Sunday, August 5, 2012

Limited Creativity, Pt. 1

normal german words sound funny when translated literally
(It means "nipple.")

Continued in part two.

16 comments:

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    1. Vocabulary is easy to learn, but when it comes to grammar, it's entirely different.

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    2. Romance languages and other Germanic languages (Scandinavian cluster, Dutch, etc..) are actually easier to learn than German.

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  2. Nouns yes. Verbs no.

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  3. Because English words like fireman and pineapple are so much more imaginative.

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    1. Good point! I'm sure we took our inspiration for those words from German

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    2. I wonder how "Ananas" relates to pineapple though.

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    3. Probably the same way as "apple" relates to the fruit.

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  4. Hello. :) I'm half German and I like this cartoon. It's true that German nouns seem very simply constructed! Some of the 'scary-looking long words' are just 3 or 4 small words put together.

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    1. Glad you like it! I do enjoy German, not least of all because of its hilarious word combinations.

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  5. I've got a good one. Living in Graz atm, and there's a Schloss on the Berg in the center of town. You get three guesses what they call the Berg.

    Yup. Schlossberg. Castle-Mountain.

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  6. Great work! As a German teacher, I absolutely love this! Sorry to be pedantic, but shouldn't word-book be word(s)-book? Wรถrter is the plural form... Also, I'd love to see "vacuum cleaner" (dust sucker in German) if you do a Part III :-) Cheers

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    1. You're not being pedantic, you're just doing your job! Yes, it should be "words-book."

      I will add "dust sucker" to the list for Part 3!

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  7. I'm German and what I love about German is that you can express almost everything precisely using ordinay words so that everybody can understand what you are talking about even not knowing a thing of the materia.
    To give an example. I work in the air line business and whenever a plane takes off or lands a messages is send so that everybody is informed. This messages in English is called "movement". Quite logical but it can mean an endless forms of movemnts that do have nothing to do with air planes. The German word (that hardly anybody uses) is Flugbewegungsmeldung. Looks scary, doesn't it? But it's a composite of the words Flug-flight, Bewegung-movement and Meldung-messages. All of these words are common and known to ordinary people so everybody would know what it's all about. And there are much more examples like this.
    On the other hand there are words that change their meaning completely just by adding a prefix and this makes it extremely difficult to learn. e.g:

    kommen - come
    einkommen - income
    auskommen - get along w. st. / subsistence
    verkommen - degenerate
    ankommen - arrive
    abkommen - go astray deviate / agreement
    umkommen - die
    Nachkommen - offspring, descendant
    Vorkommen - occurence, incident
    aufkommen - emerge.

    Es kann vorkommen, daรŸ die Nachkommen mit dem Einkommen nicht auskommen und umkommen
    It may happen that the descendants do not get along with the income and die

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    1. This is wonderful - I think it needs to be a comic of its own!

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