«The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship. It is indeed a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation. It’s also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation.»
I took a year of German in graduate school so I could read German philosophical texts. On thing that really struck me about the language is that the main verb in a sentence goes at the end. So a German sentence translated word-for-word into English would be something like "I to the store in my car went."
Also I remember learning that German philosophy students prefer to read the English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason because it broke up the impossibly long sentences of the original.
German is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order. English and others are SVO. I always liked SOV languages since first learning one because they feel like using a Reverse Polish Notation (RPN [1]) calculator like the HP-15c (just mentioned here recently [2]). The verb, like the operator in the calculator, comes last, and operates all on the inputs before it.
French does, too... the Académie Française makes sure of that and slaps you on the wrist if you use loanwords. Germans are rather more laissez-faire about it, and recently are absorbing rather a lot of English. For example, the other day my mother told me that she was going to go "walken", which I guess is a brisk walk for exercise purposes.
Though the word has a slightly different meaning auf Deutsch than it does in English:
> According to the venerable Duden dictionary of the German language, the word is defined as "a storm of outrage in an Internet communication medium that, in part, goes along with offensive utterances."
How would you define it in English? I'd guess (German is my first language, so words existing in both are always tricky) a) it's considered a lot more vulgar in English and b) is more general for a bad situation with s* flying around?
Correct on both points. Shit is a fairly strong expletive in English, so it’s not a word you’d generally roll out in polite conversation. And a shitstorm in English doesn’t have a specific context of something that happens online, it’s just any situation where a bunch of really bad stuff is happening all at once.
Learning German, he says, is particularly useful when applying oneself to the task of understanding the Germans, which he seems to be implying may be quite soon something of interest to (con and noncon) tinental Europe.
