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Ariana said:
Nice. It's a lovely place.
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There's plenty of lovely places in Germany, but once you've seen Berlin, you'll never want to go anywhere else. ;)

Forostar said:
My understanding is pretty OK, but my grammar (Kasussystem!) used to be way better 20 years ago, on secondary school.
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Oh, German is easy. Four cases is silly. Try Avestan, which has seven cases.

Besides, the way people keep confusing genitive, accusative and dative, we'll have only two or three cases left in a hundred year's time.
 
Why not dump them altogether? It would make everyone's life easier.

Actually, I really loved Dachau. The palace is magnificent, the town is beautiful. It's just sad that the camp gave it such a terrible reputation.
 
German is the class I like the least at school. :p I'd probably be good at it if I cared to be good at it, though.
 
Yeah, the problem is that whenever somebody does that, I'm having an inner holocaust. German is a very problematic language, because it is very, very ugly by it's sound. The only thing that make it bearable are proper grammar and people like Heinrich Heine or Friedrich Nietzsche. I am very careful in my choice of words and grammar, and while I love the English language, I try to avoid anglicisms as much as I can.

Currently, there is a trend of omitting auxiliary verbs in transitive construction. For example, German requires an auxiliary verb for "etwas können", although colloquially you can omit it if the auxiliary verb is "tun" or "machen". It sounds a bit childish, I don't like it very much, but it's so common that I'm used to it. However, it must be included if the auxiliary in question is "sein" or "werden". Unfortunately, recent marketing language has started omitting that, too, and it's starting to catch on. In a while, it will be acceptable to say "ich kann Lehrer", when you should add "werden" afterwards. You hear that on TV every day now. It makes me physically sick when I hear it.
 
Perun said:
Oh, German is easy. Four cases is silly. Try Avestan, which has seven cases.
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Or Polish (also seven).

Compared to these languages, German is indeed easy, when I study and use it. The thing is, I don't need to do anything professionally in German, and my faulty Deutsch is good enough (English even is) for other purposes.

So the lack of using it correctly makes me forgetting things.
 
Perun said:
... while I love the English language, I try to avoid anglicisms as much as I can.
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Anglicisms in Swedish is one of my biggest pet peeves. The worst is the increasingly common practice of splitting compound words, which looks incredibly stupid and sometimes alters the meaning of what's being said (a classic example: "brunhårig sjuksköterska" = "brown-haired nurse", "brun hårig sjuk sköterska" = "brown hairy sick nurse").

I also routinely come across literal translations of English words and expressions that make no sense at all in Swedish, which would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
 
Same thing goes for Turkish (anglicism) I try to avoid it as much as possible. It's actually tough to find a shop that its name isn't in English here now. Also, almost every English word that has -tion on its ending goes on to being used commonly in Turkish even though we have a lot better translations for them in our own language. It's all about bragging actually, like if you use an English word instead of a Turkish word, you look cool. Well, you don't.

I haven't come across to a man with my level of English in my area as of yet, but I'm not using my English knowledge to brag, using it in Turkish language. If I'm speaking to Turkish speaking people, I should speak in Turkish, simple as said.
 
I have just English. My daughter is trying to teach me Spanish.

In other news, tomorrow I'll be the father of TWO teenage daughters. My youngest leaves the double digit midget behind and becomes a real teenager. yeay (he says dripping with sarcasm)
 
I'm having a smoked pork knee right now. Not sure it's knee in english, but hell, it's tasty.

And home baked bread.
 
If you were telling me 3 years before, that one day I would play 5 hours of tennis in a row, I would have laughed at you.. Times they are a-changin
 
I didn't. But from time to time I manage to surprise myself, a noble challenge. And then I know that I'm -still- alive.
 
Perun said:
So, how good is everyone's German, actually?
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Mine suffers from not being used frequently enough. I understand enough to follow when someone is speaking s-l-o-w-ly and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, and when reading I understand enough to get the meaning of unknown words from context. But I don't speak it very well. I'd say I have a basic grasp of it, not more. I'd probably improve a lot with little effort, though. The problem is that, like Foro, I don't need to use German in any professional setting.

Shadow said:
Anglicisms in Swedish is one of my biggest pet peeves. The worst is the increasingly common practice of splitting compound words, which looks incredibly stupid and sometimes alters the meaning of what's being said (a classic example: "brunhårig sjuksköterska" = "brown-haired nurse", "brun hårig sjuk sköterska" = "brown hairy sick nurse").

I also routinely come across literal translations of English words and expressions that make no sense at all in Swedish, which would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
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It's the same in Norway. Both for anglicisms and for this English-inspired splitting of compound words. A particularly funny one is "lammelår" (=leg of lamb) which splits to "lamme lår" which means "paralyzed thighs" :D
 
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