Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 4111-4115 (October 14th-18th, 2019)
cybersmurf:
Yeah, Swiss "Hochdeutsch" still has a thick accent on it, usually. Speaking actual Hochdeutsch usually takes some training, and you might never get rid of some kind of regional "coloring"
hakko504:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 23 Oct 2019, 14:02 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 23 Oct 2019, 10:42 ---Written German, otoh, is a different beast, especially in a professional setting. We use much longer-, and more complicated sentences when writing. Also, people are less forgiving about mistakes. I know a Canadian professor who is basically fluent in conversational settings, but his lecture transcripts ... are interesting!
P.S.: About ze Dialektz - No, we don't understand them, either. That's why there's standard German - otherwise there'd be hundreds different little Germanies ... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinstaaterei and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_languages).
--- End quote ---
Well, German sentences can be really long. Somebody once called German "Lego for words" since you csn string almost any combination into a noun. Likewise, you can string together a life-sized fortress into a single sentence - although that monster won't be easy to follow.
--- End quote ---
After reading Das Muschelessen by Birgit Vanderbeke I can wholeheartedly agree with you. The average sentence in that book was about a page long, and the longst I found was a bit over four pages IIRC. May have been longer. Certainly felt that way.
Skewbrow:
Whatever German grammar I absorbed in high school is mostly forgotten. I never found the cases difficult (my native Finnish has fifteen case, so ...), but recalling the grammatical genders of nouns was a more serious problem. Particularly their effect on the adjectives, when used as attributes, something that I never became fluent with. And let's not get started on schwache Maskulina :-D.
Luckily the three foreign languages I was to learn in school (English, Swedish, German) have so much in common that it became relatively easy to guess the meaning of a previously unknown word. So as a tourist in Germany I never ran into problems with written text. Spoken, hmm. I got by at pubs, restaurants and such, but forget about any professional discussion :-(.
Case:
--- Quote from: hakko504 on 23 Oct 2019, 23:53 ---
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 23 Oct 2019, 14:02 ---Well, German sentences can be really long. Somebody once called German "Lego for words" since you csn string almost any combination into a noun. Likewise, you can string together a life-sized fortress into a single sentence - although that monster won't be easy to follow.
--- End quote ---
After reading Das Muschelessen by Birgit Vanderbeke I can wholeheartedly agree with you. The average sentence in that book was about a page long, and the longst I found was a bit over four pages IIRC. May have been longer. Certainly felt that way.
--- End quote ---
My German teacher in 5th grade drilled us to go sparingly with the nested subclauses. I'd regularly get back essays with the annotation "Keine Bandwurmsätze!" ('No tapeworm-sentences!') all over the page. German grammar is complicated compared to the English one, true, but if you get the hang of it, it also allows you 'write on your feet' more readily.
I have to plan my English sentences more - frequently dividing what I'd planned into shorter ones, for example - and the rigid SVO word-order often feels ... constraining.
--- Quote from: Skewbrow on 24 Oct 2019, 00:00 ---Whatever German grammar I absorbed in high school is mostly forgotten. I never found the cases difficult (my native Finnish has fifteen case, so ...), but recalling the grammatical genders of nouns was a more serious problem. Particularly their effect on the adjectives, when used as attributes, something that I never became fluent with. And let's not get started on schwache Maskulina :-D.
--- End quote ---
Let's not.
:Furtively Googles 'schwache Maskulina':
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: Case on 24 Oct 2019, 05:33 ---I have to plan my English sentences more - frequently dividing what I'd planned into shorter ones, for example - and the rigid SVO word-order often feels ... constraining.
--- End quote ---
Every so often I have to rephrase and chop my single German sentence into two or three English ones. It's incredibly annoying being used to using what feels like ultra-long sentences hardly anyone else would use.
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