Once again it’s left up to me to be the only one willing to say something nice about German:
German is a great yelling language.
Eat that, haters.
Remember that one guy that said Brythonic languages sounded kind of molestery?
Well, now, I did experience something like what the OP is talking about.
My father and I shared a number of interests, among them singing and language study, and when my now-wife and I were planning our wedding I asked him to choose something to sing at the ceremony. He chose Robert Schumann’s famous setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Du bist wie eine Blume” (you are like a flower), which he planned to sing in German. “It’s appropriate for a wedding,” he said, “and it’s in one of your languages,” and he was right on both counts. And everything was fine until about three weeks before the ceremony, when my future inlaws looked at a mockup of the program and hit the roof. “Nothing will be sung in German,” they said, “because if anything is, we will not be attending.” The issue was that German was in their minds, just as the OP suggests, a Nazi language.
Dad was more understanding than I was and switched to Andersen/Grieg’s “Jeg elsker deg” (I love you), in Danish, and that was acceptable.
The ironic thing about all this is that Heine was not exactly an early exponent of Nazism. Not only was he Jewish, but his works were burned and banned by the Nazi regime…
Anyway. I’m glad most of you have not experienced this kind of thing, but I can assure you it absolutely can happen!
How about the difference between Persian and Arabic??
I’m tired of this bigotry too
Girls stop hanging out with me when they find out I study Klingon
I have a hard time believing that.
I mean, they’d have to start first.
We are.
Which clearly from your example, it is impossible to say in English. 
It really depends on what people are used to. People in Indiana use cardinal directions all the time, and can always tell you which way is North. It used to freaking amaze me. Whenever someone from Indiana gives you directions, it will go like this: “drive a mile North, then turn West…” Thanks. I need “Go to the 7-11, and turn left.”
New Yorkers always give you cross streets an blocks. That’s one of the things I love about Law & Order. People give directions like real New Yorkers. One thing, though, is New Yorkers are good at telling you how long it will take you to get where you want to go.
Should be: “¿Que?” The inverted question mark is used at the beginning of the sentence.
Should be: “¿Que?” The inverted question mark is used at the beginning of the sentence.
[/QUOTE]
I’m so sorry; he’s from Barcelona.
No hayblow espanish. Por favor.
Certain languages do sound different to an untrained ear. Since English is our common tongue here, I’ll use it as a reference. The farther away from English sounds one gets, the more ‘unpleasant’ is the language perceived, hence the thought that Arabic and German sound ‘harsh’ and French and Italian are perceived as more melodious. I’m a native English and Italian speaker who is also fully fluent in Spanish and German, and even i perceive a certain quality of ‘other’ while listening or learning an unrelated language, such as Hebrew or Dutch. Classifying a language as evil is a xenophobic reaction, which I feel may even be evolutionary. The survival of the clan could have been possibly threatened with the arrival of non native speakers, perhaps.
The amazing thing about languages is that not every language uses the same phonemes, every human is capable of making them.
So it’s either ¿Qué? or Què?, neither of which matches the original version.
'Kay.
:dubious:
I don’t know if anyone’s ranked languages by dissimilarity of sounds but I’d be very surprised if german differed from english much more than french or italian. I’d believe a dislike due to unfamiliarity with a language, but not “distance from english sounds”.
Apparently I don’t type it that well myself. I forgot the accent mark. :smack:
No sweat, I forgot my umlauts.
The Other Waldo Pepper doesn’t want to let you in on the joke but he was quoting a 1970s British sitcom. It was very humourous if you got the reference.
I would have guessed medical. “You have a bad case of goidels, Ms. Jones.”
Both of you are missing the acute accent.
I know some things about the German language. I took lessons in German once. I learned to sing art songs in German when I took voice lessons in college. I have seen (and listened to) lots of subtitled German movies. Yes, German is ugly.