Thursday, February 18, 2010

German

Brett wants me to learn German. Let's just say I am not as enthusiastic about the idea as him. I won't go into reasons.

Anyway, Brett ran across a blog post the other day entitled 'Don't Learn German' and we thought it was HI-larious. Here are some of my favorite parts, but you can click here to read the entire thing:

Living in Germany is great, and I would recommend it to anyone. Speaking German, on the other hand, is terrible and it should be avoided at all costs. In fact, Mark Twain warned us way back in 1880 in his essay The Awful German Language not to bother with this language. There are countless reasons not to learn German, so let’s discuss a few:

The German language is, in fact, impossible to learn
unless you begin learning it as a baby. Starting to learn this language is impossible if you start later, because your brain will lack the capacity to learn so many senseless details, such as the different forms of the word “the”.
  • You probably know in German there are three different genders der, das, and die. So for every single noun out there, you need to memorize a gender as well (the are some rules for determining gender, but for every rule there are just as many exceptions as examples that fit, so you still have to memorize every single one individually). But you also need to change the article, based on the case that you are using the noun in. Let’s see what this looks like in German:

  • German
    Nominative der das die die (pl.)
    Accusative den das die die
    Dative dem dem der den
    Genitive des des der der

    Now let’s translate that table into English:


    English
    Nominative the the the the (pl.)
    Accusative the the the the
    Dative the the the the
    Genitive the the the the

    Do you really want to learn a language that has 16 ways to say the word “the”? And it doesn’t stop there, you need to learn 16 ways to say “a” (in English 2), and 32 ways to change adjective endings (in English we have 0). And you want to try to do this in real-time in your head while trying to carry one a conversation… forget about it.

    No matter how good your German gets, most Germans will speak English much better than you can speak German. Let them do the work in learning your language, since they have to do it anyway to talk with the rest of the world. The British have figured out you can live in Germany with no problems without speaking a word of German, so just follow their lead.

    Use your lack of German speaking abilities to your advantage in the workforce. For every professional job in Germany, English is a required skill. So by default, any professional working in Germany who doesn’t speak English fluently either lied to get the job and/or is incompetent. Forcing these people to speak in English gives you an unfair edge in order to dominate negotiations. Try negotiating in German and you have the exact opposite situation… don’t set yourself up for a weaker position by learning enough German to get you into trouble.

    You will never learn how to say ö or ü.

3 comments:

Ginger said...

I took German for 4 years in high school. You are very right, it is so confusing

Lynn said...

LOL! Even my grandma Boehme would probably agree with you. And she married a German! Grandpa was German through and through.

When they went on their mission to Austria, she never really grasped the German language and would just let him do most of the translating.

Megan said...

THAT WAS HILARIOUS!!! I am going to have Jared read it - very funny - ya - I didn't do so well learning german - but you have alot longer than I did.

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