What a fricking language! The absolute precision and sonority are equalled by no other tongue in the world. German is simply the most masculine and cool Germanic language. Once you know the rules, it starts to make a lot of sense, unlike English. The only downside about German is that some Germans pronounce their Rs like in that homosexual and disgusting ape screech known as French. I want my Rs to sound like Rs, not like fricking sickening phlegms from subhuman throats! And also they sometimes don't finish their words! Think British English (the non-rhotic dialects). But then German literature is literally GODLIKE and it's worth the price of admittance alone, so it's all forgiven! Sadly the modern German person is a burgerized pussyllanimous bugman! Their literature should be the main focus, not the unworthy social aspect. Either way, this tongue is unparalleled. The thinking man's language. Latin of the 21st century.
Cheers, lad. The power ranking for European languages looks like this:
>Greek > Latin > German > French > Russian > Italian > Spanish > Portuguese > the rest
German is almost as god-tier as Latin and Greek.
he typed in English.
inb4 you are a monolingual
You are mentally cucked Anglo superiority.
I've studied all the languages I listed. Fight me.
Portuguese has Pessoa and maybe a few more authors worth mentioning... whereas all the other Romance languages have scores of authors.
I can only assume anyone putting French above Russian has severe brain damage. And it is well known among the non-moronic that Portuguese is the best Romance language, but Germanic is by far the best language family. Latin and Greek are more worthwhile to learn than any ancient Germanic language, but Old English and Gothic are more mellifluous.
Portuguese is moronic. Italian, Spanish and French all mog Portuguese.
saying portuguese is moronic and that spanish mogs portuguese shows you know frick all.
it's so similar it's almost the same language
bump
English is the best language. it encapsulate so much emotion compare to other languages of the entire planet. if romans spake any other languages that isnt latin. it would be merrie olde English-- it conqueres and soaks up everything good of other languages and leaves out the downside of those languages to the mongrel vultures
Spoken like a true monolingual cuck. You are living in a world of delusion, trapped by your one and only language.
If you can't tell from that post that the poster was an ESL, you've got a lot of work to do before you're qualified to judge English.
what are some books in German you recommend, OP
damn that's a nice paiting
Name of the painting?
Asking for a friend
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts
It's extremely ugly, but it's pleasurable to hear cute bavarian girls speak it.
French glottal Rs are downstream of Germanic languages, not the other way around.
No. Rolled Rs are Germanic. Gay Rs are French.
French is Germans pronouncing Vulgar Latin. Latin R is trilled, not full glottal. Glottal Rs are the norm all the way into Scandinavia, while they only go as far south as the Germanics did.
>. Glottal Rs are the norm all the way into Scandinavia
Not true. They're only present in some southern regions that have degenerate Franco-Germ influence. In a purely Germanic population like the Icelanders, people roll their Rs. Gay Rs are a French cancer and they're mostly prevalent there. Thank you for ruining languages with your disease, stupid frogs.
Based uneducated Luxembourgish peasants standing in the path of totality of that guttural R and resisting with a fortitude only a truly Lux can have.
Map is not achurate in switzerland. People in Zürich roll their R's, people farther to the east in Thurgau, St.Gallen have guttural R's
This is heavily contested in linguistics and, indeed, there is evidence that the uvular r originated in Germany, since it is attested there from the middle ages whereas in France it spread relatively recently from the top down as it became trendy in Parisian circles. Read about this rather than being a homosexual.
unfassbar schwuler post
Germans are pathetic midwits who try and fail to get out of atheism. Germens are deeply effete people because they are not actors. In europe the great peoples were the romans and the french. Germans were always push-overs.
They will always be submissive and always poorly understand the social currents which sway the world. Germans are second rate thinkers.
Think of a german as woman: always subpar, always trying to punch way above her waist and deep down she knows she is a worthless prostitute good for nothing but her c**t.
It's like this for germbugs. So when they try to understand atheism, they create a grotesque system like Hegel. Deep down they know they are out of their depth. So like a woman nowadays, they flee to exotic lands and when they find one they say it's the right one, it's the truth, simply because it's different.
Of course they don't understand it like they couldn't understand atheism. That's what happened with Hesse.
Incel homosexual got rejected by a German woman and now hates Germany with a passion lmao it's obvious to everyone reading this trauma post
Extremely based post. German philosophy is only popular with incel chuds who can't cope with the fact that Anglo chads utterly obliterated their israeli fairy tales and seek refuge in some contrived overwrought metaphysical system. In fact German philosophy was a massive setback for humanity as a whole, if it weren't for pseuds like Hegel or Kant or Marx we'd be colonizing the Solar System by now.
It's refreshing to see that nobody in academia cares about German mental diarrhea anymore. German philosophy doesn't bear on ANY of the toughest questions in contemporary philosophy like the hard problem of consciousness, mind-body problem etc. If you want to learn more about them you open a book written by an Anglo analytic chad. Hegel and the rest are popular with a segment of terminally online culture warriors and trannies and that's it
Anglo analytic..are you moronic?
Analytic is just autistic Anglos trying to make sense of their nonsensical language. It's an sterile approach.
Is this a copypasta? Anyway German philosophy is a pile of worthless garbage. Anglo philosophy mogs all German pseudosophers
Terrific b8 m8
Which reddit post did you get this from?
It's a IQfy original, gay.
Wallah billah ich küss deine Augen Brudi.
Dein Durchfall ist schön!
*sprechdurchfall
>tfw I find out that ze Germans were unironically trying to claim Shakespeare as their own on the basis of some moronic notion of Germanic unity
Lmao this is literal Black person-tier behaviour. Is it really becoming of a proud nation in the middle of Europe, Land der Dichter und Denker, to steal other country's achievements for want of your own? I think it's significant that the only relevant book Goether ever wrote - Faust - is based on an idea "borrowed" from Christopher Marlowe
>Lmao this is literal Black person-tier behaviour.
That's what /misc/tards, chuds and white supremacists from America all do. Trying to unite everything under "white" and claiming everything as their own.
They have a better claim to Shakespeare as even the woppiest wop from New Jersey has at least a drop of Anglo blood in him which can't be said of most Germans
>Germans claiming Shakespeare >:(
>Americans claiming all European culture :O
>Some guy is talking about Germany? This is my chance to write up another loosely related diatribe against America.
Your fixation on my country cannot be healthy.
Your country's fixation on burger's isnt healthy
but muh in group preference and homogeneous society ..are you a israelite?
>an idea "borrowed" from Christopher Marlowe
Marlowe 'borrowed' it from Germany my dude. It's possible his play went back to Germany very early and influenced the popular myth there but not certain. Goethe didn't read Doctor Faustus until after having written Faust part 1.
The German claim to Shakespeare makes sense if you speak their language. Shakespeare's plays were translated so well into German, it seems almost necessary to assume they were meant for that specific language. And his influence on their culture is comparable to his influence on his own English culture.
>I think it's significant that the only relevant book Goether ever wrote - Faust - is based on an idea "borrowed" from Christopher Marlowe
Anglo detected
Anyone have advice for mastering German sentences that end in a string of verbs? This is my biggest barrier with the language, especially when listening to people speak.
Maybe I am moronic rn but can you give an example?
NTA but I think he's referring to the more complex sentences that have subordinate clauses and stuff. Those usually have, not exactly a string of verbs, but two right after each other at the end. "Ich wunsche dass ich in das Haus gehen könnte" or something like that.
Even if a subordinate clause contains several verbs, such as an auxiliary verb or a modal verb, the conjugated verb is at the end of the sentence.
Beispiel: Sarah muss gehen, weil sie noch Hausaufgaben machen will.
Here’s a couple of examples.
Einmal ausgesprochene Worte sind unwiderruflich, ihre Wirkung kann nicht rückgängig gemacht werden.
Ihm fiel eine geniale Idee ein, wie das Problem gelöst werden könnte.
Die Kontrolle über das Feuer in dem Industriegebiet gestaltete sich schwierig, und es dauerte Stunden, bis es gelöscht werden konnte.
In der Diskussion geht es darüber, wie globale Herausforderungen auf politischer Ebene angegangen werden können.
I understand how the sentences work and what they say, but when there are clauses that tack on three verbs at the end of the sentence, my brain doesn’t piece it together immediately and I have to go back and do an English translation in my head, which obviously isn’t ideal in communication scenarios or even when enjoying German writing. How do I flip my mind around to make this aspect of the language seem more natural?
My suggestion is to do workbook exercizes on that exact topic and write your own sentences using strings of verbs in subordinate clauses until it becomes more intuitive.
I was actually just thinking of that this morning. I have ChatGPT write my Anki example sentences (which is where those examples came from), and while it’s nice to have ChatGPT do the work, I’m realizing it’s not helping me in other regards. My German practice is very passive, I hardly write or attempt to speak. I think writing my own example sentences will push me past this deficiency. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
If you can deal with complicated stuff like that, maybe you or others can help me. How tf did you learn cases? Most learning sources either ignore it, or copy each other and explain cases the same exact way which is robotic and unhelpful. I can't believe how many people have this same problem with cases, and yet literally nobody has come up with an actually functional practical way to learn cases.
Yes my mother tongue is english, so I can't preinstalled-cheatcode my way into cases.
To explain how it feels trying to learn this, I'll use something unrelated but conveys the moronation:
Imagine somebody teaching you a modern boardgame for the first time, explaining all the details, with a long 30 minute monologue. Only abstract concepts for an activity you've never done before. At the end of that, they didn't once explain how you actually win the game, only the mechanisms of play.
I still don't know how to win cases, even though I understand them mechanically. I even like genitive even though everybody say to ignore it. I can do exercises and sentences all day but that only results in real life conversations being ridiculously slow (not feasible), or, fast with all declensions wrong. Calculating and juggling like a dozen variables might work on paper, but does not work for real conversation. I've been seething for half a year over this, while using crutches to keep studying other things but still sounding moronic IRL.
nta but the truth of the matter, anon, is that learning languages in the passive aspect simply does not carry over into the active aspect, so to speak. If you wish to make German intuitive, you must speak it or at least use it to communicate in short-form written style (i.e. not through large premeditated letters or such).
A German does not actually think about cases at all, just as you do not think about which prepositions to use, or about do-support. Grammatical analysis is a post-hoc thing, a system-building that explains the way people speak intuitively, it cannot really be reverse-engineered into natural speech. That's, of course, not to say that it's useless.
I originally typed up a pedantic response to explain how I understand cases but I read your post more carefully and realized that you and I are likely in the same boat. But I do have an intuitive understanding of cases achieved through methodically asking myself with every example sentence: What is the subject? What is the verb? What is the object? If the object is “essential” to the verb, then it is in the accusative. If the object is inessential to the verb, then it is in the dative (with obvious exceptions such as geben where the indirect object is essential). German capitalization of nouns helps with this. Genitive was pretty straight forward to learn, but my ChatGPT examples have shown me that there are genitive relationships where I normally wouldn’t expect them. It’s a tough language. Here’s a striking example to illustrate its difficulty: I recently started Norwegian on Duolingo and downloaded “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun off Gutenberg in Norwegian and German. And despite my limited exposure to Norwegian, the original Norwegian felt “eaisier” than the German translation (I’ve been studying German for ~1 year). With the Norwegian it was simply a matter of looking up words, while with the German it was more, “let’s look up the words and figure what the hell is going on here”—largely because of how German sentences are structured with subordinate clauses, etc. It’s a tough language but I’m determined to conquer it. Anyway, hope that was somewhat helpful. Let me know if you want to talk more about cases.
Thank you for the response man. I'm able to ID subject and verb easily and quickly while speaking or listening. I'm getting better at paying attention to the object and indirect object, but that's still a manual effort.
>there are genitive relationships where I normally wouldn’t expect them.
You may already know, or maybe you're learning things I have no idea about. But, some verbs go along with certain cases, which seems limited and manageable based on what I've heard about it, but I don't know the difference yet because I learned loads of verbs divorced of their case distinction. The only odd verb difference I happen to know are the "sich" verbs (also movement verbs).
>Let me know if you want to talk more about cases.
I'm down to learn more about cases if you have any more protips. Also worth noting, I'm not concerning myself with prepositions even though they also force you to pay attention to case/declension. That is different from what I need help with. I already have a rudimentary grasp on some of that, thanks to simple memorized combos (before I knew about "case") and also dumb youtube songs through which I memorised prepositions.
>I learned loads of verbs divorced of their case distinction
I think this is the best way to approach verbs because some verbs are flexible and can take on an accusative or a dative object. For example, the verb gehen:
Ich gehe ins Kino.
Ich gehe zum Lebensmittelladen.
The first example is accusative and strictly emphasizes the location of the movie theatre with the preposition “in.” The second example is dative and emphasizes movement toward the grocery store through the preposition “zu.” The final destination inessential to the intended usage of the verb. In fact, you could conceive of a situation where someone is rushing to the front door and shouts to someone else in the house, “ich gehe!”—indicating that they are going to be out and about. The final destination of their movement is inessential to the intended usage of the statement. So prepositions play an important role in conveying specific meaning and determining whether an object is accusative or dative. But some verbs are a little more obvious in terms of what case applies. For example,
Ich werfe!
doesn’t really make sense because it begs the question: “What? You’re throwing what?” So just from an intuitive analysis of the verb, we see that it requires a direct object and therefore falls under the accusative case:
Ich werfe den Ball.
Or accusative and dative:
Ich gehe in den Wald in der Schweiz,
where the direct object of the verb gehen is the actual forest and Switzerland is an additional detail, but inessential. Again, you could remove the dative object and imagine a situation where you say,
Ich gehe in den Wald,
and assuming someone knows “den Wald” means a forest in Switzerland, no meaning is lost by omitting the dative object.
Anyway, I’m just telling you how I work with cases intuitively without looking up the grammar (in Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, for example). Ultimately though, time spent with that book is never wasted. It’s sections on prepositions have helped me tremendously. I highly recommend it as a solid reference book!
Your problem seems to be the combination of "werden" and "können". It always talks about a possibility. Maybe if you conzeptualize at it as something like "could be (können) made to be (werden) + third word"
For example:
>wie globale Herausforderungen auf politischer Ebene angegangen werden können.
...how global challenges could be made to be tackled (on a political level)
or
>, und es dauerte Stunden, bis es gelöscht werden konnte.
and it took hours until it could be made to be extinguished.
Don't know if that helps.
Yes, thank you. I’m weak with incorporating werden and the subjunctive mood in general. I know that for Germans the inclusion of werden softens the tone of speech a bit. But it’s not natural for me to hear “werden können” and experience the same sensation that “could” produces for me in English. I’m getting there though. But I think you’re right. I don’t have much trouble with two verbs (e.g., gesehen habe), and the inclusion of a third verb in a subordinate clause is usually werden—which indicates a grammatical mood. I’m going to keep that in mind moving forward, thanks again!
Lesen, lesen, lesen. Es gibt nichts anderes, was dir... ekhem ekhem... hätte helfen können.
sprechen, vielleicht? mancher tut das
Danke mein Freund 🙂
The only time I've ever been interested in German is through the poetry of Heinrich Heine. It's just not a very appealing language.
I'm sorry to say this, but English is the superior Germanic language. You guys don't even have the dental fricative anymore
English is barely even Germanic. German is the king of Germanic languages.
>Consider English: of all modern languages, not one has acquired such great strength and vigour. This is the result of the weakening of ancient phonetic laws, and the reduction of almost all inflections. Indeed, the English language may be justly called a world language, destined to reign in future with ever more extensive sway over all parts of the globe . For none of all the living languages can be compared with it as to richness, rationality, and compact construction, not even the German—which has many discrepancies, like our nation, and from which it would be first obliged to free itself, before it could boldly enter the lists with the English
-famed German linguist Jacob Grimm (yes that Grimm)
Germans are self-hating freaks, this is nothing new. It's up to foreigners to remind them of their greatness and the superiority of their language.
>In the evening finished the Grimm essay; R. disputes the glorification of the English language in it; he says the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection; such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops, the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm had given up all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him), and he was glad that at least one severed tribe had managed to get as far as the English and their culture had done.”
>In spite of a violent headache, R. spoke a lot with me early this morning about the German language, which has in his opinion not yet displayed all its riches, “for Lessing, finding it in the state it then was, constructed words based on foreign conceptions, which then dominated everything. It is fortunately true that these constructions were in the spirit of the German language, but the language has not yet undergone a development coming from its own roots.”
>The German language, he says, is now the only one which, as J. Grimm says, can be studied physiologically, not just in order to speak it or to read the classical writers (in contrast to French, English, and Italian). —
>At lunch R. said that W. v. Humboldt was driving him to despair with all his drivel about his ideas, excellent as these may be in themselves. He also expresses his antipathy toward the English language; the fact that in it a Shakesp. has emerged does not disturb him—that is an anomaly; but imaginative writing is possible only in a language in-which one feels every word to be alive. The German language is still half alive. He cites the verb “sprechen’’ [“to speak”] as a living word, whereas “reden” [“to talk”] is a constructed, dead word. I think I understand correctly what he then added: that English was a created language (under H. VII), since before that time French was spoken, and that Shakespeare was able to work creatively with a language in the process of creation, rather like Dante; however, by the time the mixtum compositum was finally established, poetry was already dead.
I wish I were able to see why people think that German is essentially a default language to learn like French is
It just doesn't seem worth it to me
not worth it in terms of what?
My calculation for whether a language is worth it is
1. the texts available written in that language
2. the difficulty of acquiring the ability to read these texts somewhat fluently
I don't take anything else into consideration
one of the most moronic languages that cannot decide how to make plural form with even worse genderization of nouns.
*blocks your path*
>the very last sentence
you were saying?
wtf does that have to do with German? are you moronic?
I think that a lot of people who learn a language for some specific purpose, like to read its literature, end up thinking that language to be superior to their native language. This can be because they're engaged in such close scrutiny and interpretation of it -- something which they may not have undertaken with their native language -- or perhaps simply due to its novelty and the access to otherwise inaccessible writings it allows. Also it's possible to be too close to something to be able to appreciate properly, and this can apply to one's native language just as it does with one's social relations, etc.
Feels bad man
I studied my language by just reading books in that language and now I feel the same way about that language as I do English
It's just meaning that flows into my head
I don't think that's a bad thing. When I see people like OP praising another language in that hyperbolic way it makes me cringe a little. It's like how weebs talk about Japanese.
>I want my r's to sound like r's
You mean like the weird w-like sound you guys use? I mean, the uvular fricative is, generally speaking, uncommon as an r-sound, sure, but you can't possibly consider the retroflex approximant as a "normal" r, unless if you're a linguistically illiterate American, of course.
The language might be okayish, but the fact that it is spoken by the most moronic population in the history of humankind i.e. the Germans is a massive downside.
Es ist wie es ist, kannsch nix machen
using rolled r makes it a much more pleasant sounding language
unfortunately the rolling r is a next to impossible sound to actually use for someone who doesn't use it natively, and seems to exist to torment me personally -- my tongue cannot approach the level of relaxation required
Unironically the Irish language does what German does sonewhat and actually does it better with word addings and genderization.
> word addings and genderization.
elaborte?
Irish and German add to a word with a pre-existing word to emphasize a new and intuitive meaning and capitalize nouns, although Irish does both of those less than German, I felt the way it does this was more natural and well-formatted. The thing Irish definitely does better is the gender all around. This is easier to compare both with since they have Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter; along with a very similar case system. This really isn’t saying much about Irish and its functions with nouns and pronouns though rather with German. German’s gender is especially confusing and not indicated by the word like Romance or Slavic languages and has a even weirder sense to this rule with its pluralization. German’s ability to make words up for description and definition, and still be understood is a feature unmatched by any other language that’s widely spoken, but calling it the perfect or most great language is definitely not the case for German by anyone who knows the language. It’s why I choose Irish because of its closeness to German in terms of features and rules and its obscureness to most people as a language that did some of those features better.
Best resources to learn Irish?
That’s few and far, but a good starter book is Teach Yourself Books: Irish; A complete course for beginners by Diarmuid Ó Sé.
Thanks!
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811182922/https://IQfyint.fandom.com/wiki/Irish
Isn't German pronounced closer to the way it's written than Irish, though?
Irish is pronounced consistently even though it’s orthography is unconventional. Especially to non-Celtic speakers. But it gets compared a lot to French in terms of orthography, which is unfair imo because Irish’s letters and combination letters for sounds are not silent and not much different than some other languages do in a lesser level.
Is Middle High German worth learning?