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My German-English bilingual brain couldn’t handle this video. I kept thinking that I should be able to understand everything without subtitles but I just couldn’t.
Mark Twain said of German “whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
An old joke from German class circa 1974. Two friends are traveling through Germany. One speaks German and the other depends on the first to translate everything for him. They are on a tour bus and the guide keeps talking on and on and his friend isn''t telling him anything. "What is he saying?" "I don't know. He hasn't reached the verb at the end of the sentence yet." My friend thought that her first trip to Europe would work well since I spoke German. All the times I had to tell her at every door "No, the other Drücken." I'm surprised I ever survived that.
@@urlauburlaub2222 Absoluter Bullshit 😂 Sätze, die mit "Trinkst du.." anfangen sind nicht nur das normalste der Welt, sondern auch absolut korrektes Deutsch. "Du trinkst normale Milch?" könnte nicht falscher für mich klingen (klingt wie eine Unterstellung, ein Aussagesatz, als sollte ich überhaupt nicht drauf antworten und es hinnehmen, normale Milch zu erhalten); ich hab's nie benutzt oder gehört und werde jeden korrigieren, der mich das mal auf diese Art fragen sollte (bin selber laktoseintolerant). Vor allem, weil es so viele Sprachen gibt, die dieselbe Unterscheidung zwischen Aussage- und Fragesätzen machen, indem sie nämlich Subjekt und Prädikat umdrehen. Im Französischen bspw.: Tu bois du lait. (Aussage, "Du trinkst Milch") Bois-tu du lait? (Frage, "Trinkst du Milch?") Es wäre sogar *umgekehrt eher* umgangssprachlich so, dass man an den ersten Satz - den ursprünglichen Aussagesatz - ein Fragezeichen dranhängt, sodass "Tu bois du lait?" draus wird. Aber das ist die *eigentliche* Umgangssprache; so könnte man das in einem formellen Essay also vergessen. Wie kommt man auf sowas? Bist du ein Troll oder einfach nicht in der Lage korrekte Fragesätze zu konstruieren? Wieso muss man denn auch sein Halbwissen und seine Spekulationen an andere weitergeben? Bitte bilde dich weiter, bevor du irgendwas behauptest und im Internet postest.
@@エルフェンリート-l3i Bois tu du lait ? is what we call " langage soutenu" ( académique french) In the dayly life, ordinary people would ask "Est ce que tu bois du lait ? " And even more basic " Du lait ? "
@@エルフェンリート-l3i Ich würde das nicht als trollen sehen. Eine Aussage als Fragesatz zu verwenden kann auch ein Stilmittel sein. Quasi als rhetorische Frage. Klar ist es in erster Linie richtig die Frage als Frage zu formulieren aber die Form eine Aussage als Frage zu stellen, wie Urlaub Urlaub es schrieb, ist mir im Sprachgebrauch durchaus auch bekannt. Und jeder weiß, was damit gemeint ist. Ist dann eher eine Sache der Betonung.
Having tried to learn German multiple times, this resonates so much with me. Sometimes the conjugation is exactly the same in both languages, and then other times I feel like Yoda.
Just re-gear you’re brain to switch to German, and put the verb second, or at the last of your sentences. When I switch to Spanish, I totally put English out of my mind, and switch to Spanish, so my mind thinks “ la camisa roja “( the shirt red ), instead of trying to battle in my thoughts, thinking why isn’t it Red Shirt …
@@G.Harley.Davidson Yes but the structure details of Spanish are largely similar to English (other than switching the noun/adjective) whereas the German order can seem totally random to a native English speaker
@@ondattaja I guess the point of what I’m saying is to totally switch to the language you are learning when speaking or practicing, and try not to compare to your native language. Learn as a toddler would from the ground up, so you’re not constantly trying to making comparisons as you speak.
Fun fact "Jo da" in Danish is a phrase that means. something like "for sure"! (It's the opposite of "nej da", meaning "oh no", or the doubtful "no way?".)
This absolutely struck me whilst learning german how much it sounded like 'old english' in my head and how polite the language actually is, it really is a beautiful language to listen to.
might be because old english is a western germanic language :D but i can see that one might think german should have evolved since then in terms of grammar
I have this to my husband shown. His face looked totally funny out! I was impressed from me, because I everything understood have! What for a funny video idea! It must difficult to film been to be.
@@LaureninGermany yeah I know. Sometimes I have trouble to do it right ... and then I do it the german way :D An other german told me that at my EVS time in turkey that I spoke these english sentence "so german".
40-ish years ago, as I was learning German, I decided that if I just used Shakespeare or King James syntax it would make a lot more sense. Now, hearing it out loud in English, I think I was right! Brilliant execution, by the way!
Modern German has retained many features English lost after the Norman invasion. I took a semester of Old English in grad school. Having had 6 semesters of German as an undergrad made learning so much easier. Think of old English as a funky dialect of German and it'll start making sense.
Thou hast understood halfway - it isn't the syntax of early modern English that carries over but certain morphological patterns and lexical items, like the subject-verb combo at the beginning of this sentence and the use of the to be as an auxiliary verb. The syntax of Shakespeare is hardly more like German than contemporary English on balance.
There we have the salad. Nalf speaks English like a German now. No, but seriously: How did your brain feel after filming this video? It must have been a complete mess.
I heard Dutch is closer to German than English. Though, I heard Dutch is easier than German, but I think the word order ressembles German. German is complex, but I know some because of German grandparents. German dialects vary a lot too. Swiss German is pretty hard to understand. I heard even German people from Germany have trouble understanding Swiss German. So people use standard German for business and travel. If you’re Dutch, you can probably understand Afrikaans, as I heard it’s an older sounding variation of Dutch.
That reminds me of the Asterix comic books, with German translations. Whenever they had foreign characters visiting in the Gallic Village (e.g. from Iberia, Britannia), they used their sentence structure to convey the accent. Or they used the fraktur font for the Goths, and hieroglyphs for Egyptians …
This is absolute genius. You have done so well speaking with such fluency and rhythm! It is like listening to a weird foreign language and then suddenly realising that you actually understand every single word. I was struggling to follow the conversation the first time round, but watching it the second time, I had already tuned in really well, almost scary 😆
@@-cirad- I don’t think so. I was saying Das because English is non-gendered. When I looked up the etymology of the word it says "Originally neutral nominative, in Middle English it superseded all previous Old English nominative forms" so it was always neutral.
At first I was going to say that would just be me trying to speak German, but then when I tried to actually write that in German with English sentence structure, I couldn't figure out how to do it. 😆 I think it would be: Das war nur sein mich versuchen zu sprechen Deutsch. Maybe? The verb conjugation is throwing me off
That would mess me up permanently, I'm afraid. For example, "Weil ich bin alt" doesn't sound *that* wrong to me (the weil vs denn thing). And every so often I hear Germans mess that up too!
Oh man, that was awesome and so true! As an English speaker (American), learning the German structure was so difficult (still is) to get used to. Love the effort, especially by Laura as a native German speaker. Keep up the good work, love your stuff!
You don't have to. It is enough for an Englishman in Germany or as a German in England to wear a T-shirt with the inscription "I love Master Yoda". And simply continue to use your usual sentence structure in the foreign language. Because believe me, if you're not linguistically gifted and suddenly have to use English grammar, it's no less difficult.
Interestingly, if you're a coder geek, it's a bit easier to learn, because you usually end up learning something called "postfix notation." It's a more efficient way for computers to process arithmetic. So 2 + 4 becomes 2 4 +, and (3 * 6) / 9 becomes 3 6 * 9 /. Makes me wonder if the native German brain end up more efficient at parsing sentences.
This is one of the best things iv seen in a long while haha, finally native english speakers get a glimpse of what a german brain has to handle when translating inside our german brains :D
I can't imagine how difficult this. must have been to write the script AND speak those sentences without screwing it up completely . Well done, and absolutely hilarious. Mark Twain would appreciate your excellent efforts.
Shakespearean proximity is not an accident. Old English and Old German were very close. I can understand quite some part of it and in Shakespearean times there were still some grammar features preserved from Ye Olde English that are similar in German. Vocabulary has changed though under the influence of French.
Modern English is for most parts older English spoken like its French with some minor (readjustments later). Prior to that English used a word order that was extremly close to the German one.
@@nacaclanga9947 True. The further back you go in English, the closer it gets to Modern German in its lexicon and syntax, because German is probably the most conservative of the major West Germanic languages, with Icelandic having that crown on the North Germanic side. That is why some constructions in English that would resemble German sound archaic or poetic to anglophones, especially the constructions with the adverb or object before the verb and the subject right after it. Such constructions would be perfectly fine in German but perhaps ‘incorrect’ in Standard English.
Me hearing the English with German grammar: "This makes absolutely zero sense" Me reading the German subtitles with the same grammar: "Ah, that clears it up! So much more sensible!"
My dear mister singing club, Denglish on a master's level. But let's leave the church in the village, it must be hell to talk like that as a native speaker.
@@Cau_No Actually, most of the time he speaks with proper English grammar, only occasionally the word order change is thrown in. Those just stick in your memory more.
@@silkwesir1444 And that word order resembles the Japanese one, with the verb always at the end. (I also learned Japanese) It is assumed, because George Lucas was a great fan of Akira Kurosawa, he did not just get the ideas for the story from one of his movies (The Hidden Fortress), but also this character trait.
This is so good, Nick! Well done! I hear this sort of English every day from my 5 year old daughter. We moved to Germany when she was 3, so she had a good base of English but has since become more fluent in German. She now tries to use her English and it's all in the German word order. 😂
Finnish sentence structure is also so different. For me as a German native speaker, it is super weird to hear English with German sentence structure :D.
This is hilarious! I often speak to myself in English like this when I'm practicing my German syntax :) This is why it's so hard for an English speaker to understand German when spoken too quickly. By the time you've rearranged things in your head to make sense, the next sentence is already being spoken and you're missing what's being said. Ugh!
Exactly!! I've been learning German for a year now. Good luck asking a native German speaker to explain grammar rules! They just say that's how they normally speak, they don't know WHY! 😭😭😭
I apologize if this has already been addressed in previous comments. This is absolutely going to be an excellent educational tool for English speakers learning the German language! Herzlich Danke!
Thanks to Laura, Nick and Mikey for showing me, that my English skills could actually be way worse :) ! That's a new one on me. You guys just made my day
@Sarah Hodgins I got curious about that, thinking the same. But everything I see on line is that while Anglo Saxon was more free with word order because of inflection, for the most part it was subject verb object, just as it is now. So I wondered if some other languages like Old Norse or Frisian account for the difference between English and German... not so much, at least from a very quick and non-scientific tour of the Googleverse.
@@ajrwilde14 Um, what? Frisian was one of the _distant_ ancestors of Old English before the invasion of Celtic Britain by various tribes from that part of Northern Europe. I'm 100% sure Middle English is mostly a result of Norman French with a fair bit of vocabulary from clerical Latin.
O my, this is so mind wobbling! I admire the two of you, your fluency and easiness speaking English with that German sentence structure. I couldn’t wrap my head around it!
Since I started learning German not too long ago, this video left me EXTREMELY confused. I'm coming to grips with the way sentences are structured in German, but hearing English spoken this way was mind-boggling.
As a Dutch native speaker this is so familiar. A lot of Dutch people tend to use their native sentence structure when they speak English. There's even a word for it: Dunglish (a contraction of Dutch and English)
And yet English speakers can understand it and, unlike the Frnech, feel it impolite to correct you. Evenutally you end up chnaging English a little bit (for the the better)
I bought and watched Unicorn Town last night. Though I did know the outcome of the seasons (been a subscriber for years now), it was still fun to watch the story unfold in a feature length format. It was really wonderful to learn more about the players and staff, and how the entire team and town function like a family that cares about each other. Especially juxtaposed against the "professionalism" and money behind the other league teams, it was really refreshing to see. It's truly a David & Goliath type narrative! As for the filmmaking itself, you see skills improve as time marched on. That broken collarbone benefitted you in many ways, and it was only possible because the Unicorns program didn't give up on you that first year. Thanks so much for all your hard work on this @NALF PS: Can't get over how young Nick and Cody are in the old footage. Initially I was like, where's Cody's hair?
Years ago I for a german company worked. Even though we were in amerika, I was with germans surrounded. At home my sentence structure in english was in german constructed. My wife had many complaints made. It took special effort on my part to this habit break. When I was young, there was a popular American song about a Pennsylvania dutch girl sending her mother off on a train trip. Among the words were "Throw mama from the train a kiss, a Kiss". Clever, huh ?
This. is. brilliant. period. Wow, you guys have done an amazing job. The idea behind the video is absolutely great. Kudos to you guys! Please make more of these. :D
Loved this! What would have made it perfect would be using "Thou" for "Du" and "You" for "Sie" So 0:09 would be "Hi, good morning, hast thou good slept?"
That is EXACTLY how my daughter talks thanks to being raised bilingual! And the crazy thing is that I don't even notice anymore! 😆🙈 And it goes both ways...Example: "Mama, das ist NICHT EIN Käfer, das ist ein Wurm"...her aunt starts cracking up while I'm dumbfounded as to why she's laughing hysterically.
da kann ich aber auch nichts falsches erkennen. in der Umgangssprache klingt das in diesem Zusammenhang korrekt. Oder bin ich schon infiziert. Ich hatte einen englischen Mann ? Ich glaube ja, nachdem ich es jetzt 5x gelesen habe. Habe mir bisher nie Gedanken darüber gemacht, dass sich mein Satzbau vielleicht im Laufe der Jahre etwas verdenglischt haben könnte. Vielen Dank :-))
This was a good video. Finally. Many other recent videos on your channel have interesting titles and thumbnails but they have no clear conclusion/ purpose.
Personal note. Around 1:00 there's an odd bench in your video. I saw this in Melk just west of the Marktplatz under the Stift. The old post office (kind of) now Hotel-Restaurant zur Post. Just a little more west of that is what I seem to recall in 2017 was a theater or Kino or some such. In front of it was a concrete bench that photographs on display at that site also depicted when we were there. It is plush. Overstuffed plush. And completely in concrete. And as per the photos it's been there for over a century. Wow!
I have already seen the video a week ago and have blown away with laughter (without subtitles, even for me as a German really hard to understand). And just again in a reaction video. But I'm still waiting eagerly for the making of and the outtakes! There must be a lot of them.😄
As a Spanish native speaker this was hard but funny! My brain got crazy! i could understand the main idea of the phrases but I couldn't repeat them. In Spanish the SOV order exists but just in poetry and questions (like French, for example). Also, we can do other kind of inversions if we want to emphasize something, but seeing that in English was other story.
I am a Californian who has lived an hour north of Schwäbisch Hall for about 6 years now. I came to the conclusion that one really needs to learn to THINK this way to really know German. I was calling it Yodatalk, because of Yoda's habit of messing up word order. These days I am working on a Harry Potter dual-language book that shows each sentence in English, German, and Yodatalk. People don't seem to see the value, probably because there is none, but it really makes the German clearer to me. There is probably heresy in mixing Harry Potter and Star Wars this way, but I don't mind. I intend to check out your new movie after we wrap up our summertime activities. Best wishes from Höpfingen. P.S. I've now read through the comments. Seems like EVERYBODY hears Yoda.
Having two bilingual teenagers at home I'm so used to this kind of language mix up that it felt somewhat normal, just that my brain needed to switch from Greek/German to English/German. Most pronounced sentence in this house: "Mama ich bin langweilig" (kann entweder heißen "ich habe keine Lust", oder "mir ist langweilig"). Auf griechisch ein Wort: "βαριέμαι".
Love it! I teach English at a Realschule in Germany and this is exactly what I have to deal with every day. I call it "Grafschafter Englisch" but I did not know that it was also spoken outside Grafschaft Bentheim.
As a english speaker learning german its so confusing, epsecially when you learn the formal words and they started using informal words which i do not recognise lol
That reminds me of the book(s) from the 70ties/80ties by Gisela Daum "Filserbriefe" where a German Gisela wrote letters to her English penpal informing him on her daily life and world politics in exactly the same Denglish. 😂Fun to read.
I never had any trouble with German word order. Yes, it can be vastly different to English, but everything is still there, so I came pretty easily to me. It’s easy to understand German word order *in German*. But now this? This is absolutely bewildering.
In my third year of German class we started to do this, but only made it 3 or 4 minutes. As I was listening to this I kept thinking, “this has got to be much easier in German.”
That's actually a technique to easily learn a language developed By Vera F. Birkenbihl. One basically starts with texts in the native language but with word-for-word translation of the a text in the target language to get a feeling for the foreign language (and learn syntax/grammar as a side-effect).
You write of Birkenbihl. I heard her name for the first time just today, after showing a friend how I study German using word-for-word translations/interpretations. I didn't understand exactly what he was saying about Birkenbihl, and she has no English Wikepedia page, but there is a German one, and I intend to read it through and find out about her.
Thank you both for bringing this up. This video has made me curious about whether you could use this sort of awkward literal translation as a way of learning a language. While listening to their dialogue without reading the subtitles, I found myself translating words into German almost automatically. That was pretty interesting. I’ll be reading up on Vera Birkenbihl now. Thanks!
😂😂😂😂 This is your best video yet! I've been hardcore studying German for a year and I actually did this accidentally the other day. I asked my sister what her new friend's last name was again. She responded, "It's Hogg." My response. " Really? That's so funny to me that her Last name Hogg is."
Even without the outtake, it was wonderful. And now, perhaps some people will understand how weird English word order sounds to native speakers of German. Enough of being serious, you had me laughing all the way through. PS I did plug the movie on my Facebook page and tagged you and the flick.
I just showed this video to an American friend who doesn't speak German and this was his response: "Funny! I don’t think I could ever speak German. It’s so confusing!"
Wow, that must have been so hard for you to do! I sometimes do this to annoy some english speaking people I know (especially my englich coach...). 😅 I never realized this before, but that actually sounds a little like Yoda is taking. Again what learned...👍
I’m English and this direct translation is how I learn. I understand all the spoken but that’s because I’m so used to reading old books and Middle English that all this makes sense. If as an English speaker you can’t understand this video by just listening, you have no hope of learning German other than to just parroting sentences and never being able to construct them or understand anything other than the ones from your text book. It’s really useful to learn this way of speaking in English because it makes constructing sentences in your head easier.
Congrats. You always find the best spots to shoot your videos and this content is super creative. Lots of love from a different part of Germany where lots of lamas live (alliteration).
My husband speaks Dutch, which a Germanic language is. He speaks also German. He laughs still because he this video has seen. Mijn man spreekt nederlands, wat een Germaanse taal is. Hij spreekt ook Duits. Hij lacht nog steeds omdat hij deze video heeft gezien.
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My German-English bilingual brain couldn’t handle this video. I kept thinking that I should be able to understand everything without subtitles but I just couldn’t.
Ich fand es nicht zu sein so schwierig. Einfach Zitroneauspresschen.
Same here ! Hopefully there are the German subtitles ! Funny that I understand better the subtitles than the voices 😂 (I'm french)
Same und deutsch mit englisher grammatik genau so schlimm
Reminded me of Shakespeare.
My monolingual brain couldn't handle it.
Mark Twain said of German “whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
That's hilarious, but oh so true!
Perfect!
Too bad I can only give this comment a thumbs up once!
Hahaha lol! That's a great one!
An old joke from German class circa 1974. Two friends are traveling through Germany. One speaks German and the other depends on the first to translate everything for him. They are on a tour bus and the guide keeps talking on and on and his friend isn''t telling him anything. "What is he saying?" "I don't know. He hasn't reached the verb at the end of the sentence yet."
My friend thought that her first trip to Europe would work well since I spoke German. All the times I had to tell her at every door "No, the other Drücken." I'm surprised I ever survived that.
All jokes aside, this is genius. I applaud your determination to draw it out a bit longer than comfortable.
@@urlauburlaub2222 People like you can also be colloquially referred to as bean counters
@@urlauburlaub2222 Absoluter Bullshit 😂 Sätze, die mit "Trinkst du.." anfangen sind nicht nur das normalste der Welt, sondern auch absolut korrektes Deutsch. "Du trinkst normale Milch?" könnte nicht falscher für mich klingen (klingt wie eine Unterstellung, ein Aussagesatz, als sollte ich überhaupt nicht drauf antworten und es hinnehmen, normale Milch zu erhalten); ich hab's nie benutzt oder gehört und werde jeden korrigieren, der mich das mal auf diese Art fragen sollte (bin selber laktoseintolerant).
Vor allem, weil es so viele Sprachen gibt, die dieselbe Unterscheidung zwischen Aussage- und Fragesätzen machen, indem sie nämlich Subjekt und Prädikat umdrehen.
Im Französischen bspw.:
Tu bois du lait.
(Aussage, "Du trinkst Milch")
Bois-tu du lait?
(Frage, "Trinkst du Milch?")
Es wäre sogar *umgekehrt eher* umgangssprachlich so, dass man an den ersten Satz - den ursprünglichen Aussagesatz - ein Fragezeichen dranhängt, sodass "Tu bois du lait?" draus wird. Aber das ist die *eigentliche* Umgangssprache; so könnte man das in einem formellen Essay also vergessen.
Wie kommt man auf sowas? Bist du ein Troll oder einfach nicht in der Lage korrekte Fragesätze zu konstruieren? Wieso muss man denn auch sein Halbwissen und seine Spekulationen an andere weitergeben? Bitte bilde dich weiter, bevor du irgendwas behauptest und im Internet postest.
@@urlauburlaub2222 Guys he's a troll, like literally anything he said is just plain bullshit that contradicts itself and I also explained why.
@@エルフェンリート-l3i Bois tu du lait ? is what we call " langage soutenu" ( académique french)
In the dayly life, ordinary people would ask "Est ce que tu bois du lait ? "
And even more basic " Du lait ? "
@@エルフェンリート-l3i Ich würde das nicht als trollen sehen. Eine Aussage als Fragesatz zu verwenden kann auch ein Stilmittel sein. Quasi als rhetorische Frage. Klar ist es in erster Linie richtig die Frage als Frage zu formulieren aber die Form eine Aussage als Frage zu stellen, wie Urlaub Urlaub es schrieb, ist mir im Sprachgebrauch durchaus auch bekannt. Und jeder weiß, was damit gemeint ist. Ist dann eher eine Sache der Betonung.
Having tried to learn German multiple times, this resonates so much with me. Sometimes the conjugation is exactly the same in both languages, and then other times I feel like Yoda.
Just re-gear you’re brain to switch to German, and put the verb second, or at the last of your sentences. When I switch to Spanish, I totally put English out of my mind, and switch to Spanish, so my mind thinks “ la camisa roja “( the shirt red ), instead of trying to battle in my thoughts, thinking why isn’t it Red Shirt …
Damn, you faster than me was.
@@G.Harley.Davidson Yes but the structure details of Spanish are largely similar to English (other than switching the noun/adjective) whereas the German order can seem totally random to a native English speaker
@@ondattaja I guess the point of what I’m saying is to totally switch to the language you are learning when speaking or practicing, and try not to compare to your native language. Learn as a toddler would from the ground up, so you’re not constantly trying to making comparisons as you speak.
Same for me learning english. ("The same had i too when i english learning was") Why put english in my A Levels? Dont ask - i got a F.
My brain: "this is english"
Also my brain: "no thats not"
...
My brain: "Yoda it is"
Exactly, Yoda it is reminding me of. 🤓
great, a lame star wars reference when yoda was inspired by actual cultures around the world
Fun fact "Jo da" in Danish is a phrase that means. something like "for sure"! (It's the opposite of "nej da", meaning "oh no", or the doubtful "no way?".)
Yoda’s German?
If you read the new testament, you'll find out that one of ancestors Jesus recalls from his family tree is called Yoda.
This absolutely struck me whilst learning german how much it sounded like 'old english' in my head and how polite the language actually is, it really is a beautiful language to listen to.
That is balsam for a German soul, thanks there for!
might be because old english is a western germanic language :D
but i can see that one might think german should have evolved since then in terms of grammar
And quite precise.
@@zombee0036 evolved or devolved? Tough question.
German has actually lost a huge amount of words in the past 150 years.
I have this to my husband shown. His face looked totally funny out! I was impressed from me, because I everything understood have! What for a funny video idea! It must difficult to film been to be.
damn hard one ... nice comment :D was easier to read word by word in german then actually read it in english :D
@@SkeeveTVR thanks! It’s really something how different the word order is to English, isn’t it?
Brillanter Kommentar, genial!
@@LaureninGermany yeah I know.
Sometimes I have trouble to do it right ... and then I do it the german way :D
An other german told me that at my EVS time in turkey that I spoke these english sentence "so german".
@@berndbrakemeier1418 oh, das gefällt mir! Danke!
40-ish years ago, as I was learning German, I decided that if I just used Shakespeare or King James syntax it would make a lot more sense. Now, hearing it out loud in English, I think I was right! Brilliant execution, by the way!
I do wonder how much closer Old English grammar is to modem German (and other Germanic languages).
Modern German has retained many features English lost after the Norman invasion. I took a semester of Old English in grad school. Having had 6 semesters of German as an undergrad made learning so much easier. Think of old English as a funky dialect of German and it'll start making sense.
@@SalK-LS It's much closer. Though if we're talking about Shakespeare or King James bible, it's early modern English, technically ;)
Thou hast understood halfway - it isn't the syntax of early modern English that carries over but certain morphological patterns and lexical items, like the subject-verb combo at the beginning of this sentence and the use of the to be as an auxiliary verb. The syntax of Shakespeare is hardly more like German than contemporary English on balance.
There we have the salad. Nalf speaks English like a German now.
No, but seriously: How did your brain feel after filming this video? It must have been a complete mess.
I believe I spider. Me stand the hairs to mountain.
So some crazy! 🤦
@@Nikioko I believe I am spinning!
I believe yes it hooks! That makes them so fast nobody after!
In Norwegian it would be "There have we the salad"
As a dutch girl, this is probably how I spoke english when I first started learning. It sounds really natural to me
I heard Dutch is closer to German than English. Though, I heard Dutch is easier than German, but I think the word order ressembles German. German is complex, but I know some because of German grandparents. German dialects vary a lot too. Swiss German is pretty hard to understand. I heard even German people from Germany have trouble understanding Swiss German. So people use standard German for business and travel. If you’re Dutch, you can probably understand Afrikaans, as I heard it’s an older sounding variation of Dutch.
Dutch is like if a hippy Berliner married a sheltered kid from Missouri and gave birth to this strange hybrid
That reminds me of the Asterix comic books, with German translations.
Whenever they had foreign characters visiting in the Gallic Village (e.g. from Iberia, Britannia), they used their sentence structure to convey the accent.
Or they used the fraktur font for the Goths, and hieroglyphs for Egyptians …
They even did that during their daily hot water hour !
I loved Asterix in Britannia. "Das ist unhöflich, ist es nicht?"
@@katjachrist5618 "Es ist köstlich, ist es nicht?"
@@katjachrist5618 😆😆😂 herrlich
@@katjachrist5618 Lasst uns schütteln die Hände! 😂
This is absolute genius. You have done so well speaking with such fluency and rhythm! It is like listening to a weird foreign language and then suddenly realising that you actually understand every single word. I was struggling to follow the conversation the first time round, but watching it the second time, I had already tuned in really well, almost scary 😆
Now make a reverse one. A video in German which is spoken like English.
That would be funny. They could change every noun to being a neuter so only Das.
@@pjschmid2251 Doesn't "the" come from the masculine article sē? The neuter article became the word "that".
@@-cirad- I don’t think so. I was saying Das because English is non-gendered. When I looked up the etymology of the word it says "Originally neutral nominative, in Middle English it superseded all previous Old English nominative forms" so it was always neutral.
At first I was going to say that would just be me trying to speak German, but then when I tried to actually write that in German with English sentence structure, I couldn't figure out how to do it. 😆
I think it would be: Das war nur sein mich versuchen zu sprechen Deutsch.
Maybe? The verb conjugation is throwing me off
That would mess me up permanently, I'm afraid. For example, "Weil ich bin alt" doesn't sound *that* wrong to me (the weil vs denn thing). And every so often I hear Germans mess that up too!
Oh man, that was awesome and so true! As an English speaker (American), learning the German structure was so difficult (still is) to get used to. Love the effort, especially by Laura as a native German speaker. Keep up the good work, love your stuff!
You don't have to.
It is enough for an Englishman in Germany or as a German in England to wear a T-shirt with the inscription "I love Master Yoda".
And simply continue to use your usual sentence structure in the foreign language.
Because believe me, if you're not linguistically gifted and suddenly have to use English grammar, it's no less difficult.
@@danielmcbriel1192 thanks Daniel, great advice!
Interestingly, if you're a coder geek, it's a bit easier to learn, because you usually end up learning something called "postfix notation." It's a more efficient way for computers to process arithmetic. So 2 + 4 becomes 2 4 +, and (3 * 6) / 9 becomes 3 6 * 9 /.
Makes me wonder if the native German brain end up more efficient at parsing sentences.
This is one of the best things iv seen in a long while haha, finally native english speakers get a glimpse of what a german brain has to handle when translating inside our german brains :D
I can't imagine how difficult this. must have been to write the script AND speak those sentences without screwing it up completely . Well done, and absolutely hilarious. Mark Twain would appreciate your excellent efforts.
This is hysterical! Such a great idea for a video. It's no wonder it's taken me so long to get the sentence structure right.
Cringe. Why could I and everyone else learn English in school easily?
This sounds like Old English,like a Shakespeare work.
Shakespeare was Middle English actually
@@ajrwilde14 Actually, Shakespeare was early Modern English. Chaucer was late Middle English.
It sounded like a Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. Well done!
Shakespearean proximity is not an accident. Old English and Old German were very close. I can understand quite some part of it and in Shakespearean times there were still some grammar features preserved from Ye Olde English that are similar in German. Vocabulary has changed though under the influence of French.
That is why we Germans love Shakespeare so much. The last Englishman who was able to express himself reasonably. The rest is silence!
"What light through yonder window breaks?"
Modern English is for most parts older English spoken like its French with some minor (readjustments later). Prior to that English used a word order that was extremly close to the German one.
@@nacaclanga9947 True. The further back you go in English, the closer it gets to Modern German in its lexicon and syntax, because German is probably the most conservative of the major West Germanic languages, with Icelandic having that crown on the North Germanic side. That is why some constructions in English that would resemble German sound archaic or poetic to anglophones, especially the constructions with the adverb or object before the verb and the subject right after it. Such constructions would be perfectly fine in German but perhaps ‘incorrect’ in Standard English.
Me hearing the English with German grammar: "This makes absolutely zero sense"
Me reading the German subtitles with the same grammar: "Ah, that clears it up! So much more sensible!"
There have you but a funny clip made! 😂 Has me really enjoyed. Therefore get you immediately a thumbs to up. 👍
My dear mister singing club, Denglish on a master's level. But let's leave the church in the village, it must be hell to talk like that as a native speaker.
So Yoda is German after all. 😅
Some parts even sounded Shakespearean.
Actually, Yoda always Japanese grammar is using.
The same thing said I... 😉
@@Cau_No Actually, most of the time he speaks with proper English grammar, only occasionally the word order change is thrown in. Those just stick in your memory more.
@@silkwesir1444 And that word order resembles the Japanese one, with the verb always at the end. (I also learned Japanese)
It is assumed, because George Lucas was a great fan of Akira Kurosawa, he did not just get the ideas for the story from one of his movies (The Hidden Fortress), but also this character trait.
This is so good, Nick! Well done! I hear this sort of English every day from my 5 year old daughter. We moved to Germany when she was 3, so she had a good base of English but has since become more fluent in German. She now tries to use her English and it's all in the German word order. 😂
🤣🤣🤣👌
Awesome idea!!! Well executed and I’m sure you three had a lot of fun putting this together!! Keep‘em coming 🤩
Every German has that one friend who talks like this on vacation.
Finnish sentence structure is also so different.
For me as a German native speaker, it is super weird to hear English with German sentence structure :D.
This is hilarious! I often speak to myself in English like this when I'm practicing my German syntax :) This is why it's so hard for an English speaker to understand German when spoken too quickly. By the time you've rearranged things in your head to make sense, the next sentence is already being spoken and you're missing what's being said. Ugh!
Exactly!! I've been learning German for a year now. Good luck asking a native German speaker to explain grammar rules! They just say that's how they normally speak, they don't know WHY! 😭😭😭
That sounds like someone who learned English at school 40 years ago and hasn’t used it since.
Hm but not even passively through music
@@3HR3NGR4B You have naturally right. You have it correct understood. 👍🏼
I apologize if this has already been addressed in previous comments. This is absolutely going to be an excellent educational tool for English speakers learning the German language! Herzlich Danke!
Thanks to Laura, Nick and Mikey for showing me, that my English skills could actually be way worse :) ! That's a new one on me. You guys just made my day
@Sarah Hodgins I got curious about that, thinking the same. But everything I see on line is that while Anglo Saxon was more free with word order because of inflection, for the most part it was subject verb object, just as it is now. So I wondered if some other languages like Old Norse or Frisian account for the difference between English and German... not so much, at least from a very quick and non-scientific tour of the Googleverse.
@@blindleader42 Yes old Frisian changed old English to Middle English
@@ajrwilde14 Um, what? Frisian was one of the _distant_ ancestors of Old English before the invasion of Celtic Britain by various tribes from that part of Northern Europe. I'm 100% sure Middle English is mostly a result of Norman French with a fair bit of vocabulary from clerical Latin.
O my, this is so mind wobbling! I admire the two of you, your fluency and easiness speaking English with that German sentence structure. I couldn’t wrap my head around it!
I don't even want to imagine how many takes you had to go through to finish this video 😂
my gosh, i felt like I just unlearned English watching this...
This is the first time that I no subtitles need but them even in two languages get.
Absolut genial. Zum Totlachen. So schwer umzusetzen und sich nicht dauernd zu versprechen. Wie immer ein Highlight.
basiclly you spoke old english and that maks totaly sense when you hear yoda speaking cause he lived for over 900 years
Wow! you have me one new theory given!
Since I started learning German not too long ago, this video left me EXTREMELY confused. I'm coming to grips with the way sentences are structured in German, but hearing English spoken this way was mind-boggling.
Again what learned. 😁
At last someone made this video...have been waiting for it for 10 years...
As a Dutch native speaker this is so familiar. A lot of Dutch people tend to use their native sentence structure when they speak English. There's even a word for it: Dunglish (a contraction of Dutch and English)
In german it's denglish
And yet English speakers can understand it and, unlike the Frnech, feel it impolite to correct you. Evenutally you end up chnaging English a little bit (for the the better)
It's horrible - I love it!
This sounds like someone doing a play that was written in the middle ages.
When 900 years old, German Yoda you will be.
I bought and watched Unicorn Town last night. Though I did know the outcome of the seasons (been a subscriber for years now), it was still fun to watch the story unfold in a feature length format. It was really wonderful to learn more about the players and staff, and how the entire team and town function like a family that cares about each other. Especially juxtaposed against the "professionalism" and money behind the other league teams, it was really refreshing to see. It's truly a David & Goliath type narrative! As for the filmmaking itself, you see skills improve as time marched on. That broken collarbone benefitted you in many ways, and it was only possible because the Unicorns program didn't give up on you that first year. Thanks so much for all your hard work on this @NALF
PS: Can't get over how young Nick and Cody are in the old footage. Initially I was like, where's Cody's hair?
That was so funny 🤣! "Have you a muscle cat?" - hahaha😂😂😂
Should sound: a muscle-tom-cat.
@@MarsOhr
neither, Kater doesn't refer to any cat and just happens to look the same.
"my English is under all pig" = Mein Englisch ist unter aller Sau"
"not the yellow of the egg" = "nicht das Gelbe vom Ei"
This was surprisingly amusing :-)
But it interestingly reminds of old, or formal, English
Years ago I for a german company worked. Even though we were in amerika, I was with germans surrounded. At home my sentence structure in english was in german constructed. My wife had many complaints made. It took special effort on my part to this habit break.
When I was young, there was a popular American song about a Pennsylvania dutch girl sending her mother off on a train trip. Among the words were "Throw mama from the train a kiss, a Kiss".
Clever, huh ?
Lol cute how you tried it but this isn't german sentence structure at all 😅 no offense it's just funny
@@ehmha3641 it's just throwing Mama from the train in the first place. A kiss at the end. Where's the problem?😜
@@ilsekuper3045 I was not refering to this but rather to his own words. Like they don't make any sense in german at all😅
@@ehmha3641 no, its Germlish.
@@williamhitchcock6265 nah
This. is. brilliant. period. Wow, you guys have done an amazing job. The idea behind the video is absolutely great. Kudos to you guys! Please make more of these. :D
This was absolutely hilarious and amazing!! Excellent job!! At the end, even Mikey seems to be getting Germanized!
Thanks that you bloopers put in have!
I have everyday for the past 8 months German learning. I have a day off not taken. I walk seriously around the house myself like this talking.
I almost wet my pants when you said that the pretzel tasted you well. 😂
Loved this! What would have made it perfect would be using "Thou" for "Du" and "You" for "Sie" So 0:09 would be "Hi, good morning, hast thou good slept?"
1:03 i cannot hear either english or german, my brain just turns to mush when she speaks.
When my husband not anymore knows how you a German sentence build, then speaks he like Yoda! It helps him much
Brilliant idea and execution!
Love this!
That is EXACTLY how my daughter talks thanks to being raised bilingual! And the crazy thing is that I don't even notice anymore! 😆🙈
And it goes both ways...Example: "Mama, das ist NICHT EIN Käfer, das ist ein Wurm"...her aunt starts cracking up while I'm dumbfounded as to why she's laughing hysterically.
da kann ich aber auch nichts falsches erkennen. in der Umgangssprache klingt das in diesem Zusammenhang korrekt.
Oder bin ich schon infiziert. Ich hatte einen englischen Mann ? Ich glaube ja, nachdem ich es jetzt 5x gelesen habe.
Habe mir bisher
nie Gedanken darüber gemacht, dass sich mein Satzbau vielleicht im Laufe der Jahre etwas verdenglischt haben könnte.
Vielen Dank :-))
@@sandrarogerson364 nicht ein= kein. Es ist KEIN Käfer. 😅
Du bist definitiv auch " infiziert" mit dem Denglisch virus! 😆
okay richtig wäre, das ist nicht ein Käfer, das sind zwei Käfer :-))
@@sandrarogerson364 "kein" anstatt "nicht".
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 I am literally with laughter on the floor rolled! 🤪🙃😆
Thank you, this was a great amusement!
This was a good video. Finally. Many other recent videos on your channel have interesting titles and thumbnails but they have no clear conclusion/ purpose.
Oh man that was amazing, can't imagine how much work (and fun) this must have been to make...
Personal note. Around 1:00 there's an odd bench in your video.
I saw this in Melk just west of the Marktplatz under the Stift. The old post office (kind of) now Hotel-Restaurant zur Post. Just a little more west of that is what I seem to recall in 2017 was a theater or Kino or some such. In front of it was a concrete bench that photographs on display at that site also depicted when we were there. It is plush. Overstuffed plush. And completely in concrete. And as per the photos it's been there for over a century. Wow!
Now can I neither German nor English speak!
This sounds absolutley like Shakespeare
You have that really well made. I had no problems this whole story to understand. Greatlike clip and I congratte you.
mikey looks like hes using all his brain power to put the words in the right(wrong?) order which is fair
I have already seen the video a week ago and have blown away with laughter (without subtitles, even for me as a German really hard to understand). And just again in a reaction video.
But I'm still waiting eagerly for the making of and the outtakes!
There must be a lot of them.😄
As someone who grew up bilingual, I see nothing wrong in this video, sounds just like me when I speak
LOL Thanks for the big smile you put on my face.
As a Spanish native speaker this was hard but funny! My brain got crazy! i could understand the main idea of the phrases but I couldn't repeat them. In Spanish the SOV order exists but just in poetry and questions (like French, for example). Also, we can do other kind of inversions if we want to emphasize something, but seeing that in English was other story.
"I like super with pleasure one!" 🤣🤣 never gonna say it any other way!
I am a Californian who has lived an hour north of Schwäbisch Hall for about 6 years now. I came to the conclusion that one really needs to learn to THINK this way to really know German. I was calling it Yodatalk, because of Yoda's habit of messing up word order. These days I am working on a Harry Potter dual-language book that shows each sentence in English, German, and Yodatalk. People don't seem to see the value, probably because there is none, but it really makes the German clearer to me.
There is probably heresy in mixing Harry Potter and Star Wars this way, but I don't mind.
I intend to check out your new movie after we wrap up our summertime activities. Best wishes from Höpfingen.
P.S. I've now read through the comments. Seems like EVERYBODY hears Yoda.
Is this the video that will go viral and take NALF over 100K subs?
Having two bilingual teenagers at home I'm so used to this kind of language mix up that it felt somewhat normal, just that my brain needed to switch from Greek/German to English/German.
Most pronounced sentence in this house: "Mama ich bin langweilig" (kann entweder heißen "ich habe keine Lust", oder "mir ist langweilig"). Auf griechisch ein Wort: "βαριέμαι".
Na please, it goes. English can quite normal sound when competent people it speak.
😂👍🏻
1:13 The cut bathtub as bench 😂
Love it! I teach English at a Realschule in Germany and this is exactly what I have to deal with every day. I call it "Grafschafter Englisch" but I did not know that it was also spoken outside Grafschaft Bentheim.
As a english speaker learning german its so confusing, epsecially when you learn the formal words and they started using informal words which i do not recognise lol
That reminds me of the book(s) from the 70ties/80ties by Gisela Daum "Filserbriefe" where a German Gisela wrote letters to her English penpal informing him on her daily life and world politics in exactly the same Denglish. 😂Fun to read.
Saw "Unicorn Town" yesterday - great one! The German small town approach on American Football, I really enjoyed that.
I never had any trouble with German word order. Yes, it can be vastly different to English, but everything is still there, so I came pretty easily to me. It’s easy to understand German word order *in German*.
But now this? This is absolutely bewildering.
In my third year of German class we started to do this, but only made it 3 or 4 minutes. As I was listening to this I kept thinking, “this has got to be much easier in German.”
What a funny idea .I really had to listen closely to understand .loved it.
"When you oatmilk have, prefere I this." OMG.... this is actually helping me learn German.
Now, 10 years english training were thrown out of the window after watching this.
Super, mein Kopf platzt gleich. Das habt ihr echt großartig gemacht.
That's actually a technique to easily learn a language developed By Vera F. Birkenbihl. One basically starts with texts in the native language but with word-for-word translation of the a text in the target language to get a feeling for the foreign language (and learn syntax/grammar as a side-effect).
You write of Birkenbihl. I heard her name for the first time just today, after showing a friend how I study German using word-for-word translations/interpretations. I didn't understand exactly what he was saying about Birkenbihl, and she has no English Wikepedia page, but there is a German one, and I intend to read it through and find out about her.
"Vocabulary learning is forbidden". Pretty amazing method.
th-cam.com/video/2sa0b2ieZMo/w-d-xo.html
Thank you both for bringing this up. This video has made me curious about whether you could use this sort of awkward literal translation as a way of learning a language. While listening to their dialogue without reading the subtitles, I found myself translating words into German almost automatically. That was pretty interesting. I’ll be reading up on Vera Birkenbihl now. Thanks!
@@joya5000 had two similar experiences with Italian. I really was mesmerized how much i actually understood.
That is where they got the inspiration for Yoda speaking - begun has the clone wars :).
😂😂😂😂 This is your best video yet!
I've been hardcore studying German for a year and I actually did this accidentally the other day.
I asked my sister what her new friend's last name was again. She responded, "It's Hogg."
My response. " Really? That's so funny to me that her Last name Hogg is."
Awesome idea and a great video! :D That screams after a second part, but other around.
Even without the outtake, it was wonderful. And now, perhaps some people will understand how weird English word order sounds to native speakers of German. Enough of being serious, you had me laughing all the way through.
PS I did plug the movie on my Facebook page and tagged you and the flick.
I just showed this video to an American friend who doesn't speak German and this was his response: "Funny! I don’t think I could ever speak German. It’s so confusing!"
So glad you did this. It’s the easiest way to explain the mental gymnastics to my friends I have to go through when speaking German. 😂
Wow, that must have been so hard for you to do! I sometimes do this to annoy some english speaking people I know (especially my englich coach...). 😅
I never realized this before, but that actually sounds a little like Yoda is taking.
Again what learned...👍
I’m English and this direct translation is how I learn. I understand all the spoken but that’s because I’m so used to reading old books and Middle English that all this makes sense. If as an English speaker you can’t understand this video by just listening, you have no hope of learning German other than to just parroting sentences and never being able to construct them or understand anything other than the ones from your text book.
It’s really useful to learn this way of speaking in English because it makes constructing sentences in your head easier.
Ich habe genossen schauen dieses Video sehr viel.
Danke für machen mich lachen.
Congrats. You always find the best spots to shoot your videos and this content is super creative. Lots of love from a different part of Germany where lots of lamas live (alliteration).
Jetzt aber bitte auch in die andere Richtung !! Wird sicher auch lustig 😂
My husband speaks Dutch, which a Germanic language is. He speaks also German. He laughs still because he this video has seen. Mijn man spreekt nederlands, wat een Germaanse taal is. Hij spreekt ook Duits. Hij lacht nog steeds omdat hij deze video heeft gezien.
OMG, as fairly competent but still learning German speaker, this just cracks me up! Well done all!
Great!
We´re looking forward to seeing "Episode II" the other way round:
German spoken like English!
"i ask myself, who can the whole day like this talk can"
I sure can :D