OT: Stereotypes about Germans in the US

[Historiker]

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

Stereotpe supportive video:

The Austrian Emperor gets a lesson in German.

Basically sorts out all you need to know about language differences, I wonder if our non-native speakers can recognise it. [:D]

[:D][:D][:D]

"Der Elefant ist kein deutsches Tier!"

[LoBaron]

ORIGINAL: Historiker

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

Stereotpe supportive video:

The Austrian Emperor gets a lesson in German.

Basically sorts out all you need to know about language differences, I wonder if our non-native speakers can recognise it. [:D]

[:D][:D][:D]

"Der Elefant ist kein deutsches Tier!"

Außer im Fühlerhauptquartier! [:D][:D]

[Historiker]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuGUcXNlq8Q

Vaterland statt Elefant!

[xmas]

Stereotypes about Europeans ... but you are sure only Stereotypes ?

[Footslogger]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YsNqHRNxok

[LargeSlowTarget]

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

Stereotpe supportive video:

The Austrian Emperor gets a lesson in German.

Basically sorts out all you need to know about language differences, I wonder if our non-native speakers can recognise it. [:D]

Wie geil ist das denn! Gleich mal die anderen "Kaiser"-Videos ansehen [:D].

[Historiker]

http://www.thelocal.de/gallery/culture/1509/

The German language should probably be mentioned. I think the vocabulary was five or six times as large?

[Empire101]

ORIGINAL: xmas

Stereotypes about Europeans ... but you are sure only Stereotypes ?

Marvellous...and how true!![:D][:D]

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Historiker

http://www.thelocal.de/gallery/culture/1509/

The German language should probably be mentioned. I think the vocabulary was five or six times as large?

There is a lot of debate about how large the vocabulary is for different languages. One source I saw once put English around 500,000 words, German 2nd largest around 300,000 words, Russian 3rd around 160,000 words. However someone wants to parse the vocabularies, English and German probably are the two largest vocabularies.

English is so large because it started out as a creole. I believe it still has the grammar of a creole. The British isles were a cross roads of different peoples who spoke different languages. The people who were there the longest spoke versions of languages from Central and North Central Europe (mostly Germanic), then the Romans came and introduced Latin. The place "went native" for a while after the Romans left, and then they were conquered by the Normans who were Vikings who spoke French. The dichotomy between the Anglo-Saxon peasants and their French lords can be seen in the different words for animals and the meat that comes from them. A cow is the animal, but the meat is beef. Or a deer is the animal and venison is the meat.

Add to that a tradition of having very flexible rules for inventing new words and the language grows like a weed.

That said, every language has words that don't translate well into other languages. Inuit (the language of the North American Eskimos) has more words for snow than any language in the world.

Farsi for some reason has more words for love than any language in the world. I suspect ancient Persian poets would challenge one another to come up with new words to convey subtle differences in meaning and hence all the words in the language today.

I also once saw a chart of foreign languages ranked by difficulty of learning by a native English speaker. If I recall correctly, Norwegian was the easiest, German and Spanish were both up near the top. The Latin and Germanic languages were all near the top. The hardest to learn was Farsi, followed by Arabic, and 3rd hardest was Chinese.

Bill

[Empire101]

Crikey, there are two languages HARDER than Chinese... [Faints]

[rockmedic109]

Which Chinese? Mandarin? Canton? And I think there are a few others {Mongolian, Tibetan perhaps}. Our frient spoke Cantonese but could understand Mandarin. It was quite funny watching a native Cantonese speaker order dinner from a native Mandarin speaker.

[Empire101]

ORIGINAL: rockmedic109

Which Chinese? Mandarin? Canton? And I think there are a few others {Mongolian, Tibetan perhaps}. Our frient spoke Cantonese but could understand Mandarin.

Just thinking about it is overheating my puny brain!!

[fcharton]

ORIGINAL: Empire101
Crikey, there are two languages HARDER than Chinese... [Faints]

I think a US government agency once rated languages according to the number of years needed for an english-native to reach proficiency. Japanese and Korean were the most difficult, with Chinese and Arabic coming next.

Chinese is not a very difficult language provided you only want to speak it. The grammar is very simple, and you can do a lot with a very small vocabulary (esp in the Mainland).

It gets trickier once you want to read it (except for mainland newspapers, which are just slightly more involved), and abominable if you want to read litterature. If you add classical in, it is a bit like learning latin and greek on top of an european language...

Francois

[Historiker]

Finnish is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in the world.

I find Spanish rather easy, but the other romanic languages propably make it very easy to understand...


Back to topic:
What do you think a 5 to 10 second video intro should include to play with the stereotypes?
Right now I think about:
- Filling an enormous glass of beer
- typical German sausages
- something that graphically shows the german wish for perfection
- something mentioning the german technology

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: fcharton

Chinese is not a very difficult language provided you only want to speak it. The grammar is very simple, and you can do a lot with a very small vocabulary (esp in the Mainland).

It gets trickier once you want to read it (except for mainland newspapers, which are just slightly more involved), and abominable if you want to read litterature. If you add classical in, it is a bit like learning latin and greek on top of an european language...

Yup - my wife reads a lot of the old kung fu-type novels. A good analogy for an English speaker would be like reading Old English with smatterings of other languages thrown in.

[danlongman]

An American scientist went to Berlin to attend a symposium hosted by some German scientists.
One of the top speakers was a German scientist whom he greatly admired.
When he heard that his German collegue was going to do his speach in German he hired a translator because his German was poor.
At the lecture the German scientist spoke and the translater repeated quietly in English.
As the lecturing scientist reached the conclusion of his presentation he began speaking passionately complete with vigorous hand gestures.
The translator fell silent listening intently. The American tugged on his sleve but the translator would not speak.
Finally the American lost patience. "What the hell is he saying?" he demanded in a loud whisper.
The translater turned to him in total frustration.
"I do not know," he said. "You made me miss the verb."

[bradfordkay]

ORIGINAL: xmas

Stereotypes about Europeans ... but you are sure only Stereotypes ?

"All this makes me think of the old "the difference between European heaven and hell" joke... somehow I don't think that it needs repeating."

But posting a t-shirt with it emblazoned is worthwhile!!

[Erkki]

As someone who has learned both English and Swedish (as well as some Deutsche) I can say they're all fairly close to each other. There are many similar structures and grammar rules, multiple same words(if 2 of them dont share the same word, either is likely to share it with the 3rd!). They all use articles and prepositions too(unlike Finnish, which uses postpositions and "cases"(think of them as merged postpositions), has next to no same words and completely different pronunciation and many grammar rules that dont exist in English).

Last summer I spent 2 weeks in Bavaria, liked it a lot. However to a northerner the amount of churches and how visible Christianity was came as a surprise. People were very friendly and being a Finn in Germany(I'm not quite sure why) meant I was offered more drinks and food I could stuff in me. [:D]

[USSAmerica]

ORIGINAL: Historiker

Finnish is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in the world.

I find Spanish rather easy, but the other romanic languages propably make it very easy to understand...


Back to topic:
What do you think a 5 to 10 second video intro should include to play with the stereotypes?
Right now I think about:
- Filling an enormous glass of beer
- typical German sausages
- something that graphically shows the german wish for perfection
- something mentioning the german technology

A black Porsche 911 turbo Cab zooming around a curve at high speed. [8D]

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: USS America

ORIGINAL: Historiker

Finnish is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in the world.

I find Spanish rather easy, but the other romanic languages propably make it very easy to understand...


Back to topic:
What do you think a 5 to 10 second video intro should include to play with the stereotypes?
Right now I think about:
- Filling an enormous glass of beer
- typical German sausages
- something that graphically shows the german wish for perfection
- something mentioning the german technology

A black Porsche 911 turbo Cab zooming around a curve at high speed. [8D]

I looked for a good YouTube of Dieter of "Sprockets" fame (Mike Myers), but I couldn't find just the right one. And most folks in Europe can't see YouTube anyway.

"Touch my monkey!"[;)]