I wonder why German isn't as highly recommended internationally as French, Spanish, Russian & Arabic are. Just because Germans can generally speak better English? And I was told not to learn German, and suggested that I should learn French & Italian. His advice is much appreciated, but I'd like to know the reasons why some people think this way. Being able to speak good English may become a major obstacle for spreading German further? Thanks!
Why isn’t German very popular? (copied)
If you want to learn German, just learn it. Some people will make a face when they hear that you are learning German, but then you can ask them what language they would suggest instead. This may "shut
them up rather quickly" if they are the types who like to give advice, but can't produce any languages.
them up rather quickly" if they are the types who like to give advice, but can't produce any languages.
I don't really think the Germans speak English terribly well. Speaking of my experiences, while it depends on individuals ultimately, the Germans I met speak far better English than the Francophones I met (the latter is a smaller sample). Regardless of the fact that 99% of the Germans aren't very used to my English, their level is in general far lower than what you expect in an international setting. But this is natural, since their country doesn't have to speak English.
But again speaking of my experiences, I think many of them aren't quite used to the English (and German) of a Chinese person, not quite used to speaking to foreigners, and not quite welcoming in offering German. Very often, they just didn't apparently understand quite well, and started to offer English very quickly. The most FAQ was Deutsch oder (or) Englisch, and very often I actually said beides (both). In fact, I could, but they still forced English but ended up speaking far poorer English than I did.
This is why, given that I haven't met a lot of peoples speaking different native languages so far, the Germans are JUST slightly slower than the Chinese in offering English to foreigners. The Chinese know 99.9% of the foreigners know nothing of Chinese and offer English instantly. The Germans, I don't know, offer English after two or three sentences. But Francophones, in my experiences, didn't really offer English until they became impatient. In short, I'm yet to know why Germans liked to offer me English so quickly.
>>I wonder why German isn't as highly recommended internationally as French, Spanish, Russian & Arabic are. Just because Germans can generally speak better English?<<
Oh, in fact, objectively, given my linguistic background, I'd actually find monolinguals far worse than passive bilinguals (like most younger Germans) in practicing their languages in the first stages of learning. The Germans were more helpful than Francophones exactly because they could express better in English. Whenever there were vocab gaps, they could comprehend English substitutes better.
>>And I was told not to learn German, and suggested that I should learn French & Italian.<<
And indeed, I think I've correctly invested in German, a language that is so rich to read. German institutions at large really gefallen mir (please me). And one good point of the Germans is that they learn more languages in general, well, like than the French, and even than me.
>>Being able to speak good English may become a major obstacle for spreading German further?
German and English are, IMO, only similar in a small percentage of basic vocab and in grammar, and especially the verbs. Apart from that, as I had went through most of the grammar and now struggling with far more advanced vocab, they are simply two languages and so distinct that you can't possibly mix them up. Starting from English, German grammar looks more straightforward than French (well, it's Germanic after all), but at higher levels German texts are simply ... almost unintelligible to me until now. And at higher levels, I find it impossible to rely on English and imperative to go totally German. But the good thing is that, since German vocabulary is very German at large with far less Latinate/French vocab in German, I can sometimes guess vocab rather easily.
Another good thing about German is its reading tradition. I enjoyed it much when I was window-shopping in, say, Berlin and Frankfurt, where you can find some very big bookshops. While I'm not a reading buff, I do see that keen readers may find German a very pleasant language to read. They have so many nice books you won't want to miss. For me, those include language books and, I don't know, literature stuff. I COULD see how books were structured, so I'm saying that the Germans write good books, at least judging just how complete many books are.
And while I'm not that keen on reading, since I see the point of reading to become literate in German, and since many Germans do like reading very much, it follows that it's a good language to learn and then read in.
But again speaking of my experiences, I think many of them aren't quite used to the English (and German) of a Chinese person, not quite used to speaking to foreigners, and not quite welcoming in offering German. Very often, they just didn't apparently understand quite well, and started to offer English very quickly. The most FAQ was Deutsch oder (or) Englisch, and very often I actually said beides (both). In fact, I could, but they still forced English but ended up speaking far poorer English than I did.
This is why, given that I haven't met a lot of peoples speaking different native languages so far, the Germans are JUST slightly slower than the Chinese in offering English to foreigners. The Chinese know 99.9% of the foreigners know nothing of Chinese and offer English instantly. The Germans, I don't know, offer English after two or three sentences. But Francophones, in my experiences, didn't really offer English until they became impatient. In short, I'm yet to know why Germans liked to offer me English so quickly.
>>I wonder why German isn't as highly recommended internationally as French, Spanish, Russian & Arabic are. Just because Germans can generally speak better English?<<
Oh, in fact, objectively, given my linguistic background, I'd actually find monolinguals far worse than passive bilinguals (like most younger Germans) in practicing their languages in the first stages of learning. The Germans were more helpful than Francophones exactly because they could express better in English. Whenever there were vocab gaps, they could comprehend English substitutes better.
>>And I was told not to learn German, and suggested that I should learn French & Italian.<<
And indeed, I think I've correctly invested in German, a language that is so rich to read. German institutions at large really gefallen mir (please me). And one good point of the Germans is that they learn more languages in general, well, like than the French, and even than me.
>>Being able to speak good English may become a major obstacle for spreading German further?
German and English are, IMO, only similar in a small percentage of basic vocab and in grammar, and especially the verbs. Apart from that, as I had went through most of the grammar and now struggling with far more advanced vocab, they are simply two languages and so distinct that you can't possibly mix them up. Starting from English, German grammar looks more straightforward than French (well, it's Germanic after all), but at higher levels German texts are simply ... almost unintelligible to me until now. And at higher levels, I find it impossible to rely on English and imperative to go totally German. But the good thing is that, since German vocabulary is very German at large with far less Latinate/French vocab in German, I can sometimes guess vocab rather easily.
Another good thing about German is its reading tradition. I enjoyed it much when I was window-shopping in, say, Berlin and Frankfurt, where you can find some very big bookshops. While I'm not a reading buff, I do see that keen readers may find German a very pleasant language to read. They have so many nice books you won't want to miss. For me, those include language books and, I don't know, literature stuff. I COULD see how books were structured, so I'm saying that the Germans write good books, at least judging just how complete many books are.
And while I'm not that keen on reading, since I see the point of reading to become literate in German, and since many Germans do like reading very much, it follows that it's a good language to learn and then read in.
<<I wonder why German isn't as highly recommended internationally as French, Spanish, Russian & Arabic are.>>
Perhaps because German is really tough to learn, although certainly easier than Arabic. Of course every foreign language is tough, if your 1st languge is English.
Perhaps because German is really tough to learn, although certainly easier than Arabic. Of course every foreign language is tough, if your 1st languge is English.
It's better to speak English in Germanu/Austria since when/if you('re trying to) speak German they're think you're a potential immigrant, and they don't like immigrants in Germany and Austria (unlike France).
Xie is right, English is not always spoken well by Germans (or Austrians, the German Swiss, etc). Far less so than in neighbouring Germanic countries at least, because they don't need the language as badly. But it seems to be a fairly common myth that they do all speak it well, which may turn people off of learning German.
Other reasons German is not usually recommended include the fact that its speakers are highly concentrated in one, relatively small region, it is not commonly used in international settings, it has a moderately difficult grammar, and Germans are perceived as being unfriendly (not true!). Plus, there is the whole Nazi stigma....one of my Jewish friends takes it as a personal affront that I'm learning German.
Oh well. There are lots of reasons to learn the language anyway. Even if you never visit Europe, it's one of those languages that has enough amazing music, literature and cinema to keep you satisfied at home. If English is your native language, German has a refreshingly familiar feel to it (compared with, say, French or Italian). And if you do visit Europe, German is a behemoth of a language there. It has more than one and a half times the number of native speakers of French, English or Italian. And the German-speaking world lies in the middle of everything, politically, economically and even geographically, so the language is rather hard to avoid.
Other reasons German is not usually recommended include the fact that its speakers are highly concentrated in one, relatively small region, it is not commonly used in international settings, it has a moderately difficult grammar, and Germans are perceived as being unfriendly (not true!). Plus, there is the whole Nazi stigma....one of my Jewish friends takes it as a personal affront that I'm learning German.
Oh well. There are lots of reasons to learn the language anyway. Even if you never visit Europe, it's one of those languages that has enough amazing music, literature and cinema to keep you satisfied at home. If English is your native language, German has a refreshingly familiar feel to it (compared with, say, French or Italian). And if you do visit Europe, German is a behemoth of a language there. It has more than one and a half times the number of native speakers of French, English or Italian. And the German-speaking world lies in the middle of everything, politically, economically and even geographically, so the language is rather hard to avoid.
.one of my Jewish friends takes it as a personal affront that I'm learning German.
What a stupid Jewish friend you have.
What a stupid Jewish friend you have.
<<Plus, there is the whole Nazi stigma....one of my Jewish friends takes it as a personal affront that I'm learning German. >>
Haha, what an ignorant! Being Jewish is no excuse to act like a Nazi!
Haha, what an ignorant! Being Jewish is no excuse to act like a Nazi!
Xie Sat Aug 29, 2009 5:26 am GMT:
<< ... Regardless of the fact that 99% of the Germans aren't very used to my English, their level is in general far lower than what you expect in an international setting. But this is natural, since their country doesn't have to speak English.
..., I think many of them aren't quite used to the English (and German) of a Chinese person, not quite used to speaking to foreigners, and not quite welcoming in offering German. Very often, they just didn't apparently understand quite well, and started to offer English very quickly.
In short, I'm yet to know why Germans liked to offer me English so quickly. >>
For me as a German native speaker it is often -- not always -- very difficult to understand someone whose native language is Chinese. (This may hold for other people speaking a tone language as well.)
I once was tutor in an university practical. We also had chinese students and also a chinese tutor. One of the chinese pupils didn't speak German very well. Actually, I hardly understood him. He didn't understand me, too. I offered him Englisch, started to speak to him in Englisch giving him explanations, but he still didn't really understand me. One day, the chinese tutor translated my explanations to him. But there were other students, too, so I couldn't go on in that way. He attended this practical in several terms, and finally got his certificate for almost nothing. (If I had to decide, I wouldn't have given him that certificate.) He didn't realised up to the final term of that practical that he had to keep a log every second week.
Besides hat he had almost no knowledge of German or English, to my mind, the reason for the difficulties in understanding between me and him was that people who natively speak a tone language are not really able to recognize or to produce the syllables of the aforementioned languages.
(I have similar problems in understanding a Yoruba native speaker -- Yoruba is also a tone language --, even if he speaks German.)
I have the impression that producing the syllables of a tone language requires another use of the voice producing parts. They try to produce German or English words in the way they would produce Chinese words. They have problems with consonant clusters, too. If they drop consonants, things very quickly get unintelligible. So, as German has much more complexe words than English, and German is maybe much more difficult to pronunce for a Chinese than English, I really understand why we very quickly switch to English instead of going on in German.
The other way round, people like me aren't able to really recognize and maybe to produce the tones (I admit, I never tried).
It requires you some courage to first talk to a stranger in another language, of course.
<< ... Regardless of the fact that 99% of the Germans aren't very used to my English, their level is in general far lower than what you expect in an international setting. But this is natural, since their country doesn't have to speak English.
..., I think many of them aren't quite used to the English (and German) of a Chinese person, not quite used to speaking to foreigners, and not quite welcoming in offering German. Very often, they just didn't apparently understand quite well, and started to offer English very quickly.
In short, I'm yet to know why Germans liked to offer me English so quickly. >>
For me as a German native speaker it is often -- not always -- very difficult to understand someone whose native language is Chinese. (This may hold for other people speaking a tone language as well.)
I once was tutor in an university practical. We also had chinese students and also a chinese tutor. One of the chinese pupils didn't speak German very well. Actually, I hardly understood him. He didn't understand me, too. I offered him Englisch, started to speak to him in Englisch giving him explanations, but he still didn't really understand me. One day, the chinese tutor translated my explanations to him. But there were other students, too, so I couldn't go on in that way. He attended this practical in several terms, and finally got his certificate for almost nothing. (If I had to decide, I wouldn't have given him that certificate.) He didn't realised up to the final term of that practical that he had to keep a log every second week.
Besides hat he had almost no knowledge of German or English, to my mind, the reason for the difficulties in understanding between me and him was that people who natively speak a tone language are not really able to recognize or to produce the syllables of the aforementioned languages.
(I have similar problems in understanding a Yoruba native speaker -- Yoruba is also a tone language --, even if he speaks German.)
I have the impression that producing the syllables of a tone language requires another use of the voice producing parts. They try to produce German or English words in the way they would produce Chinese words. They have problems with consonant clusters, too. If they drop consonants, things very quickly get unintelligible. So, as German has much more complexe words than English, and German is maybe much more difficult to pronunce for a Chinese than English, I really understand why we very quickly switch to English instead of going on in German.
The other way round, people like me aren't able to really recognize and maybe to produce the tones (I admit, I never tried).
It requires you some courage to first talk to a stranger in another language, of course.
German is my favorite language. When the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe conquer the world under my direction, everybody will be forced to speak it.
Xie Sat Aug 29, 2009 5:26 am GMT:
<<And indeed, I think I've correctly invested in German, a language that is so rich to read. German institutions at large really gefallen mir (please me). And one good point of the Germans is that they learn more languages in general, well, like than the French, and even than me.>>
What do you mean by ''German institutions''? What institution exactly? How can an institution please you? (Eine Irrenanstalt ist auch eine Institution, gefällt die Dir?)
Do we really learn that many languages? You are required to learn English at school, maybe French or Latin, if you are in the Gymnasium, but all other languages are up to your interest.
<<>>Being able to speak good English may become a major obstacle for spreading German further?
German and English are, IMO, only similar in a small percentage of basic vocab and in grammar, and especially the verbs. Apart from that, as I had went through most of the grammar and now struggling with far more advanced vocab, they are simply two languages and so distinct that you can't possibly mix them up. Starting from English, German grammar looks more straightforward than French (well, it's Germanic after all), but at higher levels German texts are simply ... almost unintelligible to me until now. And at higher levels, I find it impossible to rely on English and imperative to go totally German. But the good thing is that, since German vocabulary is very German at large with far less Latinate/French vocab in German, I can sometimes guess vocab rather easily. >>
German verbs are much more complicated than English ones. I don't see that they are especially similar to each other. They even behave differently, compare ''to move'' with ''sich bewegen, umziehen''. Actually, we mix English and German a lot. Go everywhere you like in Germany, you will recognize that there's much mixture of these two languages, especially in stores, on goods, in science, in advertising and also in everyday life.
I myself are guilty of that, too. There's so much mixing up that there are many people trying to fight against it, see www.vrs-ev.de and http://www.deutsche-sprachwelt.de/
<<And indeed, I think I've correctly invested in German, a language that is so rich to read. German institutions at large really gefallen mir (please me). And one good point of the Germans is that they learn more languages in general, well, like than the French, and even than me.>>
What do you mean by ''German institutions''? What institution exactly? How can an institution please you? (Eine Irrenanstalt ist auch eine Institution, gefällt die Dir?)
Do we really learn that many languages? You are required to learn English at school, maybe French or Latin, if you are in the Gymnasium, but all other languages are up to your interest.
<<>>Being able to speak good English may become a major obstacle for spreading German further?
German and English are, IMO, only similar in a small percentage of basic vocab and in grammar, and especially the verbs. Apart from that, as I had went through most of the grammar and now struggling with far more advanced vocab, they are simply two languages and so distinct that you can't possibly mix them up. Starting from English, German grammar looks more straightforward than French (well, it's Germanic after all), but at higher levels German texts are simply ... almost unintelligible to me until now. And at higher levels, I find it impossible to rely on English and imperative to go totally German. But the good thing is that, since German vocabulary is very German at large with far less Latinate/French vocab in German, I can sometimes guess vocab rather easily. >>
German verbs are much more complicated than English ones. I don't see that they are especially similar to each other. They even behave differently, compare ''to move'' with ''sich bewegen, umziehen''. Actually, we mix English and German a lot. Go everywhere you like in Germany, you will recognize that there's much mixture of these two languages, especially in stores, on goods, in science, in advertising and also in everyday life.
I myself are guilty of that, too. There's so much mixing up that there are many people trying to fight against it, see www.vrs-ev.de and http://www.deutsche-sprachwelt.de/
<<Another good thing about German is its reading tradition. I enjoyed it much when I was window-shopping in, say, Berlin and Frankfurt, where you can find some very big bookshops. While I'm not a reading buff, I do see that keen readers may find German a very pleasant language to read. They have so many nice books you won't want to miss. For me, those include language books and, I don't know, literature stuff. I COULD see how books were structured, so I'm saying that the Germans write good books, at least judging just how complete many books are.>>
You was in Frankfurt? We could have met! Yes, there are very big bookshops. But the books they offer are written in bad German. They use the socalled Rechtschreibreform in almost every book. (I haven't bought a book since the Reform started.) As a native speaker who loves his language, you only can cry out loud if you see optically wonderful books written in a spelling which causes dyslexia. (Actually, the reformed spelling in that books is relatively moderate compared to that in many internet sites or in what they are required to learn in school. This is because otherwise, the books wouldn't sell.) (Compare: The books wouldn't sell vs. Die Bücher würden sich nicht verkaufen.) The reformed spelling isn't ''very pleasing'', but just the opposite) And books are very expensive, too. Every book is structured in a certain way. How can you know about the ''completeness'' of a book? What do you mean by that?
<<And while I'm not that keen on reading, since I see the point of reading to become literate in German, and since many Germans do like reading very much, it follows that it's a good language to learn and then read in. >>
This statement was true before the reform. If you REALLY try to learn German according to the Rechtschreibreform, you're doomed to fail. You will never learn real German. You'll learn a violated language with many torn apart words. But you, as a non-native learner, will never know about the original meaning of that torn apart word because there was a compound version of that word with another meaning which you'll not find in a new dictionary any more. There are some cases where they not only ''adapted'' orthography but also the content of that pieces of literature to fit in modern political correctness issues and that kind. If you read that, you'll get a totally wrong impression from that classical books.
You was in Frankfurt? We could have met! Yes, there are very big bookshops. But the books they offer are written in bad German. They use the socalled Rechtschreibreform in almost every book. (I haven't bought a book since the Reform started.) As a native speaker who loves his language, you only can cry out loud if you see optically wonderful books written in a spelling which causes dyslexia. (Actually, the reformed spelling in that books is relatively moderate compared to that in many internet sites or in what they are required to learn in school. This is because otherwise, the books wouldn't sell.) (Compare: The books wouldn't sell vs. Die Bücher würden sich nicht verkaufen.) The reformed spelling isn't ''very pleasing'', but just the opposite) And books are very expensive, too. Every book is structured in a certain way. How can you know about the ''completeness'' of a book? What do you mean by that?
<<And while I'm not that keen on reading, since I see the point of reading to become literate in German, and since many Germans do like reading very much, it follows that it's a good language to learn and then read in. >>
This statement was true before the reform. If you REALLY try to learn German according to the Rechtschreibreform, you're doomed to fail. You will never learn real German. You'll learn a violated language with many torn apart words. But you, as a non-native learner, will never know about the original meaning of that torn apart word because there was a compound version of that word with another meaning which you'll not find in a new dictionary any more. There are some cases where they not only ''adapted'' orthography but also the content of that pieces of literature to fit in modern political correctness issues and that kind. If you read that, you'll get a totally wrong impression from that classical books.