Posted on 01/31/2015 6:00:23 AM PST by Jack Hydrazine
The German language is super harsh if you compare it to other languages! Watch the full version of How German Sounds Compared To Other Languages! Every video in one big ultimate version!
LOL. I know what you mean.
Later
Ich kann Deutsch verstehe, aber nicht so gut spreche.
Bei mir auch! Deutcsch ist ein genauem Spreache!
“Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung”
Never saw that word when I was in Germany because then there were NO speed limits!
Now, “Polizei” and “Strafsbefel” were words I knew well.
;^)
It is more strongly guttural, as in the name of the beach near the Haag (Scheveningen - a word the Dutch resistance used to ferret out Nazi spies since even Germans couldn’t pronounce it correctly). The Flemish version in Belgium is softer. But Nederlands doesn’t have the hard, sharp edges you hear in German. If you have a dog try giving it a command in English first and then switch to the equivalent in German. They generally react more strongly to German, almost as if you’re cracking a whip as you speak.
Dutch has a lot of hard consonants - it is very hard for me to follow at all.
In the video the guy who represents German is shouting/spitting the words, pouting and banging on the table. of course it sounds harsh that way. All some people can think about when the topic of the German language comes up is remembering seeing some old video of Hitler. Seeing that example, they think Germans shout like a raving lunatic. A madman shouting and ranting in any language will sound harsh.
I think it was Mark Twain who observed that if you want to verbally ‘ream’ someone with something more than just journeyman competence German was your ticket.
English is a Germanic language.
And Brazillian Portuguese is the most beautiful sounding language I’ve ever heard - been all over the world, and it’s the only language that captured me enough to learn it - in Brazil.......when there, the Brazillians think I am a native - at least for the first 15 min.!
Wonderful language, but very different from the Portuguese of Portugal......
>> Romanian - the closest living analogue to Latin <<
Mario Pei has said that among all of the modern Romance languages, Sardinian is closest to the original Latin. I’ll take his word for it, since I haven’t studied Sardinian.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Romanian is like Latin mainly in that it has retained “cases” for nouns — but only two cases, since the nominative and the accusative are identical in Romanian, as are the dative and the genitive. And some basic verbs like “to be” have a Latinesque flavor. But otherwise, not a lot of the language reminds me of Latin.
(I’ve studied both, but have remembered little of either!)
Moreover, the Romanian vocabulary is about 40% borrowed from Slavic, with another 10 to 15% borrowed from Turkish, Hungarian and other non-Romance sources.
On the other hand, Romanian does have a lot of Latin-derived words that an English speaker will recognize immediately, but most of these words seem to have been pilfered from French, Italian and classical Latin during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Romanian intellectuals wanted to “rediscover” their Latin roots. So a lot of the seeming similarity to Latin has been a fairly recent phenomenon, as opposed to something deeply rooted in the “soul” of the language.
I studied German in college, primarily due to some German-speaking ancestry. I wanted to be able to read the records of early family in the Moravian archives. Enjoyed it, did a summer in Trier. German is guttural when non-native speakers speak it. The language can be beautiful in the right circumstance, spoken by the right voice. We have a stereotype arising from WWII movies, with actors barking orders. That sounds guttural. But, there’s another language that sounds even worse when barking orders. It’s gotten less notoriety due to the comparative difficulty in learning it, I suppose. That would be Japanese.
Italian is for music.
French is for diplomacy.
English is for commerce.
Latin is for medicine.
Spanish is for love.
Dutch is for hydrology.
Russian is for literature.
Greek is for philosophy.
German is for speaking to your horse.
It depends on how you speak it. German can be quite beautiful when spoken properly. Many language teachers say Hitler ruined the German language because of his harsh enunciation. And unfortunately, many people’s conception of German comes from their experience listening to speakers from East Germany.
I beg to differ:
Exhibit A:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ktjdyy2xOk
Exhibit B:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtOzJJjtf14
My elderly neighbor is a war bride from Germany and once her sister was visiting from Regensburg where they had both grown up. I asked them about German regional accents, as I had sometimes heard Germans criticizing other Germans for the way they spoke. Boy, did they have fun with that! Apparently, for a Bavarian, a Berliner accent was posh bordering on pompous and very grating while a Hessian one marked the speaker a a country clod, and so on. It was very entertaining.
The way I can tell Chinese from Japanese is that Chinese being spoken sounds like the speaker is barfing, wherein Japanese sounds as if the talker is constipated and working on a ‘download’...
"nuclear bomb" =
Das Eargashplitten loudenboomer./
I actually read that with a German accent.
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