people misattribute or assume qualities about unrelated entities that share a name, e.g. assuming that something true of "milk" is also true of "soy milk". That example is similar to the idea of overextending a metaphor, and since every language has its own particular metaphors, that's likely among the most common ways that a linguistic feature impacts our worldview. Whether or not there are syntactic features that do the same is more debatable, but it's plausible that adjective ordering, pronoun systems, etc. might have an effect.
- tnzn 9y agoCheck out Sapir Whorf theory (the "weak" version. The strong one is most likely bs)
- captainmuon 9y agoI really like German for its expressivity. I would not say it is more expressive than English, but differently. There are many things that are easy to say in German but very hard in other languages, and vice versa. "Schadenfreude" is well-known, but one word I wanted to use often in recent times is "Missgunst" or "missgönnen": When you don't want somebody to have something. It's not jealousy, it is resenting somebody for their fortune. Google translate offers "resentment", but it doesn't fit perfectly, as that can also mean you just hold a grudge towards somebody. "Missgönnen" is the opposite of "gönnen", which means to be generous, to grant something, to be happy for somebody's fortune.
- microcolonel 9y ago> It's not jealousy, it is resenting somebody for their fortune. I think in the Christian tradition, this would be called envy, in Dutch it would be Afgunst, the German version of the Dutch Wikipedia page for Afgunst is Missgunst. Of course, die Missgunst ist nicht ganz der Neid.
- detaro 9y agoEnvy/Neid to me means that there is something you want that the other person has, which isn't required for Missgunst. (and envy doesn't have to be as negative)
- cel1ne 9y agoYou can say things like Eifersucht ist Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht was Leiden schafft. Meaning: Jealousy is a passion, that zealously searches what brings suffering. By the way, if you enjoy german you should try learning czech, it's similarly lyrical.
- _nalply 9y agoA Czech told me that Czech is possibly the most complicated language of the world. Not really difficult but you have to learn hundreds of different forms.
- diminish 9y ago>> J.Le Carre: "And I discovered that the language fitted me. It fitted my tongue. It pleased my Nordic ear." After learning several european languages, I once went to Romania, and enjoyed how nice romanian sounds. I was always thinking why we perceive some languages sound nice and some others not. How languages are perceived depend on the backgrounds of speaker and listener, on the context we're in, on which part of the mouth they are spoken and on the pitch level etc. So a good test is to see the languages spoken by a beautiful seductive person, during dispute, during business negotiation, in pop culture, during manly talks full of testosterone, in the mouths of immigrants and lower classes.While I worked in Germany, a test I was making was to ask someone from a non-neighbor, remote country like Cambodia how German/French or Spanish sounds. At the end all languages sound nice in some context.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoA corollary is what accents sound nice is different languages. I have been told that American accents sound awful in Danish, and French accents sounds nice. I think Spanish, Italian, Portuguese sound nice in English, even when the accents are quite thick. French can sometimes be variant, a really thick French sounds worse than thick Italian I believe. German accents do not sound that nice. A really good Danish accent often tends to sound nice, whereas the thicker ones are just awful, dull and plodding. These are of course my own perceptions but I wonder if there are any studies of accent preferences across cultures.
- microcolonel 9y ago> To help make the European debate decent and civilised, it is now more important than ever to value the skills of the linguist Personally I think the German establishment is just trying to conquer Europe again, as much respect as I have für die Deutschen und ihre Sprache. Today, Britain needs no additional sympathy for Germany, they need sympathy for themselves, a will to live. The EU is unrepresentative, unproductive, and unaccountable. Nobody needs any more reverence for it. The EU is the worst French idea the Germans ever took to. Germany is today a country where foreign journalists are chased through the street by communist activists, and where you need a license to post a video on YouTube. If your teacher's beloved Germany ever returned, it is surely leaving yet again. I talk to Germans who are fleeing to Austria, because they feel something wicked coming, and I don't blame them. Britons could stand to learn from Germany's mistakes and be more honest with themselves before it's too late for anyone to be honest with anyone.
- mb720 9y ago> Germany is today a country where foreign journalists are chased through the street by communist activists Source?
- microcolonel 9y agoSay what you will about these folks, but they were there to report on the G20 protests. A member of the mass media was directing Antifa to find and do something to these foreign journalists, and people were reporting their whereabouts to the people following them. It's a matter of record. https://youtu.be/Io3VpyL4RoE https://youtu.be/Io3VpyL4RoE
- fkistner 9y agoWhile it does not justify the completely inappropriate behavior, it might make sense to mention for context that one of the authors of the video is a right wing activist/journalist according to Wikipedia [1]. The claim that Germany is a country where foreign journalists in general have be afraid of being chased is unfounded. This was an incident involving so called right and left wing "activists." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Southern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Southern
- jondubois 9y agoInteresting how some people find the sound of German natural. I find German sounds extremely difficult to pronounce with all these consonants next to each other. English is not the easiest to pronounce either but it seems easier than German. Dutch sounds like a clearer version of German but with a funny 'g' sound. Italian is so clean and simple, even if you don't speak it, you can probably tell each word apart. French is pretty clear and easy to pronounce, I rarely ever ask people to repeat themselves in French. It uses a broad sound spectrum with lots of open-mouth sounds (lots of vowels and vowel combinations which produce new sounds). It's very easy to start muttering in English because you barely need to open your mouth to speak it.
- toabi 9y agoAs a German, the consonant distribution feels pretty balanced compared to for example Czech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strč_prst_skrz_krk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strč_prst_skrz_krk
- GTP 9y agoIt probably depends on which your mother tongue is. I'm Italian and I find German easier to pronounce than English. Plus it has precisely defined and easy pronunciation rules, so when you know them you're able to correctly pronounce every german word. The same doesn't hold true for English.
- dmichulke 9y ago> French is pretty clear and easy to pronounce, After half an hour of French, I often have difficulties pronouncing properly the difference between en, on, un and in(-ternet). > I rarely ever ask people to repeat themselves in French Among the two other non-native langauges (EN, PT), it has been the hardest to understand for me because it's hard to map sounds back to writing.
- tnzn 9y agoA lot of French people pronounce un and in the same way
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- tluyben2 9y agoI am Dutch, we seem to have some feeling for languages (small country and when I was young, the television would have BBC (English), ZDF (German), BRT (Flemmish) some French channels and really bad Dutch tv), I speak 6 languages including German fluent enough to make jokes and I am trying to learn #7, Mandarin, which is indeed quite hard when you get older. Of the languages I interact with, I find Flemmish, German & Mandarin the most pleasant to listen to. It is always a pleasure when the plane enters CN airspace and the soothing sounds of that language come up, while, on the other hand, German triggers my analytical senses. German sentences (especially from writers like Boll) somehow seem more provocative for the brain than my mother tongue. Flemmish has that too for me, but it needs to be well written and that is not that common, still when it is (Lampo for instance), it is a feast.
- felixschl 9y agoThe "real" Germany is back? The author must not have been there in a while.
- elcapitan 9y agoAs a side note, as a German I could not help but chuckle about John le Carré smuggling this into the essay: Every time I hear a British politician utter the fatal words, “Let me be very clear”, these days I reach for my revolver. which is a reference to a (most likely misattributed) quote by Hermann Göring, "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver" (or ".. my Browning").
- rullelito 9y agoI really wish I had the patience to read this, but the title is just too damn boring and I see no all-inclusive reason to learn German outside of a German speaking country. If anyone could TLDR, I would appreciate, but at the same time you shouldn't encourage my sloth.
- wink 9y agoIt's probably very presumptuous to compare myself to the writer, but for me it's kind of the other way round. My native tongue is German (but I grew up speaking Bavarian first, which is clearly German but not just pronounced differently, there are also some grammatical peculiarities...) but I started to learn English pretty early - and all things considered I much more prefer English to German. I've never lived abroad and spoken it daily for more than 3 weeks (unless you count the internet) - but going into programming it's the lingua franca, I don't think I've read even 10 German books about programming or computer science. Still, if I'm not talking daily (like with coworkers who don't speak German) my use gets rusty and faltering and so I wouldn't call myself absolutely fluent when being honest and not just padding a resume :P Still, I prefer the sound of English, I like many more English dialects than German ones, and even puns are easier to craft ;) But overall I wouldn't advise anyone to not learn German, at least if you like hard work, pain and humiliation.
- MattLeBlanc001 9y agoI'm fluent in German, French and English. None of them is my native language, but I prefer German when watching action/war movies. And French/English for comedy/drama. I think German has that "power" in it that you wouldn't find in other languages. I also like German poetry. German is a beautiful language with a lot to offer (poetry, books or even movies).
- awkwarddaturtle 9y agoIt's disturbing how many guardian articles we seem to be getting lately here. I left reddit to escape these types of articles. Also, it's pointless to learn german - especially if you know english as english is already a germanic language. What we ( I'm referring to americans ) should learn is LATIN and ANCIENT GREEK as they are truly "foreign" languages that had such a strong influence on english and western civilization. I studied Latin and Greek independently AFTER I graduated college and it's shocking to me how useful it would have been during my academic career. Not only would it help you understand the english language better, it helps with the understanding of western civilization and of course expands your vocabulary immensely since so many of english words ( especially technical/scientific ) is derived from these two "dead" languages.
- becga 9y agoDAS BOOT!! I remember talking to a colleague about this movie at a former job, and a woman near me piped: "Who would want to watch a movie about a Boot?!" We were speechless and she was totally serious.