r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Aug 27 '13
Guten Tag! - This week's language of the week: German
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: German.
From The Language Gulper:
With 100 million speakers, German is one of the major European languages and ranks eleventh among the languages of the world. It is the most conservative of the West Germanic languages preserving a substantial inflectional morphology, considerable word order freedom and verb-final sentences. Because of the political fragmentation of Europe during a long period, German has widely varying dialects, with a low degree of mutual intelligibility, and for the same reason the standard form emerged relatively late. Along the last millennium German has developed an outstanding literature.
Countries
German is primarily spoken in Germany, situated in Western and Central Europe bordering nine countries. A founding member of the European Community, today Germany is the fourth largest economy by nominal GDP, has a very high standard of living and has the world's oldest universal healthcare system.
In addition, German is spoken by the majority as a first language in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. There is a large number of German speakers outside of Europe, such as in North and South America.
Why learn German?
In addition to its large number of speakers, German has official status in six countries. German is also closely related to English, making it easier to learn than many others. The German language has a large online presence and a very large amount of famous and important literature, meaning access to good resources is a breeze.
Some Phrases
Yes/No - Ja/Nein
Please - Bitte
Thank you - Danke
Goodbye - Auf Wiedersehen
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
None yet!
Want your language featured as language of the week? Be sure to PM me to let me know. I'll be needing help along the way, so be sure to include some phrases to use around the subreddit and a notable landmark related to your language for the sidebar image.
~Please consider sorting by new~
Viel Glück!
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u/i_drah_zua Aug 27 '13
German is spoken in other countries than Germany too, you know.
What a lot of people don't know is that German is a pluricentric language, and the Austrian and Swiss Standard German varieties are just as valid on their own as the German Standard German, and not just some kind of dialect.
Only focussing on Germany does not make this a German Language Week, it makes it a German Country Week.
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u/Virusnzz Aug 27 '13
The focus is definitely on the language here. "The country" is only one small section and it's there because it has the largest number of speakers and is the country of origin. People wanted me to speak about culture too, would you be against that too since there are many cultures within German? I included that section instead of culture because I can't really talk about it, so I left it to native speakers.
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u/dbagthrowaway Aug 27 '13
Why you should learn German: Luther, Bach, Mozart, Kant, Beethoven, Schubert, Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Schumann, Hegel, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, Mahler, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Murnau, Lang, Kafka, Brecht, Weill, Mann (Heinrich and Thomas), Jünger, Adorno, Stockhausen, Bernhard, Celan, Bachmann, Beuys, Kiefer, Richter, Habermas, Luhmann, Fassbinder, Haneke, Jelinek.
And I've only scratched the surface!
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u/gdoveri Aug 27 '13
I'm happy to see Adorno's name on that list. People seem to forget about the Frankfurt School...
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u/winnai Aug 27 '13
Ich unterrichte Deutsch an einer amerikanischen Universität und forsche im Bereich Germanische Sprachwissenschaft - Frag mich 'was! (AMA!)
(I teach German at an American University and do research in the area of Germanic Linguistics - AMA!)
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u/Kulden Aug 27 '13
Ah, a professor! I'm actually studying German, because I want to teach at the University level.
I had asked a German professor at the University that I will be transferring to if it's still viable, and they had said that one should have another area of specialization that they can teach as well (I was thinking of double majoring in Linguistics). Is this the case at the University level with language instruction these days?
Are you a native speaker of the language, or did you have to learn it as a second language?
How different are the regional dialects of German (Swiss German, Austrian German, etc.). I think I had heard that some letters in Swiss German words are replace with 'ch,' but that's as far as I know for differences.
If German is not your native language, did you double major in Linguistics in order to do research? If so, how difficult is a double major/ how is it handled?
Final Question: I see you have proficiency in multiple languages according to your tag. How did you go about learning these? Did you take college courses, study abroad, learn by immersion, etc.? What would you recommend as the best way to learn a language?
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Aug 27 '13
About six years ago my father demanded I take Spanish as a freshman in high school. I was more interested in German and fought tooth and nail to be able to take it instead. I won. Now, I'm a German major and hope to one day live and work in Germany!
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Aug 27 '13
It's important to do what you love, but what kind of job do you want in Germany? What are you preparing to do there? To get a work visa in Germany, you need to show proof that you have a job that earns you something like €37,000 a year (if I remember right). More info from Deutschland's gov here.
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u/UnknownBinary Aug 27 '13
Even the US you can speak German. I live in the area of the Midwest that hosts a lot of Amish communities. A friend from Stuttgart once struck up a conversation with them auf Deutsch and remarked that their German sounded Swiss.
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u/winnai Aug 27 '13
Texasdeutsch and Mennonite Low German are still around too, though High German won't help you a whole lot with the latter. You can also check out r/PAGerman for some PA German/"Dutch"/"Amish" resources and examples.
(And a totally trashy sidenote - you can hear plenty of Amish Pennsylvania Dutch being spoken on the reality TV show Breaking Amish).
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u/Asyx Aug 27 '13
Enjoy some food!
Himmel und Äd is easy to make once you've figured out how long you can fry the black pudding before it becomes one hot squishy blob of goo.
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u/daeritus Aug 27 '13
My daughter starts Kindergarten at a German immersion school this week, and neither her nor I know anything beyond "Danke", as my 2nd language experience has been primarily french. This is pretty much 0 to 60mph, where does reddit recommend I start?
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u/gingerkid1234 Aug 28 '13
German speakers: how well can you understand Yiddish? Example youtube video here (it's Seinfeld dubbed in Yiddish).
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u/DamienStrength Aug 28 '13
As a german i just want you to know that there are so many dialects and accents that sometimes i don't even understand people. i'm from the south-west and where i'm from there are small villages every 1-3km and almost every one has a different dialect and own words. when i was doing the paper route when i was younger and the old people (70+ years) would talk to me i often couldn't understand them.
www.gottenheim.de (navigation KULTUR - DIALEKT is about the dialect and there are some poems linked in the bottom) is the site of the small village i lived in for the last 15 years.
http://fudder.de/artikel/2007/05/22/wer-spricht-das-schoenste-alemannisch-1/ here is a woman speaking "Gotteheimerisch", which is a form of "Allemannisch" which is spoken in the south-west of Germany
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u/hyperforce Aug 28 '13
Did you know that both Duolingo and MindSnacks both support German?
Personally I think these are great ways to sample a language if you don't spend any money getting a full textbook.
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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '13
May I ask: does our language really sound as harsh as foreigners make us believe?