Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 21:25:37 +0100, Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:

>Fraktur, IIRC. Personally, I find them very pretty. No, then try German
>hand-written text from those years... Pure horror!
Indeed, it is Fraktur and I also like it. :-))
If you want a German text to look old and dignified
by the dust of several centuries then you HAVE to
use Fraktur - even nowadays. Just kidding. *hehehe*

The major difficulties of German could be (to a native
English speaker):
1) grammatical gender, often quite arbitrary
2) the cases - even though English has them, too, but
often hides them behind prepositions or word order
3) nested sentences. Read Mark Twain's depiction of
his painful encounter with the German language! I
_almost_ happen to feel with the poor man! *GGGGG*
You can read it at:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
If you would like something tougher then read Franz
Kafka's literature in the original German version... ;-))
4) the German "ch" (nothing compared to almost Arabic-like
Swiss-German "ch", though!!! *hehehe*)
5) the German "r". Certainly, it will sound funny to
German native speakers if the English "r" is used but
they will practically always understand which word
you'd like to articulate.

These issues are my perception of the difficulty of
German because they have been the problems of a co-
worker who is native English and tries to learn
German. For myself I cannot estimate any difficulties
with German since I speak it natively. ;-)

Many greeting and waves,
Harald :-)))

Reply