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I 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 Afrika
by chilldsgn 1y ago
I 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".
- davedx 1y agoRight! I speak English and Dutch, so I can read maybe less than half of German. It's just enough to be tantalising but not enough to really understand it. Likewise with Swedish.
- snovymgodym 1y agoKnowing English and German also makes it possible to understand something like 50-75% of written Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish in my experience. Apparently a part of this is due to a huge number of Low-German loanwords present in all three due to the influence of the Hanseatic league in the region during the middle ages.
- jgilias 1y agoWell, if it comes to that. German is not _really_ a single language. It’s a dialect continuum consisting of sometimes barely mutually intelligible variants. And yes, if you continue following that continuum, you get to the languages you mention. A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet. As they used to say.
- awanderingmind 1y ago'A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet ' --> I hadn't heard this before, love it! For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- woodruffw 1y agoA bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. (One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
- arnsholt 1y ago
- chilldsgn 1y agoYep. I find it easier to understand German verbally than Dutch. I struggle when Dutch people speak to me, the way they pronounce words are hard on my ears. German feels softer.
- melvinroest 1y agoNative Dutch speaker here. I find German softer on the ears too. Except for Dutch in the South (Belgians and South NL), that's soft on my ears too. But not my accent, we are descendants of monsters. Why otherwise would we pronounce the G the way that we do?
- hengheng 1y agohttps://youtube.com/shorts/oNv7SBY32a8 https://youtube.com/shorts/oNv7SBY32a8 Yes, yes you are.
- woodpanel 1y agoWell, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch". A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts. So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue. Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now. I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
- School-Cotton 1y agoAll national identities are to a large extent constructed (or less charitably: made up). So the 21st-century idea that Germans are people with a passport from the Federal Republic of Germany is not really any more or less valid than the 19th-century idea that Germans are a cultural group spanning various states including Austria (and maybe even including the Netherlands).
- fhd2 1y agoAlso noteworthy are the different terms for "German" in different languages, they're quite far apart: "Deutsch", "Allemagne", "Nemți", which all derive from the names of different Germanic tribes. Depending on which tribes surrounding countries (which were faster to establish nation states) were closest to, that's what they called all Germans. And it stuck.
- woodpanel 1y agotrue-ish. I'm not aware of any tribes that would give name to Deutsch and Nemti. Rather, Deutsch is the generic self-description for all tribes, and Nemti was a generic description of all tribes by slavic people (ie Niemy in polish meaining "without the ability to speak")
- arp242 1y agoA Dutch speaker read Afrikaans without too much effort; understanding spoken Afrikaans is a bit harder, but depending on the person it can be fine. A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. Some words are similar, but the same can be said about English. There are a number of differences in the grammar and alphabet. Of course they're related languages; because I can speak English, German, and Dutch I can kind of read Swedish or Danish on account of being Germanic as well. But that doesn't make a "dialect with pretensions". We might as well say that all current Germanic languages are some sort of "dialect with pretensions" of some old Germanic language. But that doesn't really mean anything.
- burning_hamster 1y ago> A Dutch speaker can't read or understand German. A Dutch speaker can't necessarily read or understand German. However, a Dutch person nearly always does, and often flawlessly so.
- arp242 1y agoThis is just wrong. I have nothing more to add, because this is just not the case. Maybe it was true 60 years ago, but not today.
- zahlman 1y agoI did once tell one of them something quite like that. I was assured with a smile that the feeling is mutual.
- lucb1e 1y agoHow is English then not a German dialect with pretensions? Is there a certain threshold in number of words that must originate from a different language family, or what's the logic here?
- submeta 1y agoI am a native speaker. And I find German to be a very ugly language. Pronounciation wise. Compared to French or English. It sounds like someone is constantly having a quarrel with you.
- chilldsgn 1y agoI feel the same about Afrikaans, ugly and harsh as hell :D
- pixelpoet 1y agoI speak both and to me Dutch is the super harsh spitty one, compared to German and Afrikaans it's not even close!
- otikik 1y agoWeaknesses can become strengths. Sometimes you want to have a quarrel. When French people quarrel they must rely on changes on pitch, cadence and volume because otherwise it sounds like they are ordering baguettes at the boulanger.
- Beretta_Vexee 1y agoIs this the game ‘Tell me you've never visited Italy without telling me you've never visited Italy’?
- zelphirkalt 1y agoGerman has harsh sound. But in terms of quarrelling, I find that Korean sounds like someone is complaining all the time. But then again I have never learned Korean, so my impression would surely change.
- fransje26 1y ago> Schmetterling!
- odiroot 1y agoThere's this fun video from Easy German, where native speakers (Austrians in this case) express their feeling of uneasiness when flirting in German. As in, the German language not being the sexiest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx0edmLdLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEx0edmLdLo
- pixelpoet 1y agoCool, Afrikaans is my 2nd language after German :) Groete van Duitsland boet!
- chilldsgn 1y agoLekker!
- wewxjfq 1y agoI think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.
- pjmlp 1y agoOne of the things that helped me improve German was Poetry Slam contests, they are still quite popular over here in many regions, you get poetry coupled with another German property, plenty enough sarcasm.
- larodi 1y agoPrecisely my thought - try learning French. At some point we've been asking our teacher "but, why would they start writing so many chars (unreadable) and so many different endings". and our guess is there must've been a financial reason to do so - more chars, more money when copying manuscripts, and less chance for the common people to ever have this level of writing skills, which takes years to master.
- int_19h 1y agoThe French are so proud of their roots, they insist that for every French word you learn, you also learn its entire etymological development all the way back from Vulgar Latin.
- beeforpork 1y agoMy native language is German, and I don't know whether I like it. It is the most natural to me, so no judgement -- I cannot look at it from the outside. Well, of course I like it, because I can express myself best with it. Anyway, I absolute love Afrikaans. I also like droëwors, but that's a different topic. You should have a look at Icelandic -- it is the opposite of Afrikaans on the morphological complexity scale of Germanic languages. Quite a bit more going on with endings and such than in German. And yet it is weirdly familiar, because it is, well, also Germanic.