3 ms·

Most of the German stereotypes are not just untrue, reality is actually the opposite. Germans are not efficient as an example, they love layers of formality and

by tokai 7mo ago

Most of the German stereotypes are not just untrue, reality is actually the opposite. Germans are not efficient as an example, they love layers of formality and documentation for its own shake at the cost of getting stuff done.

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
It's also not as clean as the stereotypes would suggest.
finaard 7mo ago
As a German, after encountering Russian bureaucracy once, I commented to my wife that the main difference between Russian and German bureaucracy is that in Russia at least you can pay your way out.
smitty1e 7mo ago
As a student of German (80 on DuoLingo) I'm fascinated by the definite articles. If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
- danans 7mo ago
  > If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? > We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion. German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
  - smitty1e 7mo ago
    Oh, don't drop a pfennig in me about the arbitrary genders. I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps. Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
    - danans 7mo ago
      > Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it". Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects. That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.

by tokai 7mo ago

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago

It's also not as clean as the stereotypes would suggest.

finaard 7mo ago

As a German, after encountering Russian bureaucracy once, I commented to my wife that the main difference between Russian and German bureaucracy is that in Russia at least you can pay your way out.

smitty1e 7mo ago

As a student of German (80 on DuoLingo) I'm fascinated by the definite articles. If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.

danans 7mo ago
> If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? > We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion. German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
- smitty1e 7mo ago
  Oh, don't drop a pfennig in me about the arbitrary genders. I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps. Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
  - danans 7mo ago
    > Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it". Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects. That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.