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The Awful German Language (1880)
- DocTomoe 1y agoAs a native German speaker: Everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French.
- mark38848 1y agoI suppose like the general American of today, he has just never really learnt an n-th language (where n>1).
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoWhich gives us Hitler memes where they audibly says German words that are very similar to their English counterparts, but the /funny/ subtitles is just a Beavis and Butthead level joke. Doesn't work as good if one has ears.
- jkaplowitz 1y agoHe actually learned German well enough to have appreciative audiences in Germany, but he also knows how to make amazing comedic essays on many topics. He did plenty about US-specific topics, and about French too, not just about German.
- psychoslave 1y agoHmm, French definitely has ornamental noun paradigms affecting articles and adjectives, exceptions to every single rule and things like that. But it lakes the cases that German add on top of this. Syntax is not as funny with verb at second position, or end of the phrase, separable verbs, and so on. French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. You might think that as a bastard child between Latin and the Germanic Frank tribe dialects it’s no wonder, though elimination of noun declension is rather surprising from this perspective. The truth is that all languages out there have their own dungeon with many traps and treacheries included. Fortune, nun ni ĉiuj parolas Esperanton. Kaj ne forgesas la akuzativo nin. :D
- DocTomoe 1y ago> French of course also have many original grammatical torture instruments. For me it was when I had to realize that for the French, every number larger than what they can count with their fingers becomes a small algebra problem. quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ... four times twenty plus ten plus nine makes 99.
- Svip 1y agoWell if you like that, you'd love Danish numbers, where 99 is nine and half (before) five times twenty, or »nioghalvfemsindstyve« (or more commonly shorten to »nioghalvfems«).
- jandrewrogers 1y agoSwiss French seems to have regularized some of this in a sensible way? Indian English does much the same with some things; not strictly “correct” English, to the extent those words don’t exist in British or American English, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make more sense or isn’t more consistent so I never argue the case. I generally view those regularizing pressures from non-native sources as a positive thing for languages.
- psychoslave 1y agoYeah, you can take an other locale and use "nonante neuf" instead. People generally take "quatre-vingt-dix" as a single token, they don't actually think about it in a compound perspective. Just like onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, where -ze stands for ten, so it's "n + 10". But in this case it's not synchronically as obvious as this composition is analyzed from morphological point of view, -ze in itself is not attached to any autonomous token in French. If anything French will rather lead to analyze numbers in terms of "k*10+n" instead, unlike German.
- sitharus 1y agoI recently got curious about the roots of this, and it turns out it’s from Celtic languages. All the Celtic languages count in base 20, and they were widespread across continental Europe before the Romans introduced Latin to their conquests and then the Germanic tribes brought the Germanic languages in. Celtic remained a strong influence around modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands so we end up with French counting partially in 20s, even though continental Celtic languages are extinct (Breton, spoken in north west France is an insular Celtic language, more closely related to Celtic as spoken in the British isles and Ireland.) I don’t know how Danish got base 20 counting though. Must have more reading to do.
- ur-whale 1y ago> everything Twain rants about here we attribute to French The part where you have to have the equivalent of a LIFO stack in your brain, piling stuff up and praying you won't overflow, until the effing verb finally shows up and deigns informing you of what is actually happening in the sentence, well that is not, I believe an attribute of French, and definitely specific to German (I believe Japanese has that to a certain extent has well).
- DocTomoe 1y agoYeah, I vividly remember writing whole essays in school with only two sentences like that (sometimes over several pages of relative and temporal sentences and adjective chains), just as a raised middle finger to my German teacher who sleighted me once over the interpretation of some baroque poem. Good times.
- Rendello 1y agoWerner Herzog on French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY (From a mockumentary)
- ycuser2 1y ago"Tomcat" is male in German, not female: Der Kater. "Wife" is female in German, not neutral: Die Ehefrau. "Weib" is old language and rude to use these days.
- DocTomoe 1y agoConsider that the text is, in fact, from the 19th century. Also, 'Weib' is not rude in every context. "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not diminutive towards women, but in fact appreciative (as in 'necessary for having a good time'). We have Weiberfassnacht. And then there are the dialects, in which "Weib" often is indicative of a homely, loving relationship (-> bairisch, Swabian). Context matters.
- Helmut10001 1y agoSorry to be picky, but "Wein, Weib und Gesang" is not neutral. It reduces "Weib" to the value of Wein and Gesang, something only needed for pleasure.
- wilgertvelinga 1y agoWhy do you assume reduction?
- ahofmann 1y agoYou are applying logic and common sense from this century, to words of other centuries. This doesn't work, and never will. I think this is important, because a lot of people do this and nothing good comes out of it.
- Helmut10001 1y agoYes, perhaps you are right. But then, look at who responded to my comment - all usernames suggest male companions. We are also now, not back then. Nothing prevents us from rethinking things from time to time.
- minmax2020 1y agoI would love to read "The Awful English Language" written in an alternative universe where Twain is German.
- DocTomoe 1y agoI'd expect a lot of moaning about how something is written and how it is spelled to appear to come from two different planets.
- polotics 1y agoI think you're looking for the poem "the chaos" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
- 7373737373 1y agohttps://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- brazzy 1y agoGhoti.
- xiconfjs 1y agoFish?
- BlackFly 1y agoIs https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm not what you are looking for?
- golem14 1y agoslightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself. https://www.eventpeople.de/aktuelles/eventmarket/ratschlaege.pdf https://www.eventpeople.de/aktuelles/eventmarket/ratschlaege...
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoThe example with the rain is wrong. It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ). "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls") There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom. https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-sein-tod/ https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-s... -- it's in German and discusses the (perceived) change of that idiom. As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.
- DocTomoe 1y ago> "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls") That's your natural feel of language, and you are deriving from casual use of Dativ plural ... but in these situations, Genitiv would be correct again (wegen DER Regen, but more clearly: wegen der Regenfälle, as Regen is uncountable (unlike, for example, Sturm/Stürme)). Your example is vernacular German as spoken on the road, but grammatically, it is incorrect. Yes, I am lots of fun at parties.
- cenamus 1y agoYou sound like a prescriptivist ;)
- wolfi1 1y agodes Regens wegen FIFY
- vkazanov 1y ago> the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation I always found it weird, the vast difference between phonetics of English and literally EVERYBODY ELSE, including closely related German languages.
- thomassmith65 1y ago(1880) Twain's style was so accessible, it's easy to forget this essay is almost 150 years old.
- jhbadger 1y agoDespite the offended Germans here, it is important to realize that Twain learned German well enough to perform (in German) in Germany, and was actually better known as basically the 19th-century version of a stand-up comic in America and Europe in his lifetime rather than the novelist he is remembered for now.
- dang 1y agoI didn't see any offended Germans! People seem to be taking the article in its intended (fun) spirit. Edit: Seems true of the previous threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44002116
- patates 1y agoTo add to this, I think Germans are usually the most chill about making fun of their own language. Well, I guess except English because it became so international.
- ralfd 1y agoIt is interesting that after two world wars the stereotype of German was that of a hard and harsh language. I think Twain earlier take is more correct.
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoGerman is indeed a harsh language, filled with glottal stops and harsh consonants. The publicity doesn't help either, but it's mainly the phonemes. Try to swear loudly and angrily in French, and try it in German. In German like you're cursing the world out of existence, in French it is like wiping your ass with silk.
- gherkinnn 1y agoHave you been to the French country side or listened to French rap? No silk, only gravel.
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoI have indeed, multiple times and for many years. I'm sorry, it still does not compare in my ears.
- ForgotMyUUID 1y agoAhaha, was für ein Scheißkerl! Frankly, I used this text to tease my teacher when he suggested to read something in German together.
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 - May 2021 (253 comments) The Awful German Language (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147467 - Oct 2018 (311 comments)
- flomo 1y agoHilarious, wish I would have seen this when I was studying German.
- chilldsgn 1y agoI absolutely love German, it is one of my favourite languages, there's such beauty in it. I am not a native speaker, but enjoy studying it. I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I see so many similarities between the two, which I find intriguing.
- bradley13 1y agoDon't tell the people in the Netherlands and Belgium, but Dutch is a German dialect with pretensions, and Afrikaans is a Dutch dialect, so...
- patates 1y agoI can speak English and German which makes me able to somewhat understand written Dutch (especially if I know the context), but no chance when it's spoken.
- lqet 1y agoAs a German, I enjoy reading the Dutch text on supermarket products and manuals, it is a source of great fun in my family :) Children especially love it. Dutch just has so many words that sound extremely cute and funny to Germans: "Sleep well" -> "Slaap lekker", in German "Schlaf lecker" = "Sleep tasty". "Nuttig" -> "Useful", in German "nuttig" means "slutty" "Huren" -> "to rent", in German "huren" means "to whore". "Oorbellen" -> "earrings", "ear bells".
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- bradley13 1y agoI can certainly confirm that learning German grammar as an adult is...challenging. Even though I am now fluent, learning as an adult means that you will always make mistakes on the gender of nouns. There are effectively four genders (male/neuter/female/plural), plus four cases (nominative/accusative/dative/genetive), so you have a 4x4 table giving you a choice of 16 articles that can appear in from of a noun. Only, the 16 articles are not unique: the table contains lots of duplicates in unexpected places. Of course, most Western languages have gendered nouns - English is pretty unique in that respect. That likely comes from English being born as a pidgin of French and German. Verbs in German are valuable things. You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. In purest German, they come out in reverse order, giving you a nice, context-free grammar. In Swiss dialects, they come out in the order they were conceived, meaning that the grammar is technically context sensitive. In Austrian dialects, the order can be a mix. Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all. English, meanwhile, gives learners fits, because the pronunciation has nothing whatsoever to do with spelling. Consider the letters "gh" in this sentence (thanks ChatGPT): "Though the tough man gave a sigh and a laugh at the ghost, he had a hiccough and coughed through the night by the slough, hoping to get enough rest."
- codethief 1y ago> The order of the nouns at the end of the sentence differs by region. Could you give some examples? As a German native speaker I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. :)
- ashdnazg 1y agoI think he meant verbs, and specifically how you say things like "could have done" - the order of "hätte machen können".
- Barrin92 1y ago>You collect them, hold on to them as long as you can, and then - at the end of the sentence - they all come tumbling out. as a German native I felt oddly at home with Japanese because funnily enough building seemingly endless verbs at the end of sentences felt very natural. Despite the fact that German, most of the time, is an ordinary SVO language. It's one of the mistakes English natives who just learn German make, that only made sense for me after I thought how odd that structure is. I've also heard live TV translators really hate this about German because it's annoying, depending on the context, to have to wait to the end of a sentence to translate the whole thing.
- p1anecrazy 1y agoOne of grading criteria for German B2 exam (mid-level in European framework) is Sprachgefühl, a feeling of (a feel for?) language. As mentioned earlier, if studying as an adult, you will probably keep making mistakes, but a lot just comes from being inside the German bubble.
- rawbert 1y agoAs a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.
- titanomachy 1y agoCare to share an example or two?
- bradley13 1y agoI hope he will give us an actual example from his work. But meanwhile, here's a classic example: The Donau is a river. On this river is a steamship (Dampfshiff): Donaudampfschiff This ship is part of an organisation (Gesellschaft) that manages cruises (Fahrt): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft The ship has a captain (Kapitän) who has a cap (Mütze): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze On this cap is a button (Knopf): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopf You could extend this example: The button is colored with a special paint (Farbe), which is produced in a factory (Fabrik): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrik And the factory has an entry gate (Eingangstor): Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor In English, this would be a huge sentence, all in reverse order: The entry gate of the factory that produces the color for the button on the captain's cap of the ship belonging to the cruise organization on the Donau. The German is a lot more compact, if sometimes hard to parse :-)
- praptak 1y agoI don't remember many events from 1996 but my German boss walking into the office excited about the spelling reform of "Schiffahrt" certainly stood out as a memorable event. (They added the third f or maybe re-added it)
- Roombag 1y agoRelated video by RobWords "Is German really 'Awful'?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0
- krige 1y agoAs someone who's learned a few (natural) languages over the years, German remains the only one that just instills me with a sense of dread, or maybe some sort of internal animosity. Russian? Sure. French? Yeah. English? Obviously. Japanese? Still in the kanji mines but making progress. Spanish? Sweet. But German is a blood-and-tears uphill battle for me and I just can't get over it. It's really fascinating on some level.
- bashkiddie 1y agoI am a native German and had Russian as a second foreign language. Try applying Russian Grammar rules to German, you will find they are almost identical. Verb prefix system is the same. Noun conjugation even uses the same prepositions to decide the case. Compound words are slighly different, instead of a tram-station you would use tramlike station.
- Wilder7977 1y agoFor what is worth, I find the ugro-finnic trinity (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) a step down towards hell, compared to German, Russian and many other languages traditionally considered hard.
- toolslive 1y agoThe compositional powers of German, Dutch and plenty of other languages are really amazing. People invent words on the fly and promptly forget immediately after and the listener just understands what has been said. In my Dutch native language, we had the word "pausbaar" (which means something like "in possession of the necessary properties to become pope) coming up recently.
- dmichulke 1y agoAhhh, the recurring themes of popeability and pope-worthiness.
- melvinroest 1y agoAh, I read "pausbaar" as the "ability to pause" since "pauzebaar" would be odd to say :')
- toolslive 1y agoif you want to build "ability to be paused" you would end up with "pauzeerbaar" from "pauzeren" (to pause)
- melvinroest 1y agoah yea, fair
- hanshenning 1y agoIn some languages there is an actual word for this in the dictionary: papabile https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/papabile
- School-Cotton 1y agoThis word is widely known in English too, at least among people who follow papal elections. I’m not sure whether it’d count as “an English word originally loaned from Italian” (like “pasta”) or “an Italian word that a lot of English-speakers recognize” (like “buongiorno”), but it is there — probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
- bashkiddie 1y agoReading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher. Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?
- iamsaitam 1y agoWhy do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
- bashkiddie 1y agoFrom a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun. But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive-maskulin-neutral-oder-feminin-definition-und-regeln/ https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive... You can classify by suffix. * -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit * -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling * -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer. You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.
- ur-whale 1y ago> there are rules for 2/3 of cases LOL. And are they rules to remember which word falls in the 2/3rd ?
- nitros 1y agoNope, but it's not so different to irregular plural forms or verbs in english. Afaik: At some point in the history of the language there would(?) have been rules for these nouns, but not today.
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- 5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 1y agoA analytic language speaker discovers synthetic/fusional languages.
- ccppurcell 1y agoAs someone who studied German at school and has made serious attempts to learn Finnish and Czech, I have feelings about this. Obviously Twain was being humourous. But I took three years of German two decades ago, and to this day it is easier than Czech (I'm embarrassed to say, as I've lived here and tried to learn on and off for the last six years). I'm exaggerating only a bit.
- trinix912 1y agoThe main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation_of_a_regular_verb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
- ccppurcell 1y agoIt's not so much the cases but the interaction with cases and gender. I found Finnish easier in some ways, despite the many cases. Because the case endings are always the same (modulo vowel harmony) so you can extract helpful information - something is inside something else say. In Czech a word ending with u has five different possible gender-case combinations (if I counted right) and that's not counting the distinction between short and long u.
- stratocumulus0 1y agoI'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".
- int_19h 1y agoWriting as a native Slavic language speaker, that's fair, but it's mostly a testament to how complex all Slavic languages are. It's like we decided to make it absolutely sure that any foreigner who decided to learn them would be in a world of pain. Declensions? Check. Grammatical gender? Sure, and adjectives and verbs also have it for good measure, not just nouns; and for verbs, it also interacts with tense and number. And let's not forget about our phonology, with 5-consonant clusters, palatalized labials, utterly unpredictable stress, complex mutations of both consonants and vowels when adding suffixes etc. By the way, the nearly universal ethnic designation for Germans in Slavic languages - some variation of "nemci" - literally means "mutes".
- metalman 1y agoJust had some menonites come to my place to buy something last evening, and they confer amongst themselves in "low" german, which to my ear is much nicer sounding than the other variety. I also like the sound of Swiss speaking "swiser dutch", which has a bit of sing song whistly lilt, and is apparently incomprehensable to anyone who wasn't raised with it. A Canadian/german farmer down the road, did make much of his income translating german to english, mostly for technical manuals of equipment, but that work hss devolved into proof reading the automated translations, the whole translation industry having quietly been taken over. Though another recent experience in a high end, high volume cabinetry shop full of exotic german equipment, revealed that technical support is done from germany, and requires muliti lingual tech support people to do voice calls.....down time on a million dollar "saw" running at .1mm accuracy, bieng painfull
- radiator 1y agoin a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
- hoseyor 1y agoRather odd hatred of German considering that English is in effect a regression of German (yes, I know, that simplifies it, but it’s true), i.e., a simplification. It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.
- VMG 1y agokeep in mind that the author is a comedian
- School-Cotton 1y agoGerman and English have a distant common ancestor (spoken roughly 2000 years ago) but neither is the ancestor of the other. There’s no meaningful scientific reason to say that German is the “main branch” of the Germanic languages and English is the “fork”. Also, it’s not clear that either is “more complex” than the other across the board. German has more complex noun morphology (cases, etc) whereas English has more complex phonology, for example.
- Tainnor 1y agoI do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots due to the pervasive influence of French (there are people who call English a creole although I think that's taking it a bit far). But I agree that languages with more complex morphology aren't somehow "better", that's just weird elitism coming from an era where every language was analysed as if it were some variant of Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.
- School-Cotton 1y ago> I do think English has deviated more from its Germanic roots That’s fair, but so have German and many other Germanic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic had six cases whereas German only has four (and colloquially spoken German mostly only has three). Dutch has only vestigial remnants of a case system and Afrikaans has none at all.
- Havoc 1y agoGlad I learned it as a kid rather than adult. Seems like an absolute nightmare. Though not quite chinese level
- mda 1y agoI guess, If you consolidate all articles in German to a single one, it loses almost nothing (noun genders) and becomes easier than English to learn.
- mda 1y agoEeh you can downvote sure, but I actually tried to rewrite some German text with using an LLM and it ended up quite decent.
- simonklitj 1y agoRobwords has a good video on this article! https://youtu.be/VcekIrFjwe0?si=4rZqHqunKa3epKQP https://youtu.be/VcekIrFjwe0?si=4rZqHqunKa3epKQP
- ayrtondesozzla 1y agoMy experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!
- dgan 1y agoi spent like 10y studying German in school, and was pretty good at it. Then life happened, and we moved to France. I could speak good enough French after 1 year, and speak/understand basically everything after 2 years. German was PITA, French was pretty easy but obviously I had a personal French teacher, and old lady who was amazing I don't speak German at all anymore :/
- ryukoposting 1y agoI've been studying German in my spare time for about a year now, and it seems very similar to Old English. Lots of subject-object-verb, lots of suffixes, noun gender.
- zahlman 1y agoCan confirm. 11 years of French education and 3 of German left me with considerably worse French. (Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001832, maybe it's because I learned French first?)
- yurishimo 1y agoHow old were you when you first "learned" French? I've observed that kids/teenagers who aren't actually interested in learning the language retain just enough to pass their classes and then it all just drifts away. I was the same "learning" Spanish in high school in Texas. Until I moved to a new country and _wanted_ to learn the language, I could barely remember how to ask where the toilet was. Now that I'm invested and interested, things are much more sticky. I believe this is why much of the world has latched on to learning English. There is so much content available that people _want_ to consume, that it becomes a hobby they are actually interested in, rather than a chore. As more and more people learn English, it becomes a positive feedback loop of content creation that nearly the entire planet can participate in.
- ur-whale 1y agoThis very classical piece is nothing short of admirable. Really funny, very well written, and most of all, while exaggerated: all true. German is laden with a ton of fairly useless and purely ornamental flourishes, it's truly a pain to master. Every step of the way, your mind is haunted by this recurring thought: "why in heaven's name would they inflict this to themselves?" It's even worse than French if you count the number of genders.
- storus 1y agoThe main issue with learning German is that each grammar rule has a bunch of heavily used exceptions one needs to learn, making the language very illogical and more idiomatic. This leads to a sort of a neurosis when many native Germans are afraid to make any mistake themselves and often prefer not to speak up in order not to embarrass themselves.
- culebron21 1y agoI had no troubles with the things Twain laments. You can rather quickly learn (but not internalize) the rules, which are exactly the same as in other Indo-European languages. Compound past tense as in Romance languages. Declination like in Slavic, and in Instrumental case the ending is almost the same! The biggest trouble nowadays with learning German is that all textbooks are DUMB and don't give enough practice. Basically they're tests on steroids. This is not the way you can internalize the grammar. You may know the rules, but still unable to use them correctly when speaking or writing. All the books are shiny, with lots of drawings, photos, bells and whistles, even media content over an app, etc. But, as said, none of them contains enough excercise to practice grammar. Over last 6 years that I did an effort, I've never seen a textbook step away from this format. Teaching by Goethe Institut is equally awful: most time you excercise by inserting just one word in a sentence spellt for you. When finally you reach speaking at length and not to the given pattern, everything falls apart, and you're told off: "oh, so many mistakes, go repeat the grammar rules." (No wonder most students choose the strategy to just speak at the kindergarten level. Das Bau ist grün. Berlin ist die Haupstadt Deutschlands. Ich möchte in einem Vorstadthaus leben.) Germans! Admit, you conspired together to not let us learn your precious language!
- barrenko 1y agoGerman is just statically typed :).
- bmicraft 1y agoWith a couple of macros and keywords that don't even try to fit into the otherwise sensible syntax.
- lycopodiopsida 1y agoYes, I wish an equivalent of “Lingua latina per se illustrata” would exist in every language.
- amelius 1y agoGerman is by far the best language to swear in :)
- wqpfofo 1y agoI think you lack familiarity with Arabic.
- maaaaattttt 1y agoI wish I could have sent this wikipedia entry to Mark Twain. It would have been a fine addition to his "museum". I'm sure he would have been thrilled to hear about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungs%C3%BCberwachungsaufgaben%C3%BCbertragungsgesetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rind...
- lqet 1y agoThe currently longest word in the Duden is Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitätsstörung (ADHS, German for ADHD).
- penguin_booze 1y agoI see German, and I'm required by the law to leave this reference: https://youtu.be/l3_tRPRt9x8 https://youtu.be/l3_tRPRt9x8.
- ycuser2 1y agoFun fact: Because of compound words it's possible in German to create words with triple consonants like "Sauerstoffflasche".
- addandsubtract 1y agoAt the end of the article, Umlauts are written :u, :a, :o. I've never seen them presented this way. Is this some old, typewriter artifact or just a formatting error?
- madcaptenor 1y agoIt looks like Microsoft Word at some point had the convention that typing Ctrl-: followed by a vowel got the umlauted vowel: https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/schreiben/umlaute/ https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/schreiben/umlaute/ https://www.novalutions.de/en/how-to-type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-word-a-simple-guide/ https://www.novalutions.de/en/how-to-type-an-umlaut-in-micro... https://www.process.st/how-to/type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-word/ https://www.process.st/how-to/type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-wo... and IIRC something similar worked for Ctrl-' + e = é , Ctrl-` + a = à, Ctrl-~ + n = ñ, and so on. So there's at least some association for (punctuation mark) + (vowel) = marked vowel and I could see people dropping the Control key and doing what's done here.
- madcaptenor 1y agoOn further research, this appears to be Microsoft's attempt to do something like a Compose key (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_combinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...) which I had forgotten about. In turn this is sort of emulating a "dead key" on mechanical typewriters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key), although I can't tell if German typewriters actually had a dead key for the umlaut or if they actually had additional keys for ä, ö, ü like modern German keyboards do.
- wongarsu 1y agoGerman typewriters generally had dedicated keys for the umlauts. Windows however does offer a "English (international with dead keys)" keyboard layout that turns :, `, ^, etc into dead keys. Word offering the same at another level of abstraction sounds like a typical Microsoft thing
- penguin_booze 1y agoI would outlaw noun gendering globally. Does it serve any semantic purpose? It does damn good job at making learning unnecessarily difficult.
- wongarsu 1y agoIt adds some additional entropy without making the words themselves longer. This both helps when communicating over an imperfect communication channel, like talking in a noisy place. A minor benefit is that references with words like "this" are less ambiguous when gendered, and you can unambiguously reference multiple things as long as they have different gender
- bmicraft 1y agoThey're very useful: if you use two nouns in a sentence chances are they're not the same gender. That makes referring back to them very easy as you can do that by gender only, without repeating the nouns or other complicated sentence structure.
- penguin_booze 1y agoIt can be useful, but only in the off chance that they're of different genders. But all this is at the expense of canonically having assigned genders to nouns, which the speaker has no way to compute or derive. In other words, even if I know the very word I want to utter, I can't legally form the correct sentence until I know its gender. All things considered, to me, the cost outweighs the benefits.
- School-Cotton 1y ago> even if I know the very word I want to utter The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word. There is no way to compute that “dog” begins with the letter “d”, even if you know that the remainder is “og”. So should we ban words that begin with “d”? Of course not. In German you must memorize “der Hund”, not just “Hund”, just like in English you must memorize “dog”, not “_og with unspecified first letter”.
- aqme28 1y agoI have a copy of this book in German.
- PopAlongKid 1y agoTwain also poked some fun at French, when he found a translation of his first successfully published story and mapped it back to English. "The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County#Translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of...
- MarkusWandel 1y agoI grew up in Germany but haven't lived there for almost 45 years. I pride myself in still being fluent. And yet, this resonates. Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend. Typing German in an email or Whatsapp, sometimes I get these details wrong and sometimes (shame!) I have to try a Google Translate from English. The other thing he makes fun of isn't that strange. Splitting "Abreisen" for example (to depart) is natural because it's a compound word in the first place. And more over, in the example, the admittedly funny "De .... [flood of words] ... parted" it's not even one word, it's two (reist ab). German does lend itself to gratuitous nesting of sentences, but that doesn't mean that good German has to.
- wqpfofo 1y agomoreover, haha.
- lucb1e 1y agoThe first and the last are the same (nominative, accusative). Do they mean the same in German also? Surely you can't just swap one out for the other?
- School-Cotton 1y agoNominative is used for subjects and accusative for direct objects. In “I bit the dog” or “the dog bit me”, “I” is nominative whereas “me” is accusative.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MarkusWandel 1y agoContext. "Mein guter Freund" works in the context "he is my good friend". "Meinen guten Freund" works in the context "I like my good friend". You don't actually learn all those grammar rules as such (what the heck is "accusative" anyway), you just pick all this up by actually using the language.
- MarkusWandel 1y agoAnd of course, one must mention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck Google's auto translated subtitles are hopeless here.
- aidenn0 1y agoI think that, whatever the German version of that has that makes it special, the Danish version has even more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqmIR0nj9Cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqmIR0nj9Cg
- MarkusWandel 1y agoI think it's the faster pace that does it. Didn't know this gimmick worked in more than one language.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mikl 1y agoEveryone likes their mother tongue better, so does Mark Twain. No need to write a whole treatise about it. Having lived 10+ years in Switzerland and having learned the language (and the local dialects), I really like German. But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste.
- lucb1e 1y ago> Everyone likes their mother tongue better Speak for your own mother (tongue)! I think there are (many) better languages than my mother tongue but I haven't been able to convince the natives of this yet. The oscillate between catching on and regaining national pride (we're currently in a nationalism phase, where they're pushing to teach more in dutch again rather than a language everybody understands and needs for research and business anyway, source: https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/actueel/nieuws/universiteiten-nemen-maatregelen-om-instroom-internationale-studenten-te-beheersen https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/actueel/nieuws/uni...) > But like many delicacies, it is an acquired taste Why say lot word when two word do trick? Stockholm syndrome!
- antirez 1y agoLanguages learning curve can be very funny. Phonetic regularity plays a lot in this game, for instance. French and Italian are very similar languages (more than Italian and Spanish), yet they are so phonetically apart (with Italian at the extremes of regularity and French at the extremes of complexity) that it's complicated for Italians to learn French in the first steps: then the curve flattens a lot. Italian itself is a strange beast. It is, perhaps, the most single latin language to learn for a random speaker of some other language, at least at a level where you can talk and understand decently, but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians.
- snovymgodym 1y ago> but it is almost impossible to master, even for Italians. Well depending on your definition of mastery, that's probably true for nearly every Western European national language since they all have some degree of artificiality and prescriptiveness. Officially, everyone from Lombardy to Calabria speaks "Italian" but what is actually spoken in each region will differ heavily from the national standard. Thanks for creating Redis, by the way.
- vondur 1y agoI came across this video about this from a linguist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcekIrFjwe0 It's a good video.
- lucb1e 1y agoRobWords' last month's "Is German as bad as people say?", for anyone wondering where that random ID goes Edit: same link posted 9 hours earlier in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44001765
- msarrel 1y agoEnjoying my schadenfreude
- jancsika 1y agoI feel like German compound nouns are just begging for ternary conditionals: Was ist das für ein Raum? Das ist mein Schläfrig?schlaf:wohnzimmer.
- lucb1e 1y agoWriting is nothing but a translation of speech though. I'm afraid you'd need to have a leading example in speech that you want to encode before this has a chance of catching on even in a subculture :(
- carlosgg 1y agoprevious https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173967
- wileydragonfly 1y agoIf only Mark Twain knew the noble Germans would instigate a world war that killed the likes of 70 million people. So charming.
- stratocumulus0 1y agoTwain is of course being satirical here, but I can tell that many people have an overly strict approach towards language learning. They expect rigid rules and get annoyed when the language does not adhere to them, yet they do not realize that these rules came after the language and they are most often a tool to teach and analyze it. What language instruction is supposed to achieve is providing one with a foundational understanding of language, just enough that immersion learning becomes possible. Since human language is a mix of logical thinking and fuzzy pattern matching, there is no other way to learn it completely than by pattern matching itself.
- alienchow 1y agoAs someone who had to learn German, I actually really appreciated the language being formatted quite like closure functions."I have 'noun' upon which 'verb'" with the pronoun and verb being the parentheses where you can then do stuff like f().g().h() where you chain the returned context: "Ich habe etwas getan, was mir schon immer Spaß gemacht hat und mir jedes Mal Freude bereitet, wenn ich daran denke." Yes I do have a peeve about the numbering system that screws you over at the end, "Ten thousand, three hundred, four and twenty." Yes I know the French numbering is even worse. German just makes sense to me programmatically. Unfortunately I no longer have much of any opportunity to practise nowadays outside of online language classes.
- SergeAx 1y agoMy first computer-related job was manually typing a part of an extensive German-Russian dictionary into text files. I was about 15, it was around 1990, scanners were a rare thing, and OCRs weren't a thing at all. The resulting files should be space-aligned at some random column, like 30 or so, of the available 80. I still remember the translations of two words that were longer than that. One was "to attack the enemy in the night while wearing a camouflage robe". The other - "to descend carefully using an unreliable rope".