5 ms·

> it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as family, lovers etc. You use du for your friends, your classmates, people your own age up through abou

by biztos 3y ago

> it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as family, lovers etc. You use du for your friends, your classmates, people your own age up through about college, and anyone you think you are or should be on informal terms with. Such as shop workers (sometimes), bartenders (usually), waiters (depending on location), random people in the street (in places like Berlin, if they're not senior citizens), and anyone -- regardless of age or station -- who has said du to you first, unless you want to very specifically snub them. You use du with people you play Fußball against even if you've never met them before and they're ten years older than you. Same with drinking. It would, perhaps counterintuitively, be rude to use Sie in many social situations involving complete strangers. Unless they're old. Then there is the ritual, rarely followed anymore, of actually formally suggesting that you and someone else -- usually a work colleague -- use du with each other... and refusing that request is giving a very cold shoulder, there normally would not be another offer in one lifetime. (An "inferior" should not suggest it to his/her "superior," that would also be inappropriate.) Du does enough work in German as she is spoke, I don't think it makes sense for foreigners to learn the Sie form before having proper facility with all the du grammar. Given the immigration trends of the last 20 years, people will just be happy to hear German in the first place. Then learn to properly siezen when you're already conversational. My zwo Pfennig anyway.

pvg 3y ago
I'll second just about all of this, the one bit of colour I can add - years ago I had a summer job in a German-speaking (auto) shop where a majority of the workers, including some of the management were immigrants with a fairly wide range of German proficiency but everyone had picked up the onsite du/Sie conventions (along with some others like shaking hands at the beginning of the shift). It's, like you're saying, as much a cultural convention with contextual intricacies as it is a grammatical feature of the language.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  Right, see my reply to biztos.
  - pvg 3y ago
    Funnily enough, my example was also from Vienna in the 90's, a specific place and time somewhat more, err, uptight about these things than I'd say today's conversational German on average.
hilbert42 3y ago
First, note my correction to the mistake in the above 'Afterthought'. Brain wasn't in gear. _ Thanks for the info. My German is far from perfect so I don't claim any authority on the matter. Most of my time in a German-speaking environment was in Austria (Wien) and that was now some years ago. Back when I was learning the language it was always stressed to me not to use du even with friends as it would be deemed as unwanted or excessive familiarity and could be taken as an offense. That said, from my limited experience there's are significant cultural differences between, say, Berlin and Wien with the latter being more formal and reserved (or it was so when I was living there two decades ago). Thus I find your observation interesting, so I'm now quite curious to see what cultural shifts if any have taken place in Wien since then. My first time there was in the early 1980s whilst Communism was still in place, so back then there was essentially no movement of people between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. and Austria. When I went back in the early 1990 and lived there at various times for about a decade I noticed a definite cultural shift which the locals put down to the movement of people from ex-communist counties such as Slovenia. However I can't say I noticed any shift in the language, but then that's not surprising as most people I worked or dealt with were better at English than I was in German. No doubt things have become more informal almost everywhere these days so I'm not surprised that there has been a shift in German usage just as there has been in English—even in my lifetime it's been very noticeable. English is a dog of language, it's slipshod, inconsistent and all over the place (it beats me how anyone who is not a native speaker ever learns it). The point I was making about thou/du illustrates the problem with English quite well, English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second languages so why make, say, learning German even more complex by not explaining actual parallels between the two languages? It seems no one cares much about the details these days. As an aside, in English you goes for everything—friends, relatives, one's dog, even inanimate objects. Thus it's interesting to note slang has picked up the cudgels and fought back with a colloquial use of the second person with youse. Many wince at this word and consider it uncouth and uneducated, but when one thinks about it, it makes sense when talking to a small group of friends. Seems funny really, we English speakers chucked out the perfectly good second-person (and respectable) word thou and at least in some circles have replaced it with the uncouth youse. Clearly, modern English is missing something important by using you for the singular and plural forms of the second person.

by biztos 3y ago

pvg 3y ago

I'll second just about all of this, the one bit of colour I can add - years ago I had a summer job in a German-speaking (auto) shop where a majority of the workers, including some of the management were immigrants with a fairly wide range of German proficiency but everyone had picked up the onsite du/Sie conventions (along with some others like shaking hands at the beginning of the shift). It's, like you're saying, as much a cultural convention with contextual intricacies as it is a grammatical feature of the language.

hilbert42 3y ago
Right, see my reply to biztos.
- pvg 3y ago
  Funnily enough, my example was also from Vienna in the 90's, a specific place and time somewhat more, err, uptight about these things than I'd say today's conversational German on average.

hilbert42 3y ago

First, note my correction to the mistake in the above 'Afterthought'. Brain wasn't in gear. _ Thanks for the info. My German is far from perfect so I don't claim any authority on the matter. Most of my time in a German-speaking environment was in Austria (Wien) and that was now some years ago. Back when I was learning the language it was always stressed to me not to use du even with friends as it would be deemed as unwanted or excessive familiarity and could be taken as an offense. That said, from my limited experience there's are significant cultural differences between, say, Berlin and Wien with the latter being more formal and reserved (or it was so when I was living there two decades ago). Thus I find your observation interesting, so I'm now quite curious to see what cultural shifts if any have taken place in Wien since then. My first time there was in the early 1980s whilst Communism was still in place, so back then there was essentially no movement of people between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. and Austria. When I went back in the early 1990 and lived there at various times for about a decade I noticed a definite cultural shift which the locals put down to the movement of people from ex-communist counties such as Slovenia. However I can't say I noticed any shift in the language, but then that's not surprising as most people I worked or dealt with were better at English than I was in German. No doubt things have become more informal almost everywhere these days so I'm not surprised that there has been a shift in German usage just as there has been in English—even in my lifetime it's been very noticeable. English is a dog of language, it's slipshod, inconsistent and all over the place (it beats me how anyone who is not a native speaker ever learns it). The point I was making about thou/du illustrates the problem with English quite well, English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second languages so why make, say, learning German even more complex by not explaining actual parallels between the two languages? It seems no one cares much about the details these days. As an aside, in English you goes for everything—friends, relatives, one's dog, even inanimate objects. Thus it's interesting to note slang has picked up the cudgels and fought back with a colloquial use of the second person with youse. Many wince at this word and consider it uncouth and uneducated, but when one thinks about it, it makes sense when talking to a small group of friends. Seems funny really, we English speakers chucked out the perfectly good second-person (and respectable) word thou and at least in some circles have replaced it with the uncouth youse. Clearly, modern English is missing something important by using you for the singular and plural forms of the second person.