German help, please

[HaphAsSard]

That's ok. They all speak English anyway.

Very true in my experience; of course with varying degrees of proficiency as everywhere, but leagues better than in my own country, unfortunately. I do have hopes for digital natives, but only some. As a Canadian friend, who teaches English here, once explained to me, this is not gonna change until we stop dubbing movies and TV shows. Internautical yoothes do tend to watch them in the original nowadays, so again, some hopes.

 

[caligula]

Very true in my experience; of course with varying degrees of proficiency as everywhere, but leagues better than in my own country, unfortunately. I do have hopes for digital natives, but only some. As a Canadian friend, who teaches English here, once explained to me, this is not gonna change until we stop dubbing movies and TV shows. Internautical yoothes do tend to watch them in the original nowadays, so again, some hopes.

But you know what ... your native language is the coolest (if there is such a thing in languages and linguistics) language on planet Earth.
Seriously, there is no language I want to learn as much as Italian, at least to some everyday conversation (B2) level. I had to take Latin classes at university some three years ago and feel my still halfway present Latin vocabulary could help me with that. Definitely a project for the hopefully not too far away future.

 

[hrodbert696]

Cool! Apparently a French loanword from "merci".

Funny thing is, Hochdeutsch actually has, beside the colloquial meaning of "Standard, proper German", the more technical one of "Southern-type variety", to which Bavarian very much belongs - "high" in this sense denoting neither Northern-ness nor prestige but altitude, like in Egypt. (The colloquial usage does have prestige connotations, and on the other side "Plattdeutsch" does seem to contain both senses - "Lowland" and "lowly" - in the mind of many users of the word.)

Or so I'm written. I just love linguistic fun-facts. Couldn't order a sandwich in German to save my life...

True, but the upper German dialects comprise the whole southern half of the country plus Austria and Switzerland. Hochdeutsch in the sense of "standard" German (the Bavarians call it Schriftdeutsch in some places) is based on the version of it from more central Germany, around Franconia and Thuringia. The southern German dialects derive from Middle High German but they vary from Hochdeutsch quite a bit, as we've been saying.

 

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

Recht doesn't translate to the form of "right" that I believe you meant.
Recht means right as in justice, claim or privilege.

I realize that the sentence you used may have been suggested by Google translate.
But Google doesn't speak actual day-to-day German.
Richtig or korrekt would be the proper word to use.

Not being mean, just wanted you to know.

No, unless my junior high school German textbook was wrong, it is correct to say "You are right" as „Du hast recht,“ (familiar) or „Sie haben recht“ (formal).

 

[SunnBass]

No, unless my junior high school German textbook was wrong, it is correct to say "You are right" as „Du hast recht,“ (familiar) or „Sie haben recht“ (formal).

Cool, I was just going off of what I learned while living in Germany, for two years, after taking 4 years of German in high school.

 

[HaphAsSard]

But you know what ... your native language is the coolest (if there is such a thing in languages and linguistics) language on planet Earth.
Seriously, there is no language I want to learn as much as Italian, at least to some everyday conversation (B2) level. I had to take Latin classes at university some three years ago and feel my still halfway present Latin vocabulary could help me with that. Definitely a project for the hopefully not too far away future.

That's very nice, thank you. I get told that a lot, I'm starting to believe you guys!
I tend to take my first language for granted, of course. Also, accents are all over the place, so everyone here has their own least favourite Italian accent...
Dialects, which can be as different from one another as English and Frisian I believe, make for a complicated picture in many ways unlike the English and French diasystems, and more akin to the German and Iberian* ones. (In a nutshell, a situation in which "dialect" means a sister tongue, genetically, to the standard language, not one of the latter's local "daughter" varieties.) And then there are related minority languages - Franco-Provençal; Ladin and Friulian (Rhaeto-Romance subfamily); Sardinian (a beast of its own) - and less closely related - German, Grecanic, Albanian - but that's standard fare for many a European country.

Anyway, go for it! (And yes I'm sure your Latin will prove more than a little helpful.) I've been postponing getting my feet wet with German and spoken French for too long myself. OT:TB new language challenge, anyone?



*The linguistic landscape in the Iberian peninsula is probably somewhere in between: while Catalan-Valencian and Galician are readily recognised as separate languages, and Portuguese most obviously is, the status of some tongues as closely related and heavily influenced by but not derived from Castilian (thus unlike e.g. Andalusian Spanish) may be less evident to many. Thinking of Leonese and Asturian for example; Aragonese is even classified by some as a subgroup of its own, seemingly close to now-extinct, scarcely-attested Mozarabic, the Romance language of Christian folks in the central and southern peninsula under Muslim rule.
And then, for something completely different, there's Basque...

 

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

Very true in my experience; of course with varying degrees of proficiency as everywhere, but leagues better than in my own country, unfortunately. I do have hopes for digital natives, but only some. As a Canadian friend, who teaches English here, once explained to me, this is not gonna change until we stop dubbing movies and TV shows. Internautical yoothes do tend to watch them in the original nowadays, so again, some hopes.

In France, keeping films in their original language and adding subtitles seems to be the regular practice (that allowed me to enjoy seeing "Mystic River" in a cinema in Bercy, in Paris, some years ago). I've been told that the usual pracice in Germany and Austria is to dub films into German.

When I watch a foreign film or TV show, I like hearing the original language and seeing the corresponding English subtitles that go with it. It's a good way to accustom my ears to the language and even learn something.

 

[HaphAsSard]

In France, keeping films in their original language and adding subtitles seems to be the regular practice (that allowed me to enjoy seeing "Mystic River" in a cinema in Bercy, in Paris, some years ago). I've been told that the usual pracice in Germany and Austria is to dub films into German.

When I watch a foreign film or TV show, I like hearing the original language and seeing the corresponding English subtitles that go with it. It's a good way to accustom my ears to the language and even learn something.

There are certainly counterexamples to my dubbing->lousy average knowledge of English oversimplification: there must be other factors at play, like closeness of local language to English, tourism, school system (which here leaves a lot to be desired), cultural factors such as plain old mind openness. Now that I think about it, it's certainly a topic I might as well read about in detail rather than relying on anecdotes and impressions.