Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

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aleph_minus_one

Honestly, in my experience as a native German speaker spoken and written German are more similar to each other than spoken and written English. Just speak German as you would write it might sound a little bit more formal than is usual, but it won't cause you any trouble to err a little bit on the "too formal" side.

> I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker, in comparison to the spoken language (once you adjust for pronunciation, etc.).

I rather think that the people who you spoke with used a simpler structure of sentences than is common in educated circles because you would otherwise have difficulties understanding them.

You should actually rather feel spoiled: in older German texts, it can actually easily happen that a whole paragraph consists of one single sentence (this rarely occurs in contemporary texts). Just to give one single arbitrary example:

"Wenn es die Verwirklichung von Urträumen ist, fliegen zu können und mit den Fischen zu reisen, sich unter den Leibern von Bergriesen durchzubohren, mit göttlichen Geschwindigkeiten Botschaften zu senden, das Unsichtbare und Ferne zu sehen und sprechen zu hören, Tote sprechen zu hören, sich in wundertätigen Genesungsschlaf versenken zu lassen, mit lebenden Augen erblicken zu können, wie man zwanzig Jahre nach seinem Tode aussehen wird, in flimmernden Nächten tausend Dinge über und unter dieser Welt zu wissen, die früher niemand gewußt hat, wenn Licht, Wärme, Kraft, Genuß, Bequemlichkeit Urträume der Menschheit sind, – dann ist die heutige Forschung nicht nur Wissenschaft, sondern ein Zauber, eine Zeremonie von höchster Herzens- und Hirnkraft, vor der Gott eine Falte seines Mantels nach der anderen öffnet, eine Religion, deren Dogmatik von der harten, mutigen, beweglichen, messerkühlen und -scharfen Denklehre der Mathematik durchdrungen und getragen wird."

(https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/musil/mannohne/chap011.htm...)

And no, I have no difficulties understanding this sentence.

> And no, I have no difficulties understanding this sentence.

This is what calls my attention most. During your language acquisition process, your brains may develop some specialized connections to handle such sentences. In Portuguese (and probably in most languages) it is possible to build such monstrosities -- and there are concrete examples which I won't recall now. However, one does that for literaly reasons, to sound overly sophisticated or intentionally difficult etc. It's definitely not a natural way to write, and it probably never happens spontaneously on spoken language. I can, very sporadically, grasp such long sentences in my language at the first pass, but it's always difficult and, even then, I usually reread just to make sure I really understood it.

The "trying to sound overly sophisticated" is a thing in German too, no worries :)

That said, personally I'm prone to this when writing. Even in English.

You've also tried. With this sentence, haven't you ;)

    I can, very sporadically, grasp such long sentences in my language at the first pass, but it's always difficult and, even then, I usually reread just to make sure I really understood it.

With some thinking you can probably convert your entire post into a one sentence paragraph.

I'm a native German speaker as well. While I understand this sentence, I think it is bad style in many cases. It's fine for artsy things where the reader is focused but if you have sentences like this in e.g. a report for a project you did or in an email to a colleague at work, it will most likely not be read at all or not understood correctly. What I mean with this: In everyday situations where people are stressed and/or in a hurry they don't take the time to read anything long properly. Also the the longer the sentences become, the harder it is to get the grammar right.

Very often I heard (and applied) the rule for "everyday" communication to keep the sentences short and to split longer ones if possible.

> I rather think that the people who you spoke with used a simpler structure of sentences than is common in educated circles because you would otherwise have difficulties understanding them.

I think this is probably true. I mean, it's natural to have a more waxing structure and decorative diction when attempting to express oneself poetically.

I guess it just feels like the ceiling of "acceptably waxing" in German poetic discourse is stratospheric in comparison.

I think the lengthy prepositions on their own would be more tolerable – but when you toss in various obscure inflections on adjectives and nouns, the split verbs, overloaded words like `sie`, it feels like a system that was designed to confound! Or, conversely, to signal intelligence.

It reminds me of the idea that the rules of proper dining etiquette were invented arbitrarily at the court of Louis XIV, mainly as an improvised mechanism for dunking on the aristocrats they didn't like. :)

I imagine it must make for wonderful poetry and literature, though. I'm imagining some young up-and-comer confidently promising "he'll take care of the patrician's daughter while in the palace". But he accidentally uses the wrong "the" for "palace" because it's a word he's not accustomed to using or hearing, forming an ironic double-entendre that he doesn't understand, that makes him look foolish to the patrician and foreshadows some misbehavior to the reader.

On the one hand, it's beautiful that the inflection of one word, can totally invert the meaning of a sentence. But on the other hand you have to be so knowledgeable about the minutiae of the language itself to even catch it when it happens! And in the end, it could have been a typo of the author. Argh :D German.

That’s horrendous and seems like bad form in any language. I was taught to write English as I speak it. If you need to pause, use a comma. If you need to breathe, use a period. But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

> I was taught to write English as I speak it. [...] But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

This is no contradiction. In particular in formal public speaks in German it is not uncommon to use complicated sentence constructions - and the audience is expected to understand it.

In other words: the difference is rather in the mentality.

- The English mentality rather seems to be to avoid complicated constructions. This might be explainable by the melting pot of the United States, where you could not rely on that everybody is very knowledgeable in English.

- The German-speaking world was historically much more culturally homogeneous. So you could rely on the fact that the conversational partner is pretty confident in the German language; so you could use sophisticated language constructions.

That’s interesting but I would still expect a German to take a breath.

To your point, both the UK and US had melting pot scenarios. The former is where the vast majority of the language was defined.

You may have guessed correctly that I’m American, but I speak nearly identically to my ancestors in 1776. Likely only losing some colloquialisms and picking up others. Perhaps losing Scottish, Dutch, French, German and Swiss accents.

In my family, my g-great grandfather from Munich or Mecklenburg (both apply but I don’t recall which ancestor this was offhand), forbade children from speaking English at the dinner table. He thought they were making fun of him. Sometimes language is less melted and simply dies off.

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