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Why isn’t German very popular? (copied)
I agree, my friend has reacted stupidly to my learning German, and I've told him so.
<< German verbs are much more complicated than English ones. I don't see that they are especially similar to each other. >>
Sort of. A lot of past tense forms are similar, like sing/sang/sung and singe/sang/gesungen, and separable prefix verbs have always reminded me of phrasal verbs. English verbs have more in common with German ones than with most other non-Germanic langauges. And I don't know about German verbs being more complicated...in conjugation, yes, but it isn't complex, and I've always found verb tenses in German very straightforward, while English tenses are anything but.
>>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). <<
My observation wouldn't probably be accurate, but the Germans I met were more friendly than the Francophones. But well, for acquaintances, it was the opposite, though not quite. My understanding is that, the less understanding we have, the harder it is for me to make foreign friends. I knew some Francophones far better than young Germans just because they were also studying on exchange. And we talked almost always in German. That's, I think, already quite exceptional. The French don't quite learn as much French as the Germans do... at least on their border.
>>Plus, there is the whole Nazi stigma....one of my Jewish friends takes it as a personal affront that I'm learning German.<<
For us Chinese, French sounds more beautiful, while German is cooler for its "glorious past", strong industry, tech stuff, beautiful people, etc. Both are more or less just as popular among us. Well, far less than their East Asian counterparts and English, but are still sensible choices for us. I can only say that, for some historical reasons, the Chinese generally praise Germany and the Germans rather highly, often making them overshadow the French. We tend to have a very very different perspective of history from the Europeans for always talking about the PAST instead of the present, and about glory and power, very often playing down the importance of ethics. This is highly cultural.
>>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.<<
The Chinese have far less choices. The French do have some, but I don't see them learn that many. The thing is, before I (ok, suppose me) became aware of the good things about learning languages and the tricks of doing them, like by going to antimoon, if I weren't even given the choices, of course I must end up not having learned anything at all. At least I like the German institution that you can do THAT many languages.
We Chinese, we got crappy English, close to no classical Chinese in our head, and in Hong Kong, far less than passable Mandarin. We don't have something like Japanese in the school, and I had to spend my own efforts, instead of asking the school/Gymnasium, in order to learn German and French. Well, at least, you guys also have superb books to read and........... in my case, well, to put it shortly, Hong Kong has very little to offer, other than tabloids, very old dictionaries from Taiwan, etc. I have to rely on, if I learn languages completely through Chinese, books from the mainland. And very often they aren't just as complete as what I see on books by Langenscheidt/German Assimil/PONS, etc. Other than dictionaries and grammar books, Chinese scholars have very little to offer.
For one thing, obviously my linguistic background already makes it hard to learn any kind of European languages. For another, the utter lack of materials, and our being so remote from your country, also make the whole matter far more difficult. Life would be much easier whether I were born an Anglophone or Germanophone or Francophone.
Going from anything like those to Chinese is ACTUALLY easier than the reverse, which is my case. I'm sorry that I may not be a very good representative, and CERTAINLY not a good exchange partner in regard to my own native language, <for that I don't quite buy my own culture>, but very often I feel rather disappointed by the surroundings. Well, in short, since I find it difficult to have a positive opinion of many things in my culture, country, language, etc, I'm not quite a good exchange partner/culture "salesperson". No, I don't buy the average Chinese's poker face in their wholesale of Chinese culture, always with the ha-ha face, always claiming everything to be great and haha in crappy English, but not quite genuine. Some Chinese receive, say, Germans quite different from other fellow Chinese, for example. And, well, with the former being treated far more positively than the latter, in many cases. We all know that. Don't feel disappointed or complain if you don't understand this part of my message. Many Chinese think in such an intricate (and cunning) way that many others find it enough baffling.
>>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.<<
Of course, I won't be able to tell just how well they are written just by using my very limited reading level. It's again cultural. Hong Kong produces so few good books in many subjects, and practically no language books at all, that .... even bookshops, things like these, to be themselves a kind of wonder in Germany. You don't know this. It was just like how I compared the landscape of most German cities with Amsterdam, which has a very special landscape. And in Amsterdam, I discovered that, in Europe, there are really buildings that are even smaller than their Hong Kong counterparts. You'll see the same if you travel in Hong Kong and hugely surprised by the landscape. So, while you know everything German and say many books are crappy (especially with new spelling), well, yes, I say many Hong Kong books also suck. But from a tourist POV, German books, even judging their covers, already beat Hong Kong stuff in my eyes.
So, the thing is, there is something compared that surprises me so much. I can go on to write a list of a lot of German beer that I can't find in Hong Kong, a lot of Chinese food that is unknown in Germany, and many many other things.
>>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.<<
One phenomenon is that the Germans seem to offer English quickly, and offer more English in many official settings and institutions, etc, than the French. And in education, the DAAD starts to recommend hundreds of master programs in English. Oh, come on, as I told you above, we Chinese value Germany (and also France) for its strengths in many fields. At least for me, I don't see the point of something "English" like a master in your country.
I don't quite have the authority to speak of what Germany should do, but at least it shouldn't downgrade itself linguistically to somewhere like Hong Kong. Please don't just mix even more English than we do in that tiny city, an ex-colony.
But in practice, as I can claim that most people have some kind of mental problems (stress, phobias, dislikes and likes, weird taste, etc, everything not physiologically harmful but enough interesting), it seems people can't balance their language attitudes quite well in general. I, too, have the obsession of complaining about the utter anonymity of my language in many places. One valid reason is I speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. We're often in fear of language loss, and many of us are NEVER used to people learning it, assuming that most foreigners won't be interested anyway. Disappointing enough, I never saw any foreigners speaking Cantonese properly, except one Aussie actor who was actually born and raised in Hong Kong. And not even Mandarin. Da Shan does speak Mandarin the best in my life so far, and he's the only personality, out of the very few, that can really manage it very well. It also follows that, as people can see in many many older posts, I admit I have the biased view that, at least, statistically, very very very few foreigners can manage such a major language as "Chinese" (generic). And indeed, in practice, I offer English instantly just like any Chinese, whether they learn a foreign language or not. I acknowledge it as a cultural-linguistic phenomenon.
>>
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.<<
Yeah, I won't really know until I force myself to become an isolated native raised by pure reading - the kind of method that most foreign learners would have to do anyway, given no or very few opportunities to stay abroad for a long time. Years passed, and my English still sucks so much that both Anglophones and Germans found it difficult to comprehend. Years passed, and it's still close to impossible to become a native. Many Chinese, and perhaps many poor Germans too, have been fighting such pointless battles in learning English. We all can acknowledge it.
I can imagine how sad it is for you, when I think of how, in my terms, the scholars, communists, etc, raped Chinese characters, tore them apart, created something called simplified Chinese, and even followed by second-round simplification. I detest simplified Chinese in some ways like how some of you guys hate the new reform. Although I do write simplified Chinese from time to time out of pure laziness.
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One last note about German verbs.
This isn't that convincing after all. English verbs LOOK more flexible, but just because they are more flexible than German verbs (and especially reflexive ones), English PHRASAL verbs also have far more variants. For me, variants of Chinese characters are also very annoying. I'm not quite creative and I don't like that many variants.
My superficial generalization is that you don't need to complain about German verbs anyway. For us Chinese, Chinese verbs are easier than any other verbs by far, close to telegraph. I don't care about just how easy or how difficult it is to learn any part, any kind of, and how much of a language if I'm interested at this moment or in the future.
Languages are all that difficult anyway. The Chinese think they don't have grammar, while both German and French "beat English" by far in terms of grammatical complexity. But in fact, as I told you guys before, Chinese grammar has weird particles, measure words, and very strict syntax that implicitly make a genuine language instead of pure babbling. Otherwise, there shouldn't be any Chinese at all. At least, you can read books to decipher "grammatical complexity" in the European cases. But just like you guys in your own countries, the Chinese make up grammar by talking, and we create grammar and practice it completely empirically. What is more difficult on earth than something empirical?
But here, therefore, I also acknowledge the huge complexity of Chinese too, since so much has to be done empirically. Unlike German which I can learn by books, by subtitles, by all kinds of reading, etc, Chinese kids don't learn grammar at all (unlike German kids) and they just make up everything. Cantonese is even more formidable for not even offering proper subtitles for film buffs. And even after years, I still find it a huge pain to read Chinese grammar. I can't do it. Sometimes I also wonder whether my Chinese has suffered because of my linguistic hobby.
>>The French don't quite learn as much French as the Germans do... at least on their border. <<
---> Learning German among the French is apparently less common than French among the Germans. Correction.
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Supplements:
One other observation is that MANY Germans actually claimed German to be (too) difficult to learn, although I was exactly speaking kindergarten-level fluent German to them. I took it literally as the exact argument that we Chinese also promote among ourselves and to foreigners at large about just how difficult Chinese is. Both Germans and Chinese seem to feel overshadowed by a common language called English, but in different ways. We don't really think English is "easy", but at least "easier" than French and German (see above), not to mention some unknown stuff elsewhere in Europe. One well-known, formidable one is called Russian.
It seems that many languages are "difficult" because of how some Americans, followed by some other Anglophones, view them. And this opinion is seconded by their native speakers, like you German guys and us Chinese, and followed by a lot of people elsewhere.
I don't know German. But I suppose that, if the Chinese power grows to become ultimately something like the US today, Chinese would then be branded as super-easy, even easier than English because it has "no grammar" at all. We'll see.
>>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.)<<
There are two things. First, many young Germans actually said my Aussprache was very good, and also standard, since I never learned any dialects. Second, I never learned a good English accent, so it has changed somehow since my stay in Germany. While I can avoid one prominent feature of the German accent, of putting the stress on the last word anywhere, where it would be a verb in German, in fact I messed up all the intonation. I sound Cantonese and Chinese and German now. But a mixture like this is disastrous, because neither people can understand it well. A clear Cantonese accent is better than mine as far as clear speech goes.
>>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.<<
I think German phonetics (not phonology) is far more straightforward than English. Well, perhaps it's the same for phonology. Nobody knows. Whether it's old spelling or new spelling, written German looks very transparent to me, Gott sei Dank.
But I gather this is more cultural than linguistic. Most Germans who offered English quickly were also those who didn't have time to know my linguistic situation, such as all the people in tourist areas. For younger Germans in the university town I stayed, I could go on totally in German without even revealing my English to them until we reach vocab gaps. In fact, somebody reminded me repeatedly that I should speak up. My volume is also a problem. In Hong Kong, many people have to speak very loudly to be understood. But in Germany, I wasn't apparently used to the environment and started with a low volume.
And apparently, I gather that my German should be more comprehensible than many Turkish guys in Kebap shops. They, too, offered English quickly. Very often, I think this is a problem with my complexions. Sometimes I went out with somebody like a French guy or anybody European, and people talked to them first, or never talked to me. That, though, relieved me of many troubles like hard-selling. Some of them, on the street, thought that I was a tourist that couldn't comprehend anything anyway, so they wouldn't talk to me. That was the same for many Germans/Europeans who simply stared at me without speaking anything. (I did the same in Hong Kong)
For more curious people, they always started with the question Deutsch oder Englisch and then are you Japanese or Chinese. Oh, come on, we Chinese even joke from time to time that a large part of the Japanese culture, as in the language, was derived (or, pejoratively, copied) from our culture. But in Europe, many people seemed to have forgotten our existence, but we're a far bigger nation and a culture of far longer history... I would've been even more irritated if I were Korean. They never mentioned Korean at all. Somebody listened to my story in Hamburg and Berlin, and said it was even a tragedy for our culture because people were even mixing up us and the Japanese. If you ask the Japanese, probably they'd also say we are two very different cultures and peoples and languages. Well, I can understand that. Some Chinese also mix up Austria and Australia (English names are similar), Sweden and Switzerland (Chinese names are similar), Finland and Netherlands (ditto), Sweden speaks English (only), Belgians are all Germanic, etc.
Scheiß, I need some more supplements, sorry.
>>There are two things. First, many young Germans actually said my Aussprache was very good, and also standard, since I never learned any dialects. Second, I never learned a good English accent, so it has changed somehow since my stay in Germany.<<
I gather that, unlike German where I have a stable accent, my English accent has been changing over the years without proper, serious learning. I've been delaying it for too long, leading to a lot of language problems. If somebody determines to do away with his own foreign accent, but fails to complete accent training, he'd end up like me. I also heard of some Chinese guys who were like in the middle of changing their accents, but end up becoming unintelligible at large to both fellow Chinese and foreigners.
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One more point about difficulty of German, or anything else
I'll now slim down my arguments to reduce all the PC, trash talk, etc. When I thought of many of my cousins who have acquired foreign citizenship, when I thought of just how their Chinese sucks, I think there can only be one reason why they, second-generation, can't manage their heritage language very well just for being (born and) raised abroad. Why? Because they spent so little time in becoming literate in Chinese. Worse still, many of them in fact rejected Chinese even at home, or never learned well how to speak it, not even to mention how to write it and read it.
At large, written command is more difficult than oral command. I also have some old friends who write and read so poorly that they actually had to ask me for help, claiming that I could talk and write more properly than they did. The more and better you are educated in a language, of course all the better you can do anything in it. Even in Hong Kong, many Chinese can't write well, me included in very formal situations. When my cousins are so far removed from their heritage language, of course they can't write and read at all.
Foreign learners are also facing the same problem, but it doesn't mean that German verbs must be prohibitively hard. Whether it's Chinese or German, the difficulty doesn't really lie in just how difficult it is to speak Chinese tones or use German verbs or write Chinese. Instead, it's in just how much you do in the target language. I spent 15 years at the school with Chinese (and English). I spent 15 years to become literate in Chinese, though I still make a lot of mistakes as a "native". I got this feeling by going through Duden's books for school kids/ Abitur guys, because apparently German pupils have to learn THAT much to enter a Gymnasium and a university. I did too, but not the same content.
To learn something as complex as a language with so much culture embedded in it, of course it must be complex. If I explain the same stuff in my posts to fellow Chinese, I can reduce the words to half. Humor, facts, arguments, etc, are so hard to translate (like the part of mental problems).
I don't wish to be off-topic, but I'll raise one question before we get back to German: given language is so complex with my complex analysis above (pun intended), how are YOU going to deal with your languages? I think either you remain illiterate, just talk for the rest of your life, or go literate by reading terribly a lot (esp. for those wishing to study abroad). Some people have a compromise as international students by learning ONLY the part of the language they need for studies and don't really aim at becoming a (near-)native. This is a matter of how much you are willing to invest.
German is not very popular nowadays for 5 reasons:
1. The Nazi stigma. The WWII finished a longtime ago, but there are a lot of films about that. In my country, people only hear German when is spoken in a WWII film by the Nazis.
2. The lost of the colonies. Germany lost Togo, Kameroon, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanganika, Namibia, New Guinea, Samoa, and other Pacific islands.
If German were spoken in Africa and Oceania, there would be a feeling of international language, as French or Spanish have.
So, at this moment is the official language in a little area of Central Europe. If you add the negative demographic tendencies, German is becoming a regional language, as Italian.
French and Spanish are spoken in other Continents, and there is a sensation that these 2 languages are really World languages, taking into account the spread of them: countries where they are official, etc.
3. United Nations. Only 6 languages are official in this Organization and all other bodies. So, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic are consider officially as "World languages".
4. English language. English is unofficial language of the European Union. It is very known in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
Perhaps, one of the most important factors to consider if a language is becoming important or not, it is the importance of English in the area where is spoken.
For example, there are 4 big areas where English is not very widespread: China, former USSR, Arabic World (depending on the countries) and Hispanic America. So, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian are yet important languages.
5. The demographic factor. It will be less spoken in the future. It won't be in the top ten languages anymore. Other languages like Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and several South Asian languages will have the opposite tendency.
<<1. The Nazi stigma. The WWII finished a longtime ago, but there are a lot of films about that. In my country, people only hear German when is spoken in a WWII film by the Nazis. >>
Only stupid,uneducated,superstitious people can believe in it. German language is one of official languages in Switzerland,Belgium ,Luxembourg,official language in Liechtenstein too,not only in Germany and Austria.Do people of Liechtenstein or Switzerland have something in common with Nazis?Of course , they don't have.Contemporary Germans and Austrians don't have too.
Do people of Liechtenstein
what a big and powerful contry!!! So Catalan is spoken not only in Calalonia but also in Andorra and Italian in Switzerland, San Marino and Vatican City :-)
<<1. The Nazi stigma. The WWII finished a longtime ago, but there are a lot of films about that. In my country, people only hear German when is spoken in a WWII film by the Nazis. >>
I don't see how the Nazi stigma would make people not want to learn it today. In fact, for young people the whole Nazi thing probably increases the 'cool factor' by a truckload.
Zorro : « The Nazi stigma. »
Sans doute à relativiser. Surtout dans des contrées genre Vietnam, Japon, Chine, Corée, Laos, Cambodge, Indonésie, Mexique, Nicaragua, Grenade, Guatemala, Haïti, Somalie, Salvador, Panama, Liban, Égypte, Palestine, Libye, Syrie, Soudan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan — et d'autres sans doute.
Zorro : « English is unofficial language of the European Union. »
L'anglais est une des 23 langues officielles de l'UE.
"I don't see how the Nazi stigma would make people not want to learn it today. In fact, for young people the whole Nazi thing probably increases the 'cool factor' by a truckload."
Let's also think about bands like Stahlgewitter, Landser, Division Germania, Sturmwehr, Kahlkopf, Volksverhetzer, Spreegeschwader and many more that contribute to this very cool element.
It's sad that whenever a thread about German is opened the conversation is diverged to the nazis. Damn nazis and damn stupid people.
<<So, at this moment is the official language in a little area of Central Europe. If you add the negative demographic tendencies, German is becoming a regional language, as Italian.
3. United Nations. Only 6 languages are official in this Organization and all other bodies. So, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic are consider officially as "World languages".
For example, there are 4 big areas where English is not very widespread: China, former USSR, Arabic World (depending on the countries) and Hispanic America. So, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian are yet important languages.
5. The demographic factor. It will be less spoken in the future. It won't be in the top ten languages anymore. Other languages like Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and several South Asian languages will have the opposite tendency.>>
I don't care about population at all when considering both German and French. I didn't follow your logic and learn French first. In fact, it's been right for me to settle on German first, and I don't even think French is THAT necessary after all. Even if there is a huge boom of Francophones for years to come in African ex-colonies.... if you take a reductionist view, the Chinese still outnumber almost all peoples all. Why do I need a foreign language then?
I speak "Chinese" but I don't speak Mandarin as a native, but there are actually prohibitive factors preventing me from actually participating in the UN as a Chinese. First, if you aren't a civil servant assigned to the UN, then of course by common sense you can't enter the UN even as an American or a Brit or of any other nationality above. You can still work in German as a German, given the position. I can't possibly even join the PLA since I'm holding the Hong Kong passport, and so what?
And the Chinese are learning (crappy) English like crazy, even in those very poor, mountainous, earthquake-struck areas. Among the top ten, I don't know anything other than my native and English, and I'm doing perfectly fine. I don't need to learn Bengali.
Regardless of rising power and economic stability and whatnot, I still see a lot of my own counterparts flocking into all the western countries to study and many actually stay there for good. Speaking of material life and the environment and etc, I can tell a lot of places in France and Germany are far more pleasant than in my country. In the latter, except green areas, sparsely populated towns, and undeveloped areas, I can't find somewhere where the air is alright. I'd prefer spending more for an easier life. Using the euro is really expensive.
<<Germane to this subject.>>
:)
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