An, auf, hinter, ...

[trønderen]

In school I did learn German for three years. That was long ago. When I look something up in Wikipedia, I frequently check what is written in other Wikipedia-languages on the subject, in all the languages I more or less master (the differences are sometimes surprisingly large!). German I consider to be in the "less" group, yet that is one of the alternatives I every now and then check up. And then I come across e.g. this 'Kategorie:Geschicklichkeitsspiel[^]. Try to read it out loudly, without any practicing in advance: Geschicklichkeitsspiel. There is even a reference to Computergeschicklichkeitsspiele. I don't want to offend native German speakers, but in such cases I feel that I am spelling my way through the German text, rather reading it word by word!

[RickZeeland]

Luckily the Dutch version of that word does not exist in Wikipedia! :-\

[0x01AA]

Not a big difference here ;P :laugh: Ferdighetsspill Dataferdighetsspill

[CodeWraith]

trønderen wrote:

Try to read it out loudly, without any practicing in advance

No problem- I promise not to practice. :-) It clearly is not a language for those among us who can only communicate with grunts and max. two syllable words. And you can have real fun with the modern gender idiocy. Reich mir mal die Salzstreuerin.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.

[Sander Rossel]

Is my language (Dutch) too Germanic to understand your point? :laugh:

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[TheRealSteveJudge]

As a native German speaker, I must admit that German is one of the most illogical and most difficult languages you can learn.
I admire those who are taking the burden of learning it.
In German potatoes are female, girls are neutral, cheese is male, for example.
That does not make sense. Do potatoes have B***s? I have never seen any like this.
“Der” is the male form of “the”, “Die” is the female form of “the”, “Das” is the neutral form of “the”.
It even becomes worse if you decline “Frau” which indeed is female in German.

Case Singular Plural
Nominative die Frau die Frauen
Genitive der Frau der Frauen
Dative der Frau den Frauen
Accusative die Frau die Frauen

Suddenly in genitive, a “der” is put in front of “Frau”. Funny, isn’t it?
Most of German words are long monsters as many words consist of concatenated words.
A simple one is “Flugzeug” which actually means “Flying Stuff” which is an aeroplane in English.
What about “Kraftfahrzeugsteuerbescheid” which is actually “Kraft Fahr Zeug Steuer Bescheid“
stating the amount of taxes you have to pay for your car annually.
I found an interesting link for those who are not afraid of knotting their brain:
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/die-der-das/
But wait! There is some more.
There are crazy people in Germany that thought this language might not be complicated enough.
In German we used to call students “Studenten”, whether they are male or female, which is a so-called generic masculine noun meaning both male and female students. If you wanted to address just female students we used to call them “Studentinnen”. Now the German State media (formerly known as free press) wash our brains by using “Student:innen” or even worse “Studierende” which actually means “studying people”.
And that goes for all nouns!
That is Newspeak at its best.

[trønderen]

Sander Rossel wrote:

Is my language (Dutch) too Germanic to understand your point? :laugh:

Most likely. Even though I had a Dutch father-in-law for quite a few years, I never learned his language, but his family seemed to treat German as not that different from the most crazy Dutch dialects ... :-) In Norway, language counsellors frequently advise us to split up such extreme agglutinations with hyphens, to ease reading, e.g. writing Computer-Geschicklichkeits-Spiel-Kategorie rather than Computergeschicklichkeitsspielkategorie. The more academic people around here are, the more they think that helping the reader in such ways is sort of childish, disrespecting the intellectual capabilities of the reader. Germans, who have lived with such constructions since their day of birth, seem to manage well without the the hyphens. (Although in the actual category description, they have managed to sneak in a hyphen in 'Kategorie:Computer-Geschicklichkeitsspiel'!) Another memory, not 'true German', but the style is quite is rather 'German inspired': In my student days, we had a prime minister named Gro Harlem Brundtland, who later made it big internationally and became the leader of the UN World Health Organization for a few years. Her speeches really required concentration to follow. A friend of mine taped a couple of them, for the purpose of analyzing the sentence structure, and found a couple cases where Mrs. Brundtland went down into a five levels nesting of bi-sentences within bi-sentences - but never failing to come out correctly before the full stop! (after a final German-style 'pop verb stack' ...) In Norwegian, that is a remarkable feat. In German, I guess it is more at the level of informal cocktail party small talk :-)

[Sander Rossel]

To be fair, a lot of Dutch people don't know the rules either. And I know the rules, but sometimes they're becoming ridiculous to the point where I break one word up in separate words too. I code in Dutch, because that's the language my customers use, and I get class names like "Importdefinitieadministratieartikelinstelling" (don't even bother to google that, it's a non-existing word, but we need to amalgamate). So, to translate, import definition administration article setting, but it's somehow one word. It could arguably be spelled as "ImportdefinitieAdministratieartikelinstelling" for clarity, I guess :laugh:

trønderen wrote:

In German, I guess it is more at the level of informal cocktail party small talk :)

If they'd have informal cocktail parties in Germany ;p

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