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I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don’t like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speake

I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don’t like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes). German is the modern Latin.

jobigoud 7y ago
Maybe it's because when you meet non-native speakers that don't have an accent you don't know it.
tehabe 7y ago
German is the modern Latin? I wonder what you mean by that? It is a complex language and these three genders which are baked into everything makes it a hard to adjust into a modern world in which gender is understood as a spectrum (or multiple spectra).
LeonidasXIV 7y ago
I strongly contest that, I have found many Dutch people to be impeccable to the point of being preferable to native dialects like what people e.g. in Manchester speak. Similar goes for many people from Denmark and Southern Sweden. That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.
zwieback 7y ago
Disagree, German is my native tongue but I think it's overly complex. Has the advantage of being more phonetic than English, though.
wenc 7y ago
German was the language of science in Europe before it was supplanted by English. It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America. I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages. Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic-tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic-Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.) In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).
- bhaak 7y ago
  > English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules). Neither does German. If you refer to the "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung", this is as the name implies just a transnational organisation from the German speaking countries to keep the orthography (somewhat) consistent. Which is something that English is dearly missing. A consistent orthography actually helps language learners a lot. This is one of the few points where English sucks as a lingua franca. If you think about the "Duden" dictionary, this is also not true. The Duden has always been a descriptive dictionary, not a normative one. There is no organization in German on the level of the Académie française. There are some small private clubs fighting for the "purity" of the language (which of course is ridiculous for a language with so many imported Latin/Greek/French and now English words) but nothing with enough authority to dictate the evolution of the living language.
- tobias3 7y ago
  There is also a huge (unsolved) gender issue with e.g. occupations. Every occupation has a male and female form and traditionally the male form is used to address a mixed group. English only has this in a few (easily fixed) cases like businessman => businessperson, policeman => police officer, otherwise they are gender neutral.
kazga 7y ago
> I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes Even the most fluent non-native German speakers I know still mix up genders and adjective endings every second sentence, at least in speaking.
- Quequau 7y ago
  I am losing my hearing and I have found that this effects my understanding of German, which I learned late in life, far more than English, my native language. In fact I'm convinced that many native speakers of German simply do not enunciate articles or adjective endings and native listeners simply subconsciously understand what they expect to hear because that's what is correct. Likewise I'm sure that native speakers of English do similar things but because it's all subconscious I can't give exact examples.

jobigoud 7y ago

Maybe it's because when you meet non-native speakers that don't have an accent you don't know it.

tehabe 7y ago

German is the modern Latin? I wonder what you mean by that? It is a complex language and these three genders which are baked into everything makes it a hard to adjust into a modern world in which gender is understood as a spectrum (or multiple spectra).

LeonidasXIV 7y ago

I strongly contest that, I have found many Dutch people to be impeccable to the point of being preferable to native dialects like what people e.g. in Manchester speak. Similar goes for many people from Denmark and Southern Sweden. That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.

zwieback 7y ago

Disagree, German is my native tongue but I think it's overly complex. Has the advantage of being more phonetic than English, though.

wenc 7y ago

German was the language of science in Europe before it was supplanted by English. It's unfair that English should be the international lingua franca. But we can't change two facts of history: the British Empire, and America. I agree English is not a particularly logical or phonetic language. However it has two things going for it -- it's easy to speak badly and it is easy to extend. Its grammar is simpler than most Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages (that I'm aware of -- correct me if I'm wrong). And being a mongrel language, it's used to absorbing other languages. Plus no need to come up with a grammatical gender for every neologism or loanword. Chai latte? Done. Twitter? Done. Whereas in German, is it "der Tic-tac" or "die Tic-tac"? Or default to "das Tic-tac" since we don't know the origin of the word? This matters because the endings in all four cases of German depend on the grammatical gender. For instance, in the dative case, if it's "die Tic-tac", then it's "mit der Tic-tac", otherwise it is "mit dem Tic-Tac". Or in accusative, if it's "der Tic-tac" then it's "fuer den Tic-Tac". And then you have to get everyone to agree (for instance, der Joghurt or das Joghurt? depends where you are.) In practice it's not a big deal obviously (neologisms enter the German language all the time), but in English there's just less friction and fuss. English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules).

bhaak 7y ago
> English also doesn't have a central gatekeeping authority to maintain the "purity" of the language -- it's more decentralized and driven by popular consensus (more or less -- there are still rules). Neither does German. If you refer to the "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung", this is as the name implies just a transnational organisation from the German speaking countries to keep the orthography (somewhat) consistent. Which is something that English is dearly missing. A consistent orthography actually helps language learners a lot. This is one of the few points where English sucks as a lingua franca. If you think about the "Duden" dictionary, this is also not true. The Duden has always been a descriptive dictionary, not a normative one. There is no organization in German on the level of the Académie française. There are some small private clubs fighting for the "purity" of the language (which of course is ridiculous for a language with so many imported Latin/Greek/French and now English words) but nothing with enough authority to dictate the evolution of the living language.
tobias3 7y ago
There is also a huge (unsolved) gender issue with e.g. occupations. Every occupation has a male and female form and traditionally the male form is used to address a mixed group. English only has this in a few (easily fixed) cases like businessman => businessperson, policeman => police officer, otherwise they are gender neutral.

kazga 7y ago

> I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes Even the most fluent non-native German speakers I know still mix up genders and adjective endings every second sentence, at least in speaking.

Quequau 7y ago
I am losing my hearing and I have found that this effects my understanding of German, which I learned late in life, far more than English, my native language. In fact I'm convinced that many native speakers of German simply do not enunciate articles or adjective endings and native listeners simply subconsciously understand what they expect to hear because that's what is correct. Likewise I'm sure that native speakers of English do similar things but because it's all subconscious I can't give exact examples.