This Swiss film has an interesting twist in subtitles. One can watch it in the original English version with subtitles in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese. It is also entertaining.
2 Likes
I like that someone said that. I always find it annoying that all language courses fail to explain the the language, pumping the whole standard thing in chunks into your brain over a long period of time. The truth is that every language can be simplified in unofficial ways, it will not sound natural, but understandable. I usually discover some of such tricks when I’m forced to communicate whilst still being on entry level
1 Like
Once dog I have…in English, to express simple concepts, you can be understandable with only the present tense and a random word order.
My husband gets by pretty well in French by using the present tense and adding tomorrow or yesterday etc to indicate time.
Everyone seems to understand him.
1 Like
Your example actually shows the opposite. Even with that word order it suggests to the reader that you’ve made a typo, and other ‘random’ selections can be even less clear. Have I once dog, for example. Statement or missing question mark? And other verb conjugations could be worse still.
No, in fact the word order in English s much more important even than in German, as the lack of inflection requires a subject verb object, whereas in German you could still be quite specific in a much more random selection. That’s literally what the case endings do.
In general the case will hint the interlocutor that something is wrong with the word order, but it there are collisions so it’s not given that this would be seen, especially if you made a “gender mistake”… so I’d say that in practice sticking to the right word order is the easiest and most important thing to learn where you can butch other things, like avoiding making questions by appending: , …yes? , …no? , …true? Actually that works to exfiltrate information, not only to cover language skills deficiency, for example: walking past wine stand you say, Oh, this is the mediocre Italian wine, no? and a person with better knowledge will involuntarily feel the urge to correct you, This is a Swiss wine, in fact pretty good one! 
Anyway, staying on the topic of German language I seem to figured out an important role of cases, they add a precise meaning to the verb. It’s hard to prove this theory, but asking LLMs it seems to be estimated that German goes by with a quarter of the count of verbs in English, so yup, if you don’t have a grammatical tool to be precise, you have to come up with a huge number of words to describe everything.
That’s a false assumption. English has more words largely because of waves of immigration from different linguistic groups of people over 1500 years or so from the Romans to the Normans, including multiple distinct Germanic (Saxon, Frisian, Danish, Norse…) influences at different times, each successive wave leaving some of their words in the evolving English language without removing the old ones.
That’s basically Swiss German, present and past perfect is all we have. And it seems to be well enough.
Exactly, that is what happens when you don’t stop the boats. Drake was right.
I happened to be catching up on this thread at the same time as the heating tech is here. I’ve done my best to answer his Swiss German questions in Hochdeutsch, but I simply don’t know all of the words. I don’t use them often enough.
That’s one issue, and my obvious accent is the other. He asked where I was from (UK??) and I said America, Colorado. He got so excited and switched to English to talk about Vail/Beaver Creek ski resort. 
5 Likes
I’ve had some fun conversations in AT as a result of wearing my fancy Telluride shirt and my Ariat Dahlias**
**The most comfortable boot ever!
1 Like
German class is a breeze. Grammar lesson in Palestine:
under the cover of darkness, Brian sneaks up to a statue and starts painting Latin grafitti on the plinth of a statue; he is caught in the act by a centurion who gives him a Latin grammar lesson*
- Centurion What’s this, then? “Romanes Eunt Domus”? “People called Romanes, they go the house”?
- Brian: It says “Romans, Go Home”.
- Centurion: No it doesn’t. What’s Latin for “Roman”? Come on!
- Centurion Goes like?
- Brian “Annus”?
- Centurion Vocative plural of “annus” is?
- [the centurion corrects the first line of Brian’s grafitti]
- Centurion: “Eunt”. What is “eunt”?
- Centurion: Conjugate the verb “to go”.
- Brian: “Ire, eo, is, it, imus, itis, eunt”.
- Centurion:: So “eunt” is?
- Brian Third person plural present indicative. “They go”.
- Centurion: But “Romans, go home” is an order, so you must use the…?
- Brian: The imperative!
- Centurion: Which is?
- Brian: Um, oh, oh, “i”.
- Centurion: How many Romans?
- BrianPlural. “Ite”.
- Centurion “Ite”.
- [the centurion corrects the second line of Brian’s grafitti]
- [Centurion: “Domus”? Nominative? “Go home”. This is motion towards, isn’t it, boy?
- [the centurion draws his sword and holds it to Brian’s neck]
- Brian: No, not dative! Accusative! Accusative! “Domum”, sir. “Ad domum”.
- Centurion: Except that “domus” takes the…
- Brian: The locative, sir.
- Centurion: Which is?
- [the centurion corrects the last line of Brian’s grafitti]
- Brian Yes, sir.
- Centurion: Now write it out a hundred times.
- Brian: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
- Centurion: Hail Caesar. And if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.
5 Likes
Your quote appears to missing a number of lines. Are we supposed to fill them in as homework?
Anyway, I can cheat, full text available here
3 Likes
I’ll never improve my German 
I went earlier to the Gemeindhaus to pick my residence permit. A man with a walking cane was leaving the office and I held the door open for him. Nice old guy cheerfully said Molte grazie! Took me a while to catch up and find the words…Prego, buona giornata.
So, how the f*** am I going to learn Tedesco if those are the daily interactions? 
2 Likes
I had the same in Rorschach…so many Italians, I almost felt at home! Not that I am Italian, but the language is so much more approachable to me than German.
1 Like
I just had a 5min work call, only in German. I think I did not rely on any word or phrase from French or English. Only the customary use of Italian in Zürideutsch 
German is difficult but not that difficult. Specially in the work context, because the topic is already known, we stay on topic, and there’s plenty of mental imagery to remember the words and grammar…Datein, Kunde, Stunden.
If you adopt the attitude “german is difficult” then it probably will be difficult for you.
1 Like
So if you adopt the attitude that it is easy then it will be easy?
Do you think that would also work for learning Quantum mechanics, or trying to beat Usain Bolt’s time in the 100 metres?
but seriously, language is not a science, all it takes is only a matter of time until you memorize enough
To my surprise I suddenly started decoding randomly longer sentences when listening or watching German in background. That’s the power of immersion, when somehow you figure out naturally the meaning of the words put in context.
Disclaimer, I surround myself with German media (not Swiss-German which is a total Greek to me).
1 Like
One does not have to adopt either attitude.