Yes, but that’s the source of some of its elegance. Consider the motto of the Vienna Secession - Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit.
In English, we have to go through hoops to get all the nuances - To every age, its art. To that art, its freedom. is the best we can do in the fewest words but the original German has an almost crystalline beauty in its simplicity.
A simplicity which is only achieved through having 4 cases times 3 genders and the plural.
(Sixteen, actually. Nominative masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, Accusative masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, Dative masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, Genitive masculine, feminine, neuter and plural.)
I took four years of German in high school and three semesters in college. I used to love the fact that I could pretty much follow a conversation my grandmother was having in Yiddish.. and that no one else in my immediate family could.
-D/a
I speak German and personally think it sounds beautiful, and is indeed elegant (although it is a bitch to learn all of those cases and I still screw them up…)
However, to be honest, I find little need for it here in the US, other than talking to friends back in Germany, or to our neighbor who happens to be from Germany. Otherwise, don’t really use it much - wait, my friend who works at Madison Square Garden called me when Rammstein was performing there last month and needed some quick translations, so yes, it has come in handy recently!
It’s not logical, and does not follow well defined rules.
What is the logic of having the three genders? What purpose does it serve, and what can’t you do in English, for example, without them?
Why do some connectors take the null position, some the 1st position, and some always have the verb at the end?
What is logical about having sentences with a bunch of verbs at the end?
What is logical about “to remember” being reflexive, but “to forget” not?
Should I even start talking about plurals?
There’s a reason why the Foreign Service reckons it takes 25% longer to learn German than French or Spanish, and it isn’t because German is logical and follows well defined rules.
Took me far less time to learn German and German grammar than it did to learn French, whilst learning both concurrently (and I am no slouch at foreign languages). As far as the “why” questions you ask above, you could ask a lot of similar questions about English. Once the rules are known it is logical. And simple. At least in my opinion (::checks forum, yep, IMHO, not GQ:: ). I go through a lot of this discussion at home with the SO – he’ll ask a question on English grammar that, when one looks at it from an objective perspective, does seem ridiculous. I never seem to have similar questions about German grammar, even though I do a lot of German reading, writing and speaking.
As others have said, it also has nuances and a succinctness that you can’t capture in English without a lot more words.
Which makes you an outlier. Most people take significantly longer to learn German than French.
English has some obscure grammar rules, but in every day use they are mostly ignored. There is virtually no subjunctive, a well defined word order, no genders, no changes of “the”, more or less standard plurals and past tenses, and quite a few other advantages.
Can you explain to me what is simple about having different connectors take different positions in the sentence. What is more logical about that, than simply having them all in the same position as is in English? It doesn’t make any sense, and there’s a half dozen stupid things like that in the German language. This is turning in to a bit of a rant, but in reality these things take quite a bit of time to learn for little obvious benefit.
To continue with my rant, who decided that it was ok for feminine and neuter to share the same “the” for accusative and nominative, but not for masculine? Why is it ok for feminine to use the same “the” for genetive and dative, but not for neuter? And who the hell decided that plural needed to have one different case than feminine?
I’m sure there are things you can say about English, but all of them are in the finer points of grammar and are almost universally ignored in speech. None of them are in basic things such as defining who is the subject and who is the direct/indirect object.
English is undoubtedly wordy, but it doesn’t really matter to anyone except banner makers and motto writers.
Finished ranting yet? Just because you think a language is “bad”, doesn’t mean we all do. I could start ranting about the crap that is French verbs, or the fact that French grammar is so hideously complicated that many of my native French colleagues had handbooks of French grammar in their offices for writing, or why, in English, the combination of letters “ough” can be pronounced in so many different ways where there’s no rhyme or reason for it. The list is endless and we can go around and around. Really, I get it, you don’t like the German language and think I’m wrong in thinking what I think about it. Sorry I offend you quite so much in liking it and thinking that, in my opinion, its an easier language than French or Spanish to learn.
Heh, I opened the thread to post “Are there tanks massed on your border?”
My wife has a German immersion CD for the car. The thing says a phrase in German, pauses, repeats the phrase in German, pauses again, and then gives the English translation.
I took advantage of the pauses to crack myself up (and sometimes amuse her) by pre-empting the English translation with my own imagined substitutions:
<German phrase> pause “Your country appears small, and vulnerable.”
<German phrase> pause “Please, how many fighter planes do you have?”
<German phrase> pause “Excuse me, which way to the munitions depot?”
I’m fond of the language --perhaps I’d be less fond of it if I had to replicate the more involved constructions orally, as opposed to recognizing them immediately when reading or recalling them at my leisure when writing the odd bit of correspondence.
Don’t buy that it’s logical, any more than Latin is supposedly a “logical” language. The claim has always seemed to have come straight from a teacher with an obvious interest in proselytizing to her flock and attempting to instill admiration for her subject.
The difficulties of the grammar are vastly overstated, IME – once the notion of declined nouns is clear, there’s really nothing else to master. The vocabulary, though for an Anglo or romance-language speaker is LARGE, and, frankly, strange, and to read most anything, you will need a substantial vocabulary, at least passively.
In Austrian literature and philosophy, many important works have never been translated, leaving one very little choice if one wishes to dive into the fray but to learn the language.
From a practical POV, I think just concentrating on Chinese would be more likely to pay off. Unless, as someone else alluded to, there are single, available objects of desire in the equation.
Even so it can be difficult to muster up the effort to (re)learn a foreign language if the only use you expect to be able to make of it is to read it. Not that I’ve got anything against reading, but using any language should so much more. There’s writing, listening, watching AV content produced in the language, and, last but not least, conversing in the language. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, distance is no longer a barrier to most of these uses. A wide variety of German TV content is available for free on the websites of the major networks like NDR and ZDF. I listen to one of the Deutschlandfunk radio stations over my smart phone, at some point nearly every day.
This doesn’t mean that English doesn’t have grammar.
The working grammar of a language isn’t just the number of genders for non-biological nouns, or tenses, or case endings the language uses. Using the subjunctive or remembering to write “whom” when you think you should isn’t really the kind of grammar that makes learning English as a second language easy or difficult. If your language doesn’t use articles at all, then the articles of any European language can be difficult. Why is it sometimes “a”, sometimes “the”, and sometimes none at all?
Why does the word “any” only work in negations and questions–why can’t we say “Yes, I do have any bananas”? Why does “hardly” work like a negative when it means “just barely a little”?
In the world of data management, why do we say “Has PENDING_TRANSACTIONS been updated yet?”, but “No, the PENDING_TRANSACTIONS table hasn’t been processed yet.”? Whether the article appears before PENDING_TRANSACTIONS depends on what comes after it. Misusing or omitting the article probably won’t detract too much from your ability to communicate, but you won’t be speaking like a native until you learn how to use it correctly–and I think it’s much the same with many of the mistakes made by foreign learners of French or German, or any other language.
At least you don’t have to learn one proper ordering of words in a sentence, and then use that all the time.
No one decided this. It actually isn’t rocket science; native speakers usually have all this stuff down pat by age six. Native speakers usually say they learn nouns and their genders together; as a non-native speaker I can’t quite wrap my mind around how that happens, but accept it on faith.
If you think of German as having three genders, and then recall that the plural number essentially works like a fourth gender, you have 16 case/“gender” combinations. But since they aren’t all distinct, you only have five phonemic variants of the definite article to learn. It’s really not that hard. As you learn the language and become more familiar with it, things begin to fall into place. With verb prefixes like ver-, zer-, and ent-, each one usually modifies the meaning of the root verb in the same way. IOW, like all languages it has its own logic.
I see no reason for you to review your German, given what you have told here. It’s not a “now or never” situation, after all: if you later on decide to travel to Germany (study abroad/ leisure journey), or want to move to a branch office, then you can brush up your German at that time.
Likewise if you ever meet somebody who speaks German but has no English (unlikely, though).
Since you say you aren’t interested in the cultural scene - I take you at face value, that you have looked at both classic and current literature, music, movies and found nothing to your taste - the usual reason of “reading a translation is like looking at a Gobelin from behind” (quote from a famous spanish author) is not valid.
Since you aren’t interested in philosophy, art, music, math or similar subjects where a lot of stuff has been published in journals and books that have not (and likely never will be) translated - that is not a reason, either.
For current financial news, it is true that you will find a lot in English and probably not much exclusivly in German.
So I’d advise you to spend your time either continuing your Chinese to advanced levels, or taking on a new, third, language that you have stronger connections to and motivations for - Spanish because you like the movies from there, French because your new girlfriend speaks it, Latin because the greatest financial minds lived in the 15th century and wrote in Latin (just kidding)…
Is this necessarily true? While German broadcasters and publishers undoubtedly make a lot of material in English available, isn’t there an inherent limitation with that? If you can only understand English, then you can only read or watch whatever subset the producers have singled out for translation to that language. That can’t be everything or anything close to it.
Well, I’m only an economic layperson, but economics is not a hard science, but a soft science, with lots of subjective armchair opinion as theories, and little to nothing of experiments, integration of data, or using other sciences like sociology and psychology to figure out how humans in the market will likely behave. (I’m expecting a real economist to come in and chew me out for this…)
Germans have a very different perspective on economy. Partly because we weren’t influenced as much by Adam Smith as the english-speaking world, partly because we remember the times of laissez-faire-capitalism in the mid-19th century up to WWI; and partly because after WWII, Ludwig Erhard, the “Father of social capitalism” influenced and strenghtened the view that the forces of the market need to be controlled, that growth in moderation is better than an overheated bubble, and so on. There are also shades of the old notion of being an “honest hanseatic trader”, back from the days of the Hanse trade league. (Although it was more of an ideal than an everyday occurrence even back then, there was still the basic sound idea that if you kept your word always and instead of driving a hard bargain, made sure everybody could live, you and your family and your children could make a good living, just not insane profits).
This is rather diametrical opposite to the major economic theories and experts in the US for the last 100-150 years, so everything is viewed through a different lens.
In addition, the financial laws and practices of the banks are different between the US and Germany. Banking practises common in the US are very different in Germany, and vice versa, dito for what kind of financial products are sold.
So a lot of the news are not useful for an USian unless he wants to invest enough time digging deeper and learn all the background. The major news are driven by the US, or will be translated (what the stock exchanges do, or what Merkel says about the Euro saving funds); the rest is specialized and different, I’d think.
(just kidding)…