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Comment by twixfel | Hacker News Reader

Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany, and I don't believe the blame lies with the Turks, let's put it that way.

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There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony.

But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

>But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.

Not only bad English, but regional varieties that I as ESL have trouble understanding, which might formally count as own languages if held against linguistic standards. I just broswed Green's dictionary of slang so I feel I know what I'm talking about.

> As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized

Reading middle and old English, I feel the onus is on you because it changed so much :')

> Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in German

No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.

> I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany

Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.

>No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.

No it's not the same. My German girlfriend is consistently asked in Germany where she's "really from" despite being born there and living there her whole life (and her parents too!). That would be scandalous in my country, and the US too. The intolerance of imperfect grammar that can realistically only be attained by natives is adjacent to this issue. It's naive and simplistic to just state all Western countries are the same in terms of social progress. The English-speaking and German-speaking worlds are not the same.

>Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.

For sure. German culture will either change of I am sure that these waves of immigrants will not integrate properly and there will be strife. One of the benefits of immigration I hope is that Germany will change and become a friendlier and less inward looking society.

No. Both Americans and Brits do care about your English mistakes. And both penalize you for accent. Especially when you do grave grammatical mistakes that just pop up equivalent to the mistake OP mentioned here.

I think there's much more of a pattern of seeing such mistakes + an accent as evidence that English isn't their native language rather than evidence of stupidity. We see so many more non-native speakers.

Getting the wrong case for an article or picking the wrong conjugated form for the verb is about as far from being a "grave grammatical mistake" as can be. Yes it matters, no it's not remotely reasonable or acceptable to just stop listening to someone because they said "dem" instead or "der", or the fucked up adjective declension (which is nice to get right but objectively sometimes carries information) for example.

And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.

We are talking here about using wrong grammatical gender throughout your speech. That is a bunch of very noticeable mistakes that affect multiple words in the sentence. Just because English does not have grammatical gender does not mean it does not matter in German.

The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.

I know it's not a gender mistake, but a mistake in the case is generally more meaningful than a mistake in the gender. A mistake in gender is even less important. I agree one should try. I certainly try. I can often look at a word I've never seen before and "somehow" know the gender, but it is ridiculous to just ignore someone who makes mistakes. And it makes no difference what the nature of the mistake is, grammatical gender isn't special, it's not acceptable in English to treat someone like shit because they used the wrong conjugated form of "to be", it shouldn't be acceptable to treat someone like shit for using the wrong gender in German.

English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.

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