I'm currently in the process of learning German and I've found the compound words to actually be really helpful. Being able to figure out what a word means based on the words it's made up of is much easier than having to learn an entirely new word. Great video!
Pro tip: It even works the other way around! Say you can't remember a certain word or it sits just at the tip of your tongue but won't come to your mind. Then you can almost always build a compound to describe what you mean instead and people will get it. A really useful word in that context is "Ding". For me, that's the beauty of our compounds: you can always invent your own on the spot. They don't have to be actual words that have been used by anyone ever before. People will still understand you (and sometimes might even find it hilarious) in the very same way you described: they simply deconstruct it and get it via the contextual relationship of its components. You can even use this trick to address things of which you don't know the proper term. You know these triangular bars used at supermarket checkouts to separate one customer's items from the next one's? The actual term is "Warentrenner", I think. But you can just call them "Kassentublerone" and everything is clear.
I encountered it the other way around with English. There are many special words for things. Every doctor has a (mostly) greek label. We have these, too, but mostly use descriptive labels like "Augenarzt" eye doctor. Similar for animals. Or words in German which mean similar things or variations based on some word. In English there often are completely different words for this stuff which you all need to learn and which don't give a clue about the meaning.
As a german its often funny, course if you know the words, the actors shout in the movies, you realise it often doesnt make sense. So the words seems to be only chosen course they sound more aggressive.
People say German sounds angry, and do exaggerated voices, but whenever I hear actual people speaking German it sounds like they are very carefully setting the words down. I'll say that I think people have gotten the angry impression from Hitler and Rammstein, and the stereotypes that emerged from that, and that now they are just hearing what they expect to hear, but they just reject that and insist that it sounds impossibly angry.
There is a good Video in TH-cam from feli from Germany about this. She also has one audio part in it, where you can hear Hitler 'regular' voice instead of the well known parts that sound military and harsh. Totally crazy to hear this difference.
YES, I've been learning German (and live in an area that has been the second one to get occupated by Germans, so I do have some bias against them), but never have I heard a not mad German sound aggressive.
@@One_with_bodieyea actually No real German speaks like the "germans" in movies And also the examples in the beginning, I couldn’t understand what these "Germans" were saying, they were just speaking in gibberish with a slight but exaggerated German accent If you would actually hear real Germans speak, you might still think it sounds harder than something like French But it definitely doesn’t sound as hard as in Hollywood movies
Some other great german words: 1. Kabelsalat: literally cable salad, meaning a mess of cables 2. Schadenfreude: literally damage joy, meaning the joy of someone else's suffering. 3. Verschlimmbessern: literally worse improving, meaning trying to make something better, and the result is worse than what it was in the beginning 4. Ohrwurm: literally ear worm, meaning having a song in your mind you just cant forget, so you always sing it in your mind
German doesn't really sound that aggressive. It's basically just because people's main exposure is a certain Austrian war veteran who had been exposed to poison gas.
@@tfaltermeieryou could roast the living shit out of me in english even in typical hitler way and it still won't sound as intimidating as it would in german
I have been learning German for 5 years and It really doesnt sound agressive, I quite like how the Vowels are so precise and each word has no tricks to how it is pronounced, It is such a logical language and that is what I love about it
I have a french roommate here in Germany, and she said it's the most pragmatic language there could be... there's a Cupboard (a Schrank) that cooling stuff (kühlt) so that's a Kühlschrank (fridge or verbatim: "Cooling cupboard"). Every time she doesn't know a word in German, she tries to describe it with other words, and stumbles into the word she was looking for by accident and it's hilarious. like Fußgänger Überweg (pedestrian crossing), or Schreibtisch ((writing table) desk).
That's a great indication that German is easy to learn. Words are clear and if you don't remember, you can figure it out fast or use other words. Both from Germanistic and Latin origin. @@Kanisterschaedel
@@svdwellenU vergeet de tweede, derde en vierde naamval 😅
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@@svdwellen The moon is female in English… not used these days outside poetry (like song lyrics), but it still is a thing. Of course, the sun is male. English way back had genders for words just like all the other germanic languages, and most still do. As do the romance languages.
I once had the chance to hear a poem, recited by a young German woman, and let me tell you that I was captivated, not because I understood what she was saying ( thank you for the subtitles for that ), but because she had this sweet way of pronouncing words, as if singing a lullaby to a child. So no, German is an aggressive language only for those who confine themselves to the past. Tschüs
@rickcharon :: I like the G-language precisely for its power and "aggressive" sounds. The extremely long words are very fascinating, yet, difficult for a non-speaker. Like any language and the vast differences between them ... when the time comes to translate Shakespeare's plays, there is a world of difference between everyday words, rhythms and inflections ; but, when the time comes for a dramatic and aggressive scene, the German language gives Shakespeare his power with words of force.
A language of the past? "Dearest creature in creation, Studying english pronounciation, I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse, corps, horse and verse..."
There is a reason why many popular artists and writers were German in the past. German is a complex, yet very vibrant language. It is honest, well-structured, playful, full of love, and also dark at times. Whatever you want to express, you can express. This is the beauty that lies hidden in it
No it can't. E.g. Bahasa Indonesia doesn't have a concept of time or singular and plural. You can express some by adding to the sentence extra words but singular and plural has to be guessed from context. "Bapak minum teh" - the father/s is/ was/ has been/ will be drinking/ drank/ has drunken/ will drink one tea/ multiple teas.
@@gulliverthegullible6667 Not really, there are words in German that does not simply exist in other languages. Of course, you are able to explain basically everything in all languages, but how you explain it may differ by language
@@yourDecisi0n then again, German lacks words that exist in other languages. I am German and fluent in English and Spanish, I also remember some of the French I learned in school. I find words in any of those four languages that describe better how I feel than the other three.
Hey, here's a re-comment: Honestly German is my 3ed language and I learned it in my mid-20s. And I think whoever thinks German is a harsh language has either watched a lot of TikTok/TH-cam/.... videos making fun of the German language or hasn't been to Germany or a REWE and heard the cashier's "tschüüöüöüöüöüöüöss" 😌
I learned German in school in Sweden. After I visited southern Germany, like Munich, and also Austria and Switzerland, I realized that German language could sound quite different. There are dialects sounding much softer and some r and auch sounds that are completely different pronounced.
Did you know for the German translation of Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t allowed to play himself because his accent was considered too rural?
Austrian and Switz German can be sometimes nearly Impossible to understand even for Germans because they have pronunciations that sound a bit like if you get strangled.
A friend of mine, who grew up in Germany, told me that the word formation is pretty literal. She told me that "Krankenwagen" (ambulance) is literally the combination of "sick" (krank) and "car" (wagen). I found it lovely.
Yes, I am intrigued to learn more German words at least...not sure if I want to deal with the grammar! One of my favorites is their word for birth control "anti-baby pills" Gotta love that bluntness!
Yup, when you feel krank, you take the Krankenwagen to the Krankenhaus (hospital) to see the Krankenschwester (nurse) in the Krankenflügel (hospital wing) 😂
@@minngaelI don't blame you, I've been studying this language for like half my life and the grammar still gets me. Though to be fair, I live in an area where there are practically no native speakers, so I don't get a lot of practice. I understand way more than I can speak. But I just love the language and despite how intimidating the grammar can be, I'd suggest you go for it.
Ironically enough English often takes on Latin words or words from other languages that then took them from Latin and well Latin did the same thing German does now.
Short answer: it doesnt. People just think it because celebreties who know some english always act like they are hitler when saying something in German
There's a recording of Hitler with his normal voice. The thing about the roughness of his speeches was due to the limitations of the tech of his era. He copied it from Mussolini and that guy too did it just so his voice could be recorded by very primitive tech during the 20's and 30's.
Did you even bother to watch this video that explains why it may sound harsh? I get that you're German and you want to try to discredit the fact that your language may sound harsh but blaming it all on people not having an accurate impression of what German sounds like is just wrong. I've lived in Germany and to me German just sounds more harsh and abrupt than other foreign languages. If you were born in Germany and that's all you know of course it's going to seem perfectly natural and not harsh but this is about foreigners impression of German, and yes, foreigners know what German sounds like aside from Hitler and screaming German celebrities.
Really don't understand why this myth persists. German sounds aggressive because people shout it in an aggressive voice that would make any language sound aggressive... I always found it rather beautiful and soothing.
In animated movies like Sing and Frozen, German accented characters sound friendly and goofy, yup! German has a high potential to sound aggressive beyond just because prejudice and people intentionally speaking that way. The "Ach"sounds, etc - the complex grammar, long words - can make it sound sweet and goofy or harsh and aggressive imo
I grew up bilingual, learning German and Hungarian as a child. My favourite German word is Geborgenheit. For me this word expresses a very deep sense of intimacy, feeling secure, like a parent lovingly carrying a child, who is slowly falling asleep.
Interestingly it's hard to translate the word because it's the noun of the (nowadays rarely used) verb "bergen" which means retreating to a safe location (originally meaning retreating to a castle on a mountain - mountain being "Berg" in German) and eventually turned into the meaning of securely storing/retrieving/housing something or someone. It contains the security aspect intrinsically and was given a more and more intimate meaning over time :)
Oh mein Gott! Ich hoffe das Ungarisch Deine Muttersprache war, denn wenn wir über die kompliziertesten Sprachen der Welt reden, erblasst Deutsch regelrecht im Angesicht der ungarischen Sprache!
@@maxnova9763 Technisch gesehen ist Ungarisch meine Muttersprache, denn dies ist die Sprache die ich von meiner Mutter gelernt habe. Ich sehe beide als Muttersprachen, da ich auf beiden Sprachen reden gelernt habe. Ich lebe seit fast 30 Jahren in Ungarn, mein Ungarisch ist deswegen besser, als mein Deutsch (viellleicht sieht es man auch hier... mein Deutsch ist ein wenig eingerostet), aber ich formuliere meine Gedanken bis heute auf beiden Sprachen.
I used to hate German, never thought I'd ever wanna speak it... then I found Faun, Wolfsheim, And One, and more via Pandora. That's when I realized how beautiful it _can_ sound, and I found myself wanting to learn it so that I could truly listen to all these magnificent songs I'd found. It's one thing to listen to it and be able to read the lyric translations, but it's another to actually listen along and understand. I'm not there yet, but I'm learning.
I can recommend you the band ASP, they do have some english songs but as the singer said himself (on bonus tracks from one album) that he loves the english language but that his own perfectionism blocks him sometimes because in english he can't reach always the high standard he has for himself.
I've been to Germany, and as an American who is learning German, I can say it's very soft and not at all harsh-sounding when natives speak it in daily life. It is very fun to speak once you've gotten the hang of the new sounds, too, and after getting much more used to it, I love it.
Septembermorgen Im Nebel ruhet noch die Welt, Noch träumen Wald und Wiesen: Bald siehst du, wenn der Schleier fällt, Den blauen Himmel unverstellt, Herbstkräftig die gedämpfte Welt In warmem Golde fließen. Eduard Mörike German is such a harsh and aggressive language.
For some reason one of the most emotional sentences to me is "es tut mir leid" which means "i am sorry" but in its word for word meaning would mean 'its hurting me" or "its makeing me feel hurt" which so perfectly describes the feeling while also completely missing the point of it. :D
Afaik sorry comes from sorrow. I am sorry also means just means I feel bad. Also Leid would more closely translate to suffering. Hurt is better translated as verletzt. Example: Es tut mir leid dass ich dich verletzt habe= It causes me suffering that I hurt you.
I came back from a two week vacation in Germany and one of my favourite things was to listen to the German language spoken in public. I find it so intellectually fascinating and stimulating to my ears.
@@fureuropa-gegennwo1259 not at all the speakers tone were casual and free flowing not aggressive at all. Well except for that pesky security guard at the Green Vault in Dresden, but that’s another story.
My favorite test for German pronunciation is "Tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen" - if you can pronounce it correctly, you've mastered the language.
When I wanted to read this comment to my friend, I struggled with saying "pronunciation" but "Tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen" came perfectly out. Well. xD
Another beautiful word is "Habseligkeiten", basically meaning all the stuff you own, but if you take the word apart you have "hab" - "have" and "selig" - which means happy/blissful. So "Habseligkeiten" are the treasured things that you own that make you happy.
As an englishman i can Absolutely say germans do not sound agressive when they talk . Most Indian languages sound like they are always shouting and arguing with each other to me
My brother has a Masters degree in German. Our Great Aunt Pauline was from Vienna. He has always told me that German is not the harsh language people claim it to be. I am about to study German myself. I wish had done so years ago. I find myself rooting for German and hope that more people realize it is not the ugly language they have been led to believe it is.
Fast jeder Deutschsprachige, den ich kennengelernt habe, war echt leise gesprochen. Außer Frau Brost 😂 Sie hatte einfach eine natürliche laute Stimme Tut mir leid, wenn meine Grammatik stimmt nicht. Deutsch ist meine zweite Sprache 😅
I used to suffer from prejudice against German and Dutch/Flemish languages as a Belgian French speaker, it's sadly part of the culture I was raised in. But once I discovered the beauty of both languages and the cultures attached to them I literally fell in love. I even considered moving to Germany or to the Netherlands but I'm probably moving to Flanders. Knowing is a first step to love.
Souhlasím, pro nás to těžké být nemusí, jelikož náš jazyk byl němčinou ovlivněn (např.: "Knedlík" vznikl z německého slova "Knödel," což má stejný význam jak v ČJ, tak v NJ), ale pro ostatní země to může být stejně těžké, jako naše "ř." Translation to English for those, who don't speak Czech: I agree, for us it might not be difficult, because our language has been affected by German (for example: our word "Knedlík" became from the german word "Knödel," which means the same thing in both Czech and German), but for other countries, it can be difficult the same way, like our "ř."
@@TriggerTail I'm learning Czech currently and it took me 2 months to pronounce " ř " partially correct. I've been listening to many explanations by native speakers who made videos on "how to pronounce ř ". Most of them suggested, learners should say it like r and ž combined. So "rž". I'm still trying to get better, but sadly there're not as much Czech speakers in my area and less to none teachers. It's also hard to get one online, who happens to speak my native (German) fluently, to explain things much better. I made the experience that Czech is way harder for English natives then mine.
@@TheVirdra That is true, Czech is one of the hardest languages in the world. Fun fact: As a German, you can notice some of the words in Czech were created from German.
hi, english speaker here, i find the german language to be incredibly beautiful! in fact, i have been obsessed with trying to learn it for the past two years now. it was honestly heartbreaking to see all of these examples of people hating on the language in this video, because it is genuinely one of my favorite things. german is such a gentle, poetic sounding language, and i wish more people would just give it a chance so that they could see that.
I agree that getting your tongue round the German poetry is great. Du bist die Ruh, der Friede mild, die Sehnsucht Du and was sie stillt,...it's so beautiful and romantic. Gives me goosebumps!
Absolutely! I'm Canadian, so yeah... first (and pretty much only) spoken language, at least for me, is a less slightly bastardized version of English. I really wish I had taken the initiative to learn other languages in school. In elementary school, we did learn French (Canadian French that is...) not that I have retained much of it at all. In high school, I think German was still being taught along with a few other languages to choose from.
Even the Austrian painter had a normal speaking voice that did not sound aggressive, unlike his broadcast speeches. There's a TH-cam video with audio of AH talking to a Finnish general. It's worth a listen.
To be specific you are talking about the Hitler-Mannerheim tape where Hitler visited Finnish field marshal Mannerheim in June 4th, 1942 which was marshal Mannerheim´s 75th birthday.
I wouldn't call his conversational tone aggressive, but he was something of a natural stentor; his voice was dominant, penetrating, commanding. And I can imagine in a less ideal setting in private, the man could have been quite intimidating.
Верно. Я слышала записи Гитлера, его диалог с каким- то подчинённым .. была удивлена насколько красивый, глубокий, размеренный и чарующий голос у Гитлера, когда он говорит спокойно. Его голос был как гипноз.
As a native English speaker, German doesn't sound harsh, it's just an American Hollywood stereotype. And as an African whose story has always been told by Western media, trust me when I tell you that there are many western rhetorics that have minimal truths
I used to work with a German boss and didn't think he sounded aggressive at all. We talked about it once and he put it completely down to prejudice: "don't speak it like Hitler and it's fine."
As a native English speaker, I have always loved the way the German language sounds when spoken and looks when written. It was the first language I became interested in learning and led to my fetish for linguistics, in that I was so fascinated with the similarities between both Deutsch and English and the origins of the words in older languages.
@@TriggerTail I found that I did, indeed. It was the flow and structure of the sentences when spoken that I found most familiar, i.e. Das ist gut = That is good. or Was ist das? = What is that? Helped ease into it before all those massive compound words came up.
I'm Dutch and love the German language. Mostly thanks to German TV I watched as a child (Sendung mit der Maus, Hallo Spencer, Bud Spencer, sesamstraße, Löwenzahn.......) Und vielleicht auch, weil ich in der Provinz Limburg wohne und unser Dialekt der deutschen Sprache sehr ähnlich ist 😉
Für mich ist es ein Vergnügen holländisch zu hören, nicht nur zuletzt weil die Menschen einfach meistens so nett sind 😊 kennt man bei uns im Ruhrgebiet nicht mehr so 👍🏼
Ich habe in seit meiner Abschlussfahrt in Amsterdam, die Niederländische Sprache ein wenig für mich entdeckt.❤ Unteranderem auch, weil Plattdeutsch meine Muttersprache noch vor Hochdeutsch ist und ich dadurch einiges verstehen und lesen kann.😊
For me it's the opposite way 🙃 Came to the Netherlands 15 years ago, first for study and stayed for work/kids. I do speak Dutch fluently, but people cannot pinpoint where I'm from. They either say Limburg or Belgium, guess also depending on my Tagesform. Dutch is very cute in its own way, especially when you know German. I loved all those TV formats you mentioned, wehmütige Erinnerungen.
Prejudice is defintely the biggest factor, if not the main one. Whenever I hear people imitate German to mock it, their go-to 100% of the time is imitating Hitler, exaggerating the harsh sounds as much as they can. If you've ever heard a conversation between native German speakers or watched any kind of German media, you quickly come to realize that the language can sound surprisingly smooth and "normal."
@telynotofficial7350 That's fine by me, but some people don't have to go the extra mile calling the language "ugly" and "the language nobody wants and should learn"
That’s especially infuriating since the Hitler voice they imitate was his speech technique, if you listen to the recordings of the meeting between Hitler and Mannerheim, you‘ll hear the everyday Hitler.
If you think German sounds harsh it's because your only experience of german is an american basically doing an impression of Hitler. Noone talks like that.
@@marktwain5266 Ja. Schlachtenhausen bräut Bierkraut gerne. Aber. Muss es gestrammen sein mit Schniegenschnagen? Hodensack! Und hier noch ein Furz zum Abschied!
Growing up in Wisconsin, surrounded by and steeped in German culture and phrases, I've always loved the sound of German. I was lucky enough to spend a college semester in Munich, where I learned German on the streets. Music to my ears.
I remember someone who came to the USA (Miami) from Argentina to learn English, and they were SHOCKED when they stepped off the plane and everyone in Miami spoke Spanish lol.
In Munich they don't speak German. You learned the bavarian language. Similar in some parts,but not German. It's like your english and scotish or irish
@@amiromorningstar2913thats only partly true. Munich is in that aspect not Bavaria. A big chunk of the munic population is "zugereist" (immigrated) from other parts of Germany.
@@augustiner3821 I don't believe in that. Why should an average german like me live there? Wouldn't like to be around people that believe in mighty ghosts , that's cringe and crazy
German can be incredibly precise in joining metaphorical ideas jotted into one word, such as mutterseelenallein (left alone with your mother's soul), mucksmäuschenstill (silent like a mouse without the slightest wee bit coming out of the mouth), auf Nimmerwiedersehen (for a nevereverseeingagain), hirnverbrannt (brainburnt) and dozens more.
That's irrelevant to how it sounds to speakers of other languages. And it wasn't THE language of these things. At the peak of German contributions to philosophy, Britain was more dominant with France not far behind, and at the peak of German literature, the Russians, British and French were probably more influential. Sure, German was a world leader in these things, just like they were a world leader in making watches, but they were still behind the Swiss and the British in this respect. Either way, German sounds aggressive to many speakers of other languages due to the phonological system, particularly regarding harsh phonemes, choppy prosody and deeper pitch. Russian and Arabic does too, and both contributed greatly to the fine arts and the sciences. In fact, we wouldn't have had the Enlightenment without the Arabs, so your argument that German cannot sound harsh because they are a very civilised nation does not logically follow.
@@davegibson79 Err... Let's see... Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, ... Then Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann, Hilbert, ... Then Kant, Hegel, ... Then Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, ,,, They all wrote in German, so if you wanted to read what they wrote, you'd have to read German. And read they did. Peeps spoke at least two languages back then, bourgeoise and aristocrats that is, but who else read anything at all back then? German didn't sound harsh to them. They read it just fine. Now to make this clear, because peeps tend not to connect the dots themselves, do notice that Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Einstein made huge breakthroughs no one else could even foresee. Muricans had to send Oppenheimer to Germany to learn Quantum Mechanics. Oppenheimer himself being German. Or Boltzmann being German too, no one understood his Statistical Mechanics so the guy hanged himself. Then, who would you compare to Gauss? Or Dirichlet? Or Riemann? Yes, there were Euler, the Swiss, and Cauchy, the French, but that is it. Gauss and Riemann started working on curved spaces when no one believed space can be curved. Russian literature? It is an easy reading compared to Germans. Then Kant started the revolution in philosophy by his Copernican Turnabout: it is not that object revolves about you, instead you actually revolve around the object, so that observing something from different angles empirically is superior to seeing just one side of something, thus killing religion and metaphysics in a single sentence, paving the way to empiricism that then spawned the english clones. And... Arabs you say? What on Earth did they do? There was some breakthrough about primes, and some Arab guy completed some proof of Euklid. However, The Euklid proof was just the last step, Euklid did everything leading to that last Theorem, which is strange, since it follows logically right away, and the Arab guy who did that infinite series - well, Indians did exactly that some 500 years before. What on Earth did Arabs do? The crazy schizophrenic psychopath killed all the smart Arabs who naturally wouldn't join his cult, so when you look at the world IQ map, the lowest IQ regions today are all muslim countries. Wikipedia has one world IQ map I believe. Muslims did the opposite of the natural selection. Natural selection kills the weak and the stupid, leaving the strong and the smart alive. Islam did the opposite: the strong and the smart wouldn't join in, but the weak and the stupid did join in. So the muslims killed the strong and the smart. Finally, sounding harsh is subjective. English is even worse in that regard, because the English growl as they speak. The ancient Greeks would certainly called them barbarian - the ones who bark when they speak. And don't get me started on French! :D
Except Spanish (specially Latibamerican) we sound as if we were singing in a very high pitch, expanding every intermediate vowel. And really mean it with the end point. We exaggerate the “p” and the “t”
Well it basically is a word which can mean many words considering the context. It can mean "it is", or "for sure", or "still". Context is all here, but it is translateable all of the times.
Nicely done. As a newbie to german language i find it wonderfully well structured, enabling one to express the subjectivity quite clear. Altgough the learning curve is other than i imagined :)). Heute hab ich "Fern" entdeckt lrute. Prima ist es👌🙌
I think part of it is also just where people hear German for the first time. Usually, it's not gonna be a casual conversation, at least not if you live in the US. Instead, the first instance of spoken German you ever hear might be something like Hitlers meltdown in "Der Untergang". And even before that,you might have heard parodies, maybe you'd have watched that episode of South Park or something simular. That aside, as a german myself, the funniest thing about native english speakers trying to pronounce german words is the fact that they seem to have an innate drive to want to combine several syllables into a single sound. I think it's in part because they're trying to emulate that thing you get in english where some vowels are actually silent and actually just change the sound of the previous word (for example, an -e at the end of most words). But german is actually far simpler than that. All you need to do to at least get somewhat of an approximation of correctly pronounced german is to take it slow, read one syllable after another and never assume that any letter is silent. Just take it step by step, instead of trying to just skip across as many syllables as possible whilst aiming for the ending.
When learning a new language, people don't have any knowledge and experience yet, so they will pronounce it in their native way. In case of English speakers, that combination comes from their own illogical spelling mess. For instance the word "thought", where half the letters are not pronounced. But German isn't just "letter by letter" pronunciation. German does have combos which produce certain sounds "ei, sch, st, ie, chs, ch"
@@LS-Moto It does have combos, and sure, some of them are tricky to pronounce, but they still don't require you to read the letters out of order. Besides, most of them have an english counterpart or actually occur in german leanwords. If you know how to pronounce the Sch in Schadenfreude, then it follows that you can also pronounce the one in Schneeschaufel. Even if you don't know how to pronounce a combination, you can still get pretty close if you just respect the order of letters and syllables. I feel like a lot of english speakers just panic when they are asked to pronounce a lengthy german word and come up with a jumbled mess instead of actually trying to guesstimate how it might sound.
It’s funny to me as an English person learning German. I’d love to know what we sound like, I’ve worked so hard on my pronunciation that I can normally pronounce things really well when I know the word. But… things like „Fräulein“ or „Häuser“ though, anything with „äu“ still throw me off… Also recently I was corrected on „Schwerer Sack“ I pronounced the word „Sack“ like „tsack“… No idea why but my English brain could not hear the difference between S, Z and Ts. My friend said Sack is a soft S. (to my brain S is s) but he meant Z! The zzzzz noise like the boys name Zack! I think my brain couldn’t compute the change from pronouncing „Schwer“ to „Sack“ for some reason. (Reading it in a Game and seeing two capital S‘s together confused me basically) 😵💫 That was a funny moment to me when he explained it and I finally understood and practiced it and got it right. Another one I had was „Ameisen“ (Ants) and „Weizen“ (wheat) I use to switch the „ei“ the other way around. Surprisingly learned my W‘s to V‘s, V‘s to F‘s quickly too 👀
@@undeadwerewolves9463 Please don't say Fräulein. This is old German for an unmarried woman. Today, it is incredibly rude to adresse a woman with that. So be aware of that. Use Frau instead.
@@undeadwerewolves9463 That's really interesting to read, thank you. I find it a bit surprising that äu out of all things is giving you difficulties, since that's a sound that also exists in english, in the form of oi/oy and nearly pronounced the same as the much more common eu. Then again, just looking at the involved letters, it is a rather unintuitive that they would produce this particular sound, and slightly odd things that don't quite make sense tend to be one of the most common things to trip you up when you're learning a new language.
@@TheGreenPig321 True - a few of my colleagues here are native Arab speakers with a very high level of proficiency when it comes to German. With some of them the only thing that is the tell tale sign is using "sch" instead of the soft "ch". In general though Arab seems to be a fairly good base to learn solid German pronounciation.
@@goonhoongtatt1883German grammar is very tricky for native English speakers. For an English speaker, Spanish will be the easiest language to learn, only taking at most 3 weeks to master Spanish grammar and Speech.
I fucking hate it when my friends ask me to speak German and then make fun of the language (they don't make fun of me don't worry) no one would ever mock a language like how people mock German, even though it is one of the greatest languages in my opinion
Yeah, German has been mocked a little too much, all that's said about it is a lie, it's a great language, true, it can be difficult, but when you'll learn it, it is great to know.
@@Flutter_Dragonz In the UK or America, they don't really focus on another language. Sure, they might have it for a year, but that's about it. Non-English speaking countries learn English for like 7 - 10 years. That's quite the difference.
I'm an Indonesian who learning German. It's a wonderful language. I'm surprised that some words in German sounds familiar in my Indonesian ears, such as "Tante" and "Hemd". Well, German had the same language family with Dutch, and Indonesian borrow several Dutch words, so it's make sense that it sounds similar. BTW, is "Fern" also a German word? It means "distant", right?
I dont think so, they explained already. German colonies in the Pacific were what is now Papua New Guinea, the Salomon Islands and Samoa@@TobyGerstenecker
My mother is German and I grew up in a bilingual household. Whenever I hear my mom talking on the phone to relatives & friends in Germany, she sounds graceful, clear, and almost delicate. Not at all aggressive.
ich liebe die deutsche Sprache und ihre Nutzung. Allein die Möglichkeiten sich damit lyrisch auszudrücken ist so wunderbar. Nicht umsosnt die Sprache der Dichter und Denker genannt.
7 หลายเดือนก่อน +7
Die Sprache der Denker ist es, weil es auf Englisch schwerer ist, einen Satz über eine ganze Buchseite zu "strecken". Niemand ;-) macht Schachtelsätze so gut wie wir. :D
@Tatsächlich kann man deutsche Texte auch in kurzen Sätzen formulieren. Und gerade bei technischen Sachverhalten sollte und kann man das machen. Das hebt die Verständlichkeit enorm. 😉
My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch, and German words and phrases were common in our household. I never thought of them as being harsh or aggressive, simply expressive in a way that wasn't English. German is uniquely it's own expression.
Linguist in training here (I only have one semester under my belt rn, but I saw an opportunity to nerd out and just couldn't resist), and so I'd like to give some feedback on the linguistics part of the video: First off, the section about morphological anomalies, specifically the infinitely recursive nature of composition, is great. No notes. Furthermore, you correctly described the phonological process by which vowel-initial words in German are often subconsciously preceded by a glottal stop (also known by the name hard attack) and I would list this among the factors contributing to the impression that German sounds harsh, so good job. :) However, I think your section about guttorals doesn't tell the full story. Arabic for instance has a lot of velar and uvular sounds, but it doesn't get classified as aggressive-sounding to quite the same extent as German does, as far as I know at least. To make a long rant as short as I humanly can, the criterium I think you should've mentioned instead is the voicedness (Stimmhaftigkeit) of consonants. I'll elaborate if anyone asks me to, but right now I want to focus on my point, which is that whether or not a consonant is voiced in a word has a significant bearing on how softly that word is typically perceived by most. To exemplify: German has a phonological process which English lacks (just like hard attack), called final devoicing (Auslautverhärtung) which basically makes any word-final consonant devoiced, EVEN IF (and this is important), the orthography has it spelled with the voiced equivalent. For instance, the majority of native German speakers will, without thinking about it or paying attention to it, pronounce 'Staub' as 'Staup', but only if that [p] is at the end of the word. When it appears in the middle of the word, for instance as in 'staubig', suddenly the b remains a [b], but the new final "g" now gets devoiced and becomes [k] (edit: or it gets softened and becomes [ç], [staubich], as a word-final g so often does in German). Anyway, I hope this makes it clear what I mean. So yeah, that would've been my version of this script: two phonological processes (hard attack and final devoicing), which make German sound just a little bit less soft than English. And yes, this isn't the full story either, I'm sure there's phonological processes other than these two, but I'd say two is a decent number to get the idea across to an average audience of non-linguists without boring or overwhelming them with too many details.
Some very good observations were made here, but I do want to say that as a (non-native) Hebrew and Arabic speaker, I definitely have been told that both of these languages sound harsh and aggressive. I think the main thing driving this is definitely the cultural aspect. People's exposure to Arabic has been through not so great circumstances, and Hebrew is perceived by many to be a mix between German and Arabic (which it is not, but that doesn't stop people from thinking so). They do attribute Arabic's harshness to it guttural and pharyngeal sounds, but also to how they perceive speakers, much like with German and even Russian (being used so often for movie villains)
I agree. But there are a few more aspects and this make this video quite unbearable for me. He used an onomatopoeia as an example for a guttoral "fauchen" (to hiss) which literally is one of the most aggressive sounding words in German. I mean ... makes sense ... hissing is aggressive and harsh sounding. If he would have used everyday words like "achso" or "natürlich" he would have not been able to bring his point across, as they are actually very soft (like most words that have ch in it). Also he didn't speak properly while he was reading out the phrases. We . don't . make . stops . between . every . word . This . would . just . be . exhausting. Also if this was as distinct in German as he said in the video, he just could hava spoken normal German. People would have been able to hear it. But what makes me real mad is the display of stupid Americans bastardising German by not even saying one German word. But the lack of German they compensate with shouting. Also the rest of the world does not think that German is especially harsh and ugly. It's mostly English speaking persons and of them mostly Americans. That is hardly the rest of the world.
No it doesn't. Every example where German sounds harsh it's because people are SCREAMING the words at you. Like if you yell BUTTTERFLY at someone, they're not going to consider your speech beautiful.
Butterfly? What do you mean? It is called a Flutterby. Yes really. How on earth did that ever change to that lousy reverse lettered "Butter - Fly" ?? A fly in butter. WHAT!?!?
I remember my dad initially was disgusted when I told him that I was learning German because he thought it was harsh. But then, when we both visited Germany together, he actually changed his mind and thought the local Germans spoke softly.
You forgot the main reason: most peoples exposure to German isn't from a native speaker but overexaggerated bad guy screaming in media that often sounds incomprehensible to someone who actually understands the language.
Absolutely LOVE the sound of German. Es klingt gut zu mich! Currently learning it...and it is a pain but I'm one to not quit on anything I set out to accomplish! And I really love the video. Prost!
Finally, a good impression to change the famous stereotype. I started learning German 3 years ago and now I am studying software engineering in German. Although my whole school journey was in English, I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to learn and speak this beautiful and very veeery strong language. Not to mention, I have started giving German language courses too!
I just started learning German. My friends say that I'm crazy and should learn a beautiful and useful language instead, but I find German interesting. This video just made me more motivated to learn, thank you! I find he compound words really interesting. I recently learned birthday present is Geburgstagsgeschenk. They're really cool imo
Actually as a German I’m very confused how everyone else gets along without compound words. I was very sad when I learned some Turkish, tried it and everyone was like that’s not a real word 🙂 More Words are Geburtstagskind, Geburtstagsparty, Geburtstagslied
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit thats literally just two words dude the whole point of a compound word is it's two words combined. Hes not an idiot and two words with a space exist in german too.
@@JesusChristTheHoly didn't think Jesus Christ would be this hostile. Anyways, the main thing about compound words is that they take two words and combine their meaning. "Compound word" is indeed two words, but they essentially get used as if they were one. There's really no meaningful difference between "compound word" and "compoundword". It's just that the typical way to write in English is to keep the space between the two halves of what is essentially a compound word. You could easily do the same in German. "Die Waschmaschine" and "die wasch Maschine" would still be understood the same way (due to context that would be common knowledge if we wrote the way English gets written). Tl;dr: the difference between a compound word and two words that combine their meaning is the way you write them.
As a 🇳🇴, learning (and clumsily using) German back in the early 80’s opened up three main areas of experience over time - Linguistics, culture and time passed (social anthropology & history). Of course, they are merely aspects of a larger whole, but that’s the journey of life - slowly ingesting knowledge, then insights and maybe a little wisdom. We need to “speak” across boundaries and borders, for so many reasons… 👍
Another word we blatantly stole from germans and then applied our own nuance to is "gestalt". German is such a cool language - and I think the precision of your language keeps everyone very grounded. That's my experience of germans, at least.
Ich bin Engländer und ich liebe die deutsche Sprache. We're all cousins from over 1000 years. And I'm glad that a lot of people feel the same way. Any language when spoken in any form of angry tone is going to sound aggressive. I rage at games from time to time and I scare the shit out of my mates
I've been starting to learn German, and like my native English, I find it to be a very poetic language. To be able to take a complex concept and distill it down to a single word is a philosopher's dream, and German does this as well as any language, giving it a metaphysical beauty.
Ha! Im german and i love how french sounds when spoken by a native. Incredibly beautiful language. Not that i could understand anything y'all say after 6 years of learning french lol
Side note: the ß ("eszett") is a sharp, hissing s after a long vocal. For a sharp, hissing s after a short vocal we use "ss". I love how someone thought "our language is so complicate for non-natives ... let's make it easier by adding an extra letter."
I fiddled with a shortwave radio as a kid. Couldn't tune in much, but once, or was it twice, in the middle of the night I caught a program in German - women talking about opera. I still remember their voices were beautiful, even though I didn't understand a word.
I always thought of French as the most beautiful, romantic sounding language. And German as a cold, technical language. Having taught myself Mandarin Chinese, I note that one thing they have in common is the way they build new words by combining existing words. Both Chinese and German refer to an airplane as a flying machine, and an airport as a flying machine field. In a way, it is logical and keeps the vocabulary from exploding. BTW, my favorite German word is Schnitzel.
"Both Chinese and German refer to an airplane as a flying machine, and an airport as a flying machine field." - Not quite and not at all. Airplane: Flugzeug = flying _thing_ --- Airport: Flughafen = flight harbor/ port. Schnitzel comes from _schnitzen_ = to carve. Gives a hint to it's origin _Schnitt_ = a cut.
im embarrassed to say it, but to me the german language sounds kind of adorable… it’s tentative and soft and polite, and this is part of why I’ve tried learning some of it (just enough to show off)
Thank you! Have you ever heard German folk songs (not the marches...) such as "Ännchen von Tharau" or Schubert's Lieder? They are really soft and smooth, not aggressive at all.
Not really. In Danish we have the word "fyraften" which means exactly the same thing. It originated from the Middel Old German or Old Saxon word viravent, not the modern German equivalent feierabend.
I did German for 8 years in school. It's not an ugly language. People are just still influenced by WW2 propaganda. If all German you hear is from an angry guy with a moustache, no wonder you think all of it sounds angry. Listen to Goethe's poems or something for once. Watch some Mozart's operas. IDK.
You would be astouned how many people, especially Americans (I wouldn't know why) say that. I really dislike the video. He is German and used a stereotype and proved his point by showing the most aggressive content he could find. Including using the most aggressive examples like "fauchen" which is an onomatopoeia and has the purpose of representig a sharp, aggressive sound. It's hissing, hissing is aggressive that is the nature of that action and also the word. If he would have used "achso" oder "natürlich" as an example, which are words we actually use everyday, they would have sounded soft. Also, when our language would be this aggressive, why the need for emphasising glottal stops. It's absolutely correct, that we have them, but we absolutely do not use them between every word. That . would . be . exhausting. Cheers mate, I am glad that the overal opnion in this comment section is that it's not aggressive. It is so tiresome to hear that all the time with aggressive Americans yelling who knows what into your face.
This is a reupload. It came as a surprise to us that TH-cam wants us so to show authoritarian dictators with their clothes on.
😂
TH-cam is full of garbage with its censorship.
If their words and thoughts can't be contained at least their appearances might be I guess XD
If you want to make another video on a horrible language and no dictators, do Dutch.
lol
I'm currently in the process of learning German and I've found the compound words to actually be really helpful. Being able to figure out what a word means based on the words it's made up of is much easier than having to learn an entirely new word. Great video!
Pro tip: It even works the other way around!
Say you can't remember a certain word or it sits just at the tip of your tongue but won't come to your mind. Then you can almost always build a compound to describe what you mean instead and people will get it. A really useful word in that context is "Ding".
For me, that's the beauty of our compounds: you can always invent your own on the spot. They don't have to be actual words that have been used by anyone ever before. People will still understand you (and sometimes might even find it hilarious) in the very same way you described: they simply deconstruct it and get it via the contextual relationship of its components.
You can even use this trick to address things of which you don't know the proper term. You know these triangular bars used at supermarket checkouts to separate one customer's items from the next one's? The actual term is "Warentrenner", I think. But you can just call them "Kassentublerone" and everything is clear.
@@lonestarr1490 aus der Sicht habe ich das noch nie gesehen, vielleicht ist Deutsch doch schöner als man denken mag..
@@lonestarr1490 "Kassentublerone" OMG I'm dying of laughter
I encountered it the other way around with English. There are many special words for things. Every doctor has a (mostly) greek label. We have these, too, but mostly use descriptive labels like "Augenarzt" eye doctor. Similar for animals. Or words in German which mean similar things or variations based on some word. In English there often are completely different words for this stuff which you all need to learn and which don't give a clue about the meaning.
@@AnonymousTH-camr69 See, exactly what I said: you can do hilarious stuff with it :D
News flash: When you yell you sound aggressive, no matter the language.
Except in French, there you gonna sound romantic always 😂😂😂(jk)
@@Optimist-Nolan1 Clearly you never heard an angry Quebecois 😆
@@catchie-playsQuebecois is not real French!
Not Argentinians. lol che
As a german its often funny, course if you know the words, the actors shout in the movies, you realise it often doesnt make sense. So the words seems to be only chosen course they sound more aggressive.
People say German sounds angry, and do exaggerated voices, but whenever I hear actual people speaking German it sounds like they are very carefully setting the words down. I'll say that I think people have gotten the angry impression from Hitler and Rammstein, and the stereotypes that emerged from that, and that now they are just hearing what they expect to hear, but they just reject that and insist that it sounds impossibly angry.
There is a good Video in TH-cam from feli from Germany about this.
She also has one audio part in it, where you can hear Hitler 'regular' voice instead of the well known parts that sound military and harsh.
Totally crazy to hear this difference.
Exactly! Thanks for your comment.
exactly it doesn't sound angry or aggressive at all... it's no good for singing though
YES, I've been learning German (and live in an area that has been the second one to get occupated by Germans, so I do have some bias against them), but never have I heard a not mad German sound aggressive.
Rammstein mentioned 🦅🦅🇩🇪 FEUER FREI 🗣🗣
As a native German speaker I can tell you that German sounds harsh mostly in Hollywood movies
Boycott offensive films. Don,t pay to be insulted.
No it sounds hard. When you can speak a couple languages you hear the hardness of German.
Suuuuuuure
@@One_with_bodieyea actually
No real German speaks like the "germans" in movies
And also the examples in the beginning,
I couldn’t understand what these "Germans" were saying, they were just speaking in gibberish with a slight but exaggerated German accent
If you would actually hear real Germans speak, you might still think it sounds harder than something like French
But it definitely doesn’t sound as hard as in Hollywood movies
yes for example in marvel movies😂
Some other great german words:
1. Kabelsalat: literally cable salad, meaning a mess of cables
2. Schadenfreude: literally damage joy, meaning the joy of someone else's suffering.
3. Verschlimmbessern: literally worse improving, meaning trying to make something better, and the result is worse than what it was in the beginning
4. Ohrwurm: literally ear worm, meaning having a song in your mind you just cant forget, so you always sing it in your mind
I think Ohrwurm has been calqued into English as "ear worm," which basically means the same thing. Kabelsalat is very cool though, I like it
@@GlaceonStudios Ah, alright, didn't know that🙂👍
Schadenfreude roughly actually means damage joy
@@Groemfontein you're right, forgot about that Word haha
Interesting we call Kabelsalat "Rat's Nest" in English, far more metaphorical.
"Weltschmerz" was a word I needed to learn today. sigh.
I'm a german and i don't know this word 😂
@@der_nikolas das ist nicht dein ernst oder?😂
@@der_nikolas i agree 100%, hab das Wort noch nie vorher gehört xD
@@prodbysamir5855 Er ist wahrscheinlich 12, man lernt immer dazu.
Easy word, only 6 consonants in a row
German doesn't really sound that aggressive.
It's basically just because people's main exposure is a certain Austrian war veteran who had been exposed to poison gas.
You can talk like a SS officer in any language and it will sound harsh.
@@tfaltermeieryou could roast the living shit out of me in english even in typical hitler way and it still won't sound as intimidating as it would in german
this is the most untrue statement i have ever read in my entire life@@tfaltermeier
English by a drill sergeant is not an especially nice sounding language.
It does
8:48 "doch" is missing it is basicly a uno Reverse card
Existiert aber tatsächlich auch in anderen Sprachen :D
@@pearlflash4795 si zum beispiel
I have been learning German for 5 years and It really doesnt sound agressive, I quite like how the Vowels are so precise and each word has no tricks to how it is pronounced, It is such a logical language and that is what I love about it
I have a french roommate here in Germany, and she said it's the most pragmatic language there could be... there's a Cupboard (a Schrank) that cooling stuff (kühlt) so that's a Kühlschrank (fridge or verbatim: "Cooling cupboard"). Every time she doesn't know a word in German, she tries to describe it with other words, and stumbles into the word she was looking for by accident and it's hilarious. like Fußgänger Überweg (pedestrian crossing), or Schreibtisch ((writing table) desk).
That's a great indication that German is easy to learn. Words are clear and if you don't remember, you can figure it out fast or use other words. Both from Germanistic and Latin origin. @@Kanisterschaedel
Die Gabel
Das Messer
Der Löffel
So logical 😵💫
@@svdwellenU vergeet de tweede, derde en vierde naamval 😅
@@svdwellen The moon is female in English… not used these days outside poetry (like song lyrics), but it still is a thing. Of course, the sun is male. English way back had genders for words just like all the other germanic languages, and most still do. As do the romance languages.
German sounds aggressive, because you usually only hear it from comedians who think stereotypes by themselves are funny.
Listen to some sung Bach.
@@davidpowell3347 Listen to Beatles song sung in German. Profanity.
Frrr those comedians were not funny
Ahhhh nicht ganz, der Adolf ist auch a bissel schuld
Ahhhh not quite, Adolf is also a bit to blame
@@nickoblack8229 That is who those comedians are imitating.
I once had the chance to hear a poem, recited by a young German woman, and let me tell you that I was captivated, not because I understood what she was saying ( thank you for the subtitles for that ), but because she had this sweet way of pronouncing words, as if singing a lullaby to a child. So no, German is an aggressive language only for those who confine themselves to the past. Tschüs
@rickcharon ::
I like the G-language precisely for its power and "aggressive" sounds. The extremely long words are very fascinating, yet, difficult for a non-speaker.
Like any language and the vast differences between them ... when the time comes to translate Shakespeare's plays, there is a world of difference between everyday words, rhythms and inflections ; but, when the time comes for a dramatic and aggressive scene, the German language gives Shakespeare his power with words of force.
A language of the past?
"Dearest creature in creation,
Studying english pronounciation,
I will teach you in my verse
sounds like corpse, corps, horse and verse..."
There is a reason why many popular artists and writers were German in the past. German is a complex, yet very vibrant language. It is honest, well-structured, playful, full of love, and also dark at times. Whatever you want to express, you can express. This is the beauty that lies hidden in it
this
same can be said about any other language.
No it can't. E.g. Bahasa Indonesia doesn't have a concept of time or singular and plural. You can express some by adding to the sentence extra words but singular and plural has to be guessed from context. "Bapak minum teh" - the father/s is/ was/ has been/ will be drinking/ drank/ has drunken/ will drink one tea/ multiple teas.
@@gulliverthegullible6667 Not really, there are words in German that does not simply exist in other languages. Of course, you are able to explain basically everything in all languages, but how you explain it may differ by language
@@yourDecisi0n then again, German lacks words that exist in other languages.
I am German and fluent in English and Spanish, I also remember some of the French I learned in school. I find words in any of those four languages that describe better how I feel than the other three.
Hey, here's a re-comment:
Honestly German is my 3ed language and I learned it in my mid-20s. And I think whoever thinks German is a harsh language has either watched a lot of TikTok/TH-cam/.... videos making fun of the German language or hasn't been to Germany or a REWE and heard the cashier's "tschüüöüöüöüöüöüöss" 😌
who tf shops at rewe
@@nitolak du anscheinend nicht, Geringverdiener :D
Tschöööö mit ö
@@nitolak probably people which don't live under a stone
Made my day 😂😂😂
I learned German in school in Sweden. After I visited southern Germany, like Munich, and also Austria and Switzerland, I realized that German language could sound quite different. There are dialects sounding much softer and some r and auch sounds that are completely different pronounced.
I'm from Germany. Yet, I can't understand the people from the south, too... 😂 except the saarlandic dialect...
Did you know for the German translation of Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t allowed to play himself because his accent was considered too rural?
Bavaria is more conformity Austria and Switzerland than Germany 🤣
Austrian and Switz German can be sometimes nearly Impossible to understand even for Germans because they have pronunciations that sound a bit like if you get strangled.
oh ye the southern.... its like another germany for the germans in the north
A friend of mine, who grew up in Germany, told me that the word formation is pretty literal. She told me that "Krankenwagen" (ambulance) is literally the combination of "sick" (krank) and "car" (wagen). I found it lovely.
Yes, I am intrigued to learn more German words at least...not sure if I want to deal with the grammar! One of my favorites is their word for birth control "anti-baby pills" Gotta love that bluntness!
Yup, when you feel krank, you take the Krankenwagen to the Krankenhaus (hospital) to see the Krankenschwester (nurse) in the Krankenflügel (hospital wing) 😂
@@minngaelI don't blame you, I've been studying this language for like half my life and the grammar still gets me. Though to be fair, I live in an area where there are practically no native speakers, so I don't get a lot of practice. I understand way more than I can speak. But I just love the language and despite how intimidating the grammar can be, I'd suggest you go for it.
fellow helluva fan. nice
Ironically enough English often takes on Latin words or words from other languages that then took them from Latin and well Latin did the same thing German does now.
Short answer: it doesnt.
People just think it because celebreties who know some english always act like they are hitler when saying something in German
Yep, it's just a stereotype that came up this way.
Thats so true.
There's a recording of Hitler with his normal voice. The thing about the roughness of his speeches was due to the limitations of the tech of his era. He copied it from Mussolini and that guy too did it just so his voice could be recorded by very primitive tech during the 20's and 30's.
Jein.
Did you even bother to watch this video that explains why it may sound harsh? I get that you're German and you want to try to discredit the fact that your language may sound harsh but blaming it all on people not having an accurate impression of what German sounds like is just wrong. I've lived in Germany and to me German just sounds more harsh and abrupt than other foreign languages. If you were born in Germany and that's all you know of course it's going to seem perfectly natural and not harsh but this is about foreigners impression of German, and yes, foreigners know what German sounds like aside from Hitler and screaming German celebrities.
Battlefield 1 the German side sounds very nice and helped me see German in a new light.
There's a video showing the German background voice production for BF1, they really gave it their best
Ich liebe Battlefield 1. :) 👍👍
Damn. Now I'm installing BF1 again.
cause they got ACTUAL german natives to voice it and not americans shouting the 3 words of german they know
omg! I love it too! the Americans in BF1 are grating!
Really don't understand why this myth persists. German sounds aggressive because people shout it in an aggressive voice that would make any language sound aggressive... I always found it rather beautiful and soothing.
Insert The Office Thank You-GIF here. :D
thank you!!!! I agree 100%.
Trust me, dirtytalk in german is awful!
"Des geht gar net"
It's not a myth. Have you watched the video?
How many songs in German do you know?
Standard German without any accent or anything is rather beautiful
"Why German Sounds So Aggressive"
Short Answer: Propaganda
Long Answer: Anti German Propaganda by the allies.
German does not sound aggressive unless the person speaking is being aggressive.
And unless the Germans stop telling the world that their language is harsh. Don't know why they do it. I love the german language!
As in any other language 👍🏻
In animated movies like Sing and Frozen, German accented characters sound friendly and goofy, yup!
German has a high potential to sound aggressive beyond just because prejudice and people intentionally speaking that way.
The "Ach"sounds, etc - the complex grammar, long words - can make it sound sweet and goofy or harsh and aggressive imo
especially when austrian painter say it.
Arabic languages do actually sound harsh
I grew up bilingual, learning German and Hungarian as a child. My favourite German word is Geborgenheit. For me this word expresses a very deep sense of intimacy, feeling secure, like a parent lovingly carrying a child, who is slowly falling asleep.
yes Geborgenheit is a very beautiful german word, it makes me feel very cozy just saying or even thinking it
Interestingly it's hard to translate the word because it's the noun of the (nowadays rarely used) verb "bergen" which means retreating to a safe location (originally meaning retreating to a castle on a mountain - mountain being "Berg" in German) and eventually turned into the meaning of securely storing/retrieving/housing something or someone. It contains the security aspect intrinsically and was given a more and more intimate meaning over time :)
Oh mein Gott! Ich hoffe das Ungarisch Deine Muttersprache war, denn wenn wir über die kompliziertesten Sprachen der Welt reden, erblasst Deutsch regelrecht im Angesicht der ungarischen Sprache!
@@maxnova9763 Technisch gesehen ist Ungarisch meine Muttersprache, denn dies ist die Sprache die ich von meiner Mutter gelernt habe. Ich sehe beide als Muttersprachen, da ich auf beiden Sprachen reden gelernt habe. Ich lebe seit fast 30 Jahren in Ungarn, mein Ungarisch ist deswegen besser, als mein Deutsch (viellleicht sieht es man auch hier... mein Deutsch ist ein wenig eingerostet), aber ich formuliere meine Gedanken bis heute auf beiden Sprachen.
Geborgenheit ist wirklich ein schönes Wort. Magyarul úgy forditanám le hogy "meghittség".
I used to hate German, never thought I'd ever wanna speak it... then I found Faun, Wolfsheim, And One, and more via Pandora. That's when I realized how beautiful it _can_ sound, and I found myself wanting to learn it so that I could truly listen to all these magnificent songs I'd found. It's one thing to listen to it and be able to read the lyric translations, but it's another to actually listen along and understand. I'm not there yet, but I'm learning.
I can recommend you the band ASP, they do have some english songs but as the singer said himself (on bonus tracks from one album) that he loves the english language but that his own perfectionism blocks him sometimes because in english he can't reach always the high standard he has for himself.
Faun is in my opinion an amazing example how soft German can sound.
Du schaffst das :) zieh durch!
Could you read that?😂
Viel Erfolg beim Lernen :)
tbh, was not expecting to find Faun in these comments.
I've been to Germany, and as an American who is learning German, I can say it's very soft and not at all harsh-sounding when natives speak it in daily life. It is very fun to speak once you've gotten the hang of the new sounds, too, and after getting much more used to it, I love it.
Septembermorgen
Im Nebel ruhet noch die Welt,
Noch träumen Wald und Wiesen:
Bald siehst du, wenn der Schleier fällt,
Den blauen Himmel unverstellt,
Herbstkräftig die gedämpfte Welt
In warmem Golde fließen.
Eduard Mörike
German is such a harsh and aggressive language.
Find ich auch
SEPP TEM BERRR MORR GEN! 😂😂
Back in school we had to choose an autumn themed poem to learn and 90% of the class chose that one because it was the shortest.
This is a really beautiful poem. I didn't know it before, though, I am an Austrian. Haha
Hey, danke, dass du diesen Gedicht mit uns geteilt hast. Gefällt mir echt gut
For some reason one of the most emotional sentences to me is "es tut mir leid" which means "i am sorry" but in its word for word meaning would mean 'its hurting me" or "its makeing me feel hurt" which so perfectly describes the feeling while also completely missing the point of it. :D
Afaik sorry comes from sorrow. I am sorry also means just means I feel bad.
Also Leid would more closely translate to suffering.
Hurt is better translated as verletzt.
Example: Es tut mir leid dass ich dich verletzt habe= It causes me suffering that I hurt you.
@@RyugaruSenbitypical german behaviour, correcting people left and right 😄 aber du hast recht
As someone in Germany I just realized that now 😀 thank you btw
I came back from a two week vacation in Germany and one of my favourite things was to listen to the German language spoken in public. I find it so intellectually fascinating and stimulating to my ears.
So, did it sound aggressive to you? I really think that is a stereotype that is not true. What did you think it sounded like?
@@fureuropa-gegennwo1259 not at all the speakers tone were casual and free flowing not aggressive at all. Well except for that pesky security guard at the Green Vault in Dresden, but that’s another story.
My favorite test for German pronunciation is "Tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen" - if you can pronounce it correctly, you've mastered the language.
but what about "des Herbsts"?
Oh, even as a German, I struggled the first time 😅
@@criticaldamage4067so you still got a lot to learn my fellow german.
When I wanted to read this comment to my friend, I struggled with saying "pronunciation" but "Tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen" came perfectly out. Well. xD
"Tschechische Chefchemiker auf Griechisch-Chinesischen Passagierschiffen"
every language sounds aggressive if you scream in it and if you try to pronounce every letter as hard as you can
Another beautiful word is "Habseligkeiten", basically meaning all the stuff you own, but if you take the word apart you have "hab" - "have" and "selig" - which means happy/blissful. So "Habseligkeiten" are the treasured things that you own that make you happy.
I had to move about 9 months ago and had to give up 28 years of my prized tools and possessians. My habseiligkeiten stuff. It broke my heart.
As an englishman i can Absolutely say germans do not sound agressive when they talk
.
Most Indian languages sound like they are always shouting and arguing with each other to me
Deutsch ist keine aggressive Sprache, aber wenn man schreit oder aggressiv ausspricht, dann klingt es natürlich aggressiv.
Genau.
My brother has a Masters degree in German. Our Great Aunt Pauline was from Vienna. He has always told me that German is not the harsh language people claim it to be. I am about to study German myself. I wish had done so years ago. I find myself rooting for German and hope that more people realize it is not the ugly language they have been led to believe it is.
Fast jeder Deutschsprachige, den ich kennengelernt habe, war echt leise gesprochen. Außer Frau Brost 😂 Sie hatte einfach eine natürliche laute Stimme
Tut mir leid, wenn meine Grammatik stimmt nicht. Deutsch ist meine zweite Sprache 😅
Stimmt
Some other german words:
Hoffnungsschimmer - Glimmer of hope
Liebestrunken - Drunk with love
Mucksmäuschenstill - Quiet as a mouse
I used to suffer from prejudice against German and Dutch/Flemish languages as a Belgian French speaker, it's sadly part of the culture I was raised in. But once I discovered the beauty of both languages and the cultures attached to them I literally fell in love. I even considered moving to Germany or to the Netherlands but I'm probably moving to Flanders. Knowing is a first step to love.
As a czech person i really dont have a problem pronouncing "Ch"
Why i always get a plenty of likes on a comment in a format like this uuuuuh
Souhlasím, pro nás to těžké být nemusí, jelikož náš jazyk byl němčinou ovlivněn (např.: "Knedlík" vznikl z německého slova "Knödel," což má stejný význam jak v ČJ, tak v NJ), ale pro ostatní země to může být stejně těžké, jako naše "ř."
Translation to English for those, who don't speak Czech: I agree, for us it might not be difficult, because our language has been affected by German (for example: our word "Knedlík" became from the german word "Knödel," which means the same thing in both Czech and German), but for other countries, it can be difficult the same way, like our "ř."
@@TriggerTail I'm learning Czech currently and it took me 2 months to pronounce " ř " partially correct. I've been listening to many explanations by native speakers who made videos on "how to pronounce ř ". Most of them suggested, learners should say it like r and ž combined. So "rž". I'm still trying to get better, but sadly there're not as much Czech speakers in my area and less to none teachers. It's also hard to get one online, who happens to speak my native (German) fluently, to explain things much better.
I made the experience that Czech is way harder for English natives then mine.
@@TheVirdra That is true, Czech is one of the hardest languages in the world.
Fun fact: As a German, you can notice some of the words in Czech were created from German.
@truegemuese Yeah, it's not difficult a lot to us, but it may be difficult to foreigners.
hi, english speaker here, i find the german language to be incredibly beautiful! in fact, i have been obsessed with trying to learn it for the past two years now. it was honestly heartbreaking to see all of these examples of people hating on the language in this video, because it is genuinely one of my favorite things. german is such a gentle, poetic sounding language, and i wish more people would just give it a chance so that they could see that.
Thank u so much❤
I agree that getting your tongue round the German poetry is great. Du bist die Ruh, der Friede mild, die Sehnsucht Du and was sie stillt,...it's so beautiful and romantic. Gives me goosebumps!
Agreed
Specially if you read Rainer Maria Rilke.
Absolutely! I'm Canadian, so yeah... first (and pretty much only) spoken language, at least for me, is a less slightly bastardized version of English. I really wish I had taken the initiative to learn other languages in school. In elementary school, we did learn French (Canadian French that is...) not that I have retained much of it at all. In high school, I think German was still being taught along with a few other languages to choose from.
Even the Austrian painter had a normal speaking voice that did not sound aggressive, unlike his broadcast speeches. There's a TH-cam video with audio of AH talking to a Finnish general. It's worth a listen.
To be specific you are talking about the Hitler-Mannerheim tape where Hitler visited Finnish field marshal Mannerheim in June 4th, 1942 which was marshal Mannerheim´s 75th birthday.
All AH audio tapes are worth a listen. Kappaklaus :)
I wouldn't call his conversational tone aggressive, but he was something of a natural stentor; his voice was dominant, penetrating, commanding. And I can imagine in a less ideal setting in private, the man could have been quite intimidating.
Верно. Я слышала записи Гитлера, его диалог с каким- то подчинённым .. была удивлена насколько красивый, глубокий, размеренный и чарующий голос у Гитлера, когда он говорит спокойно. Его голос был как гипноз.
Literally no language deserves hate or criticism. Every language is beautiful in its own way. 💜
Not arabic
Allahu Akbar 🗿💀
@@YouDeserveAllOfThis well I don’t know if what you said was good or not because I’m offended since I’m Arabic
As a native English speaker, German doesn't sound harsh, it's just an American Hollywood stereotype. And as an African whose story has always been told by Western media, trust me when I tell you that there are many western rhetorics that have minimal truths
People find german angry because of that austrian man. But as a german learner, it sounds more cute than english for me
Just say hitler he is not Voldemort
As a German , i know german could sound very cute
Especially when you greet strangers
Yes, Germans are OK except this one Austrian who is even not a German.
Sung by a woman with clear brilliant voice it sounds soft and pleasant. th-cam.com/video/zOvsyamoEDg/w-d-xo.html
I used to work with a German boss and didn't think he sounded aggressive at all. We talked about it once and he put it completely down to prejudice: "don't speak it like Hitler and it's fine."
Well that's no fun, is it? 😅
One German teacher here was reported once to ask the students in her class to speak more like normal people less like Hitler😂
2 German females whispering or talking kindly to one another is the sweetest calming sound I have ever heard.
When shouting all languages seem aggressive. When spoken calmly German sounds like any other language.
IDK I think German sounds specially harsh when spoken aggressively but under a normal tone I don’t find it hostile
It's been 27 years and I've never thought that much about my mother tongue before. Thanks!
As a native English speaker, I have always loved the way the German language sounds when spoken and looks when written. It was the first language I became interested in learning and led to my fetish for linguistics, in that I was so fascinated with the similarities between both Deutsch and English and the origins of the words in older languages.
Funnily enough, Czechs, Slovaks and English speaking people might already know some German words, without even knowing it.
@@TriggerTail I found that I did, indeed. It was the flow and structure of the sentences when spoken that I found most familiar, i.e. Das ist gut = That is good.
or
Was ist das? = What is that?
Helped ease into it before all those massive compound words came up.
I'm Dutch and love the German language. Mostly thanks to German TV I watched as a child (Sendung mit der Maus, Hallo Spencer, Bud Spencer, sesamstraße, Löwenzahn.......)
Und vielleicht auch, weil ich in der Provinz Limburg wohne und unser Dialekt der deutschen Sprache sehr ähnlich ist 😉
Für mich ist es ein Vergnügen holländisch zu hören, nicht nur zuletzt weil die Menschen einfach meistens so nett sind 😊 kennt man bei uns im Ruhrgebiet nicht mehr so 👍🏼
Ich habe in seit meiner Abschlussfahrt in Amsterdam, die Niederländische Sprache ein wenig für mich entdeckt.❤ Unteranderem auch, weil Plattdeutsch meine Muttersprache noch vor Hochdeutsch ist und ich dadurch einiges verstehen und lesen kann.😊
Great shows!!!
For me it's the opposite way 🙃 Came to the Netherlands 15 years ago, first for study and stayed for work/kids. I do speak Dutch fluently, but people cannot pinpoint where I'm from. They either say Limburg or Belgium, guess also depending on my Tagesform. Dutch is very cute in its own way, especially when you know German. I loved all those TV formats you mentioned, wehmütige Erinnerungen.
Prejudice is defintely the biggest factor, if not the main one. Whenever I hear people imitate German to mock it, their go-to 100% of the time is imitating Hitler, exaggerating the harsh sounds as much as they can. If you've ever heard a conversation between native German speakers or watched any kind of German media, you quickly come to realize that the language can sound surprisingly smooth and "normal."
My experience is like 50/50, it's either the aggressive Hitler imitation, or it's the "Hallo zere" "Sank yu" spoken in a whinerly tone.
People exaggerate the harsh sounds because all these harsh sounds being that is what's funny about it.
And even if people shout angrily, they still don't sound like Hitler.
@telynotofficial7350 That's fine by me, but some people don't have to go the extra mile calling the language "ugly" and "the language nobody wants and should learn"
That’s especially infuriating since the Hitler voice they imitate was his speech technique, if you listen to the recordings of the meeting between Hitler and Mannerheim, you‘ll hear the everyday Hitler.
If you think German sounds harsh it's because your only experience of german is an american basically doing an impression of Hitler. Noone talks like that.
Who is Noone? Is he a new Führer?
@@marktwain5266 Ja. Schlachtenhausen bräut Bierkraut gerne. Aber. Muss es gestrammen sein mit Schniegenschnagen? Hodensack! Und hier noch ein Furz zum Abschied!
@@HiroKone Was zum Henker
@@marktwain5266 Nah, he's just trying to get back to Penelope.
Growing up in Wisconsin, surrounded by and steeped in German culture and phrases, I've always loved the sound of German. I was lucky enough to spend a college semester in Munich, where I learned German on the streets. Music to my ears.
I remember someone who came to the USA (Miami) from Argentina to learn English, and they were SHOCKED when they stepped off the plane and everyone in Miami spoke Spanish lol.
In Munich they don't speak German. You learned the bavarian language. Similar in some parts,but not German. It's like your english and scotish or irish
@@amiromorningstar2913thats only partly true. Munich is in that aspect not Bavaria. A big chunk of the munic population is "zugereist" (immigrated) from other parts of Germany.
@@augustiner3821 I don't believe in that. Why should an average german like me live there?
Wouldn't like to be around people that believe in mighty ghosts , that's cringe and crazy
@@amiromorningstar2913 sorry, don't get your point.
German can be incredibly precise in joining metaphorical ideas jotted into one word, such as mutterseelenallein (left alone with your mother's soul), mucksmäuschenstill (silent like a mouse without the slightest wee bit coming out of the mouth), auf Nimmerwiedersehen (for a nevereverseeingagain), hirnverbrannt (brainburnt) and dozens more.
This is not true. German was once THE language of mathematics, philosophy, and literature.
That's irrelevant to how it sounds to speakers of other languages. And it wasn't THE language of these things. At the peak of German contributions to philosophy, Britain was more dominant with France not far behind, and at the peak of German literature, the Russians, British and French were probably more influential. Sure, German was a world leader in these things, just like they were a world leader in making watches, but they were still behind the Swiss and the British in this respect.
Either way, German sounds aggressive to many speakers of other languages due to the phonological system, particularly regarding harsh phonemes, choppy prosody and deeper pitch. Russian and Arabic does too, and both contributed greatly to the fine arts and the sciences. In fact, we wouldn't have had the Enlightenment without the Arabs, so your argument that German cannot sound harsh because they are a very civilised nation does not logically follow.
@@davegibson79 Err... Let's see... Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, ... Then Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann, Hilbert, ... Then Kant, Hegel, ... Then Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, ,,, They all wrote in German, so if you wanted to read what they wrote, you'd have to read German. And read they did. Peeps spoke at least two languages back then, bourgeoise and aristocrats that is, but who else read anything at all back then? German didn't sound harsh to them. They read it just fine. Now to make this clear, because peeps tend not to connect the dots themselves, do notice that Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Einstein made huge breakthroughs no one else could even foresee. Muricans had to send Oppenheimer to Germany to learn Quantum Mechanics. Oppenheimer himself being German. Or Boltzmann being German too, no one understood his Statistical Mechanics so the guy hanged himself. Then, who would you compare to Gauss? Or Dirichlet? Or Riemann? Yes, there were Euler, the Swiss, and Cauchy, the French, but that is it. Gauss and Riemann started working on curved spaces when no one believed space can be curved. Russian literature? It is an easy reading compared to Germans. Then Kant started the revolution in philosophy by his Copernican Turnabout: it is not that object revolves about you, instead you actually revolve around the object, so that observing something from different angles empirically is superior to seeing just one side of something, thus killing religion and metaphysics in a single sentence, paving the way to empiricism that then spawned the english clones. And... Arabs you say? What on Earth did they do? There was some breakthrough about primes, and some Arab guy completed some proof of Euklid. However, The Euklid proof was just the last step, Euklid did everything leading to that last Theorem, which is strange, since it follows logically right away, and the Arab guy who did that infinite series - well, Indians did exactly that some 500 years before. What on Earth did Arabs do? The crazy schizophrenic psychopath killed all the smart Arabs who naturally wouldn't join his cult, so when you look at the world IQ map, the lowest IQ regions today are all muslim countries. Wikipedia has one world IQ map I believe. Muslims did the opposite of the natural selection. Natural selection kills the weak and the stupid, leaving the strong and the smart alive. Islam did the opposite: the strong and the smart wouldn't join in, but the weak and the stupid did join in. So the muslims killed the strong and the smart. Finally, sounding harsh is subjective. English is even worse in that regard, because the English growl as they speak. The ancient Greeks would certainly called them barbarian - the ones who bark when they speak. And don't get me started on French! :D
z
@@slavsit7600 ze language
@@davegibson79Ah yes, who doesn't know all the famous arabic three thinkers who contributed so much to the enlightenment like.....and..........
Fun fact: every language sounds agressive if you scream it!
Tasmanians sound angry to me.
French sounds more like passionate love the louder it’s spoken 😅
Except Spanish (specially Latibamerican) we sound as if we were singing in a very high pitch, expanding every intermediate vowel. And really mean it with the end point. We exaggerate the “p” and the “t”
@donmcatee45 French actually sounds like you're unsuccessfully trying to cough out phlegm for the entirety of your lifetimes, no matter the volume
If you want to tell someone that you love them and what thay mean to you.
Don't just tell them, shout it in there face in old German.
My favourite word is "Dingsbums" the Allrounder 😂
Dingsbums, the german cousin of french truc machin!😆
Try to explain my favourite word "Doch" to a non German speaking person - difficult...🙃
Bums-Dings😂
Well it basically is a word which can mean many words considering the context. It can mean "it is", or "for sure", or "still". Context is all here, but it is translateable all of the times.
'Gutemine und der Dingsbums sind da'
Nicely done. As a newbie to german language i find it wonderfully well structured, enabling one to express the subjectivity quite clear. Altgough the learning curve is other than i imagined :)).
Heute hab ich "Fern" entdeckt lrute. Prima ist es👌🙌
I think part of it is also just where people hear German for the first time.
Usually, it's not gonna be a casual conversation, at least not if you live in the US.
Instead, the first instance of spoken German you ever hear might be something like Hitlers meltdown in "Der Untergang".
And even before that,you might have heard parodies, maybe you'd have watched that episode of South Park or something simular.
That aside, as a german myself, the funniest thing about native english speakers trying to pronounce german words is the fact that they seem to have an innate drive to want to combine several syllables into a single sound.
I think it's in part because they're trying to emulate that thing you get in english where some vowels are actually silent and actually just change the sound of the previous word (for example, an -e at the end of most words).
But german is actually far simpler than that. All you need to do to at least get somewhat of an approximation of correctly pronounced german is to take it slow, read one syllable after another and never assume that any letter is silent. Just take it step by step, instead of trying to just skip across as many syllables as possible whilst aiming for the ending.
When learning a new language, people don't have any knowledge and experience yet, so they will pronounce it in their native way. In case of English speakers, that combination comes from their own illogical spelling mess. For instance the word "thought", where half the letters are not pronounced. But German isn't just "letter by letter" pronunciation. German does have combos which produce certain sounds "ei, sch, st, ie, chs, ch"
@@LS-Moto It does have combos, and sure, some of them are tricky to pronounce, but they still don't require you to read the letters out of order. Besides, most of them have an english counterpart or actually occur in german leanwords. If you know how to pronounce the Sch in Schadenfreude, then it follows that you can also pronounce the one in Schneeschaufel.
Even if you don't know how to pronounce a combination, you can still get pretty close if you just respect the order of letters and syllables.
I feel like a lot of english speakers just panic when they are asked to pronounce a lengthy german word and come up with a jumbled mess instead of actually trying to guesstimate how it might sound.
It’s funny to me as an English person learning German. I’d love to know what we sound like, I’ve worked so hard on my pronunciation that I can normally pronounce things really well when I know the word.
But… things like „Fräulein“ or „Häuser“ though, anything with „äu“ still throw me off…
Also recently I was corrected on „Schwerer Sack“ I pronounced the word „Sack“ like „tsack“… No idea why but my English brain could not hear the difference between S, Z and Ts. My friend said Sack is a soft S. (to my brain S is s) but he meant Z! The zzzzz noise like the boys name Zack!
I think my brain couldn’t compute the change from pronouncing „Schwer“ to „Sack“ for some reason. (Reading it in a Game and seeing two capital S‘s together confused me basically) 😵💫
That was a funny moment to me when he explained it and I finally understood and practiced it and got it right.
Another one I had was „Ameisen“ (Ants) and „Weizen“ (wheat) I use to switch the „ei“ the other way around.
Surprisingly learned my W‘s to V‘s, V‘s to F‘s quickly too 👀
@@undeadwerewolves9463 Please don't say Fräulein. This is old German for an unmarried woman. Today, it is incredibly rude to adresse a woman with that. So be aware of that. Use Frau instead.
@@undeadwerewolves9463 That's really interesting to read, thank you.
I find it a bit surprising that äu out of all things is giving you difficulties, since that's a sound that also exists in english, in the form of oi/oy and nearly pronounced the same as the much more common eu.
Then again, just looking at the involved letters, it is a rather unintuitive that they would produce this particular sound, and slightly odd things that don't quite make sense tend to be one of the most common things to trip you up when you're learning a new language.
I am an Arab and to me German is the best sounding European language, It sounds strong and proud.
Yes
It's Italian
@@userre85what?
IIRC Arabic and German share some throaty constanants no?
@@TheGreenPig321 True - a few of my colleagues here are native Arab speakers with a very high level of proficiency when it comes to German. With some of them the only thing that is the tell tale sign is using "sch" instead of the soft "ch". In general though Arab seems to be a fairly good base to learn solid German pronounciation.
Fun fact: if you shout in any language it sounds aggressive 👍👍👍
Weird fact: even if you shout German aggressively, you still won't sound like Hitler.
😂😂😂
@reassuring to hear!
Listen to Rammstein that’s sounds familiar to him….
The language of Beethoven and Mozart can never be ugly. Ich liebe Deutsch. And I'm learning it.
Viel Glück 🍀
Viel Glück
German grammar makes me want to scream daily i can’t handle conjugation 😭
@@ConfuzzledClockwork One thing and one thing only: Practice practice and more practice
@@goonhoongtatt1883German grammar is very tricky for native English speakers.
For an English speaker, Spanish will be the easiest language to learn, only taking at most 3 weeks to master Spanish grammar and Speech.
I fucking hate it when my friends ask me to speak German and then make fun of the language (they don't make fun of me don't worry) no one would ever mock a language like how people mock German, even though it is one of the greatest languages in my opinion
What languages do they speak? If they don't speak anything except English, they should really "hold the ball flat" (den Ball flach halten).
Agreed. Germany doesn't deserve all the fun that's made of it.
Yeah, German has been mocked a little too much, all that's said about it is a lie, it's a great language, true, it can be difficult, but when you'll learn it, it is great to know.
@@LS-Moto What do you mean by that? In school they learn French and englisch, I think that’s enough.
@@Flutter_Dragonz In the UK or America, they don't really focus on another language. Sure, they might have it for a year, but that's about it. Non-English speaking countries learn English for like 7 - 10 years. That's quite the difference.
German isn’t remotely ugly or aggressive. If you learn it you’ll soon realise that.
I'm an Indonesian who learning German. It's a wonderful language. I'm surprised that some words in German sounds familiar in my Indonesian ears, such as "Tante" and "Hemd". Well, German had the same language family with Dutch, and Indonesian borrow several Dutch words, so it's make sense that it sounds similar.
BTW, is "Fern" also a German word? It means "distant", right?
Yes, it does indeed mean 'distant'. Greetings from Germany, I am glad you like our language!
Die Ferne is the distance
U could also say 'far' (Far Places = Ferne Orte)
I Not sur but I think Indonesia was for short a German colony
I dont think so, they explained already. German colonies in the Pacific were what is now Papua New Guinea, the Salomon Islands and Samoa@@TobyGerstenecker
My mother is German and I grew up in a bilingual household. Whenever I hear my mom talking on the phone to relatives & friends in Germany, she sounds graceful, clear, and almost delicate. Not at all aggressive.
I know exactly what you mean^^
Much love to you and your mom!
Delicate! That's the word!
ich liebe die deutsche Sprache und ihre Nutzung. Allein die Möglichkeiten sich damit lyrisch auszudrücken ist so wunderbar. Nicht umsosnt die Sprache der Dichter und Denker genannt.
Die Sprache der Denker ist es, weil es auf Englisch schwerer ist, einen Satz über eine ganze Buchseite zu "strecken". Niemand ;-) macht Schachtelsätze so gut wie wir. :D
Ja finde ich auch (Ps schweizer/in??)
@Tatsächlich kann man deutsche Texte auch in kurzen Sätzen formulieren. Und gerade bei technischen Sachverhalten sollte und kann man das machen. Das hebt die Verständlichkeit enorm. 😉
Ich wünsche wir würden immer noch Gebrauch von diesem Talent ziehen!
@@mintysan es steht dir frei deine Gedanken in schönen Texten zu formulieren und diese mit deinen Mitmenschen zu teilen :)
My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch, and German words and phrases were common in our household. I never thought of them as being harsh or aggressive, simply expressive in a way that wasn't English. German is uniquely it's own expression.
Fern is one of my favorite channels, the details and presentation of these videos is amazing.
Linguist in training here (I only have one semester under my belt rn, but I saw an opportunity to nerd out and just couldn't resist), and so I'd like to give some feedback on the linguistics part of the video:
First off, the section about morphological anomalies, specifically the infinitely recursive nature of composition, is great. No notes.
Furthermore, you correctly described the phonological process by which vowel-initial words in German are often subconsciously preceded by a glottal stop (also known by the name hard attack) and I would list this among the factors contributing to the impression that German sounds harsh, so good job. :)
However, I think your section about guttorals doesn't tell the full story. Arabic for instance has a lot of velar and uvular sounds, but it doesn't get classified as aggressive-sounding to quite the same extent as German does, as far as I know at least.
To make a long rant as short as I humanly can, the criterium I think you should've mentioned instead is the voicedness (Stimmhaftigkeit) of consonants. I'll elaborate if anyone asks me to, but right now I want to focus on my point, which is that whether or not a consonant is voiced in a word has a significant bearing on how softly that word is typically perceived by most.
To exemplify: German has a phonological process which English lacks (just like hard attack), called final devoicing (Auslautverhärtung) which basically makes any word-final consonant devoiced, EVEN IF (and this is important), the orthography has it spelled with the voiced equivalent. For instance, the majority of native German speakers will, without thinking about it or paying attention to it, pronounce 'Staub' as 'Staup', but only if that [p] is at the end of the word. When it appears in the middle of the word, for instance as in 'staubig', suddenly the b remains a [b], but the new final "g" now gets devoiced and becomes [k] (edit: or it gets softened and becomes [ç], [staubich], as a word-final g so often does in German). Anyway, I hope this makes it clear what I mean.
So yeah, that would've been my version of this script: two phonological processes (hard attack and final devoicing), which make German sound just a little bit less soft than English.
And yes, this isn't the full story either, I'm sure there's phonological processes other than these two, but I'd say two is a decent number to get the idea across to an average audience of non-linguists without boring or overwhelming them with too many details.
Very good observations here.
Some very good observations were made here, but I do want to say that as a (non-native) Hebrew and Arabic speaker, I definitely have been told that both of these languages sound harsh and aggressive. I think the main thing driving this is definitely the cultural aspect. People's exposure to Arabic has been through not so great circumstances, and Hebrew is perceived by many to be a mix between German and Arabic (which it is not, but that doesn't stop people from thinking so). They do attribute Arabic's harshness to it guttural and pharyngeal sounds, but also to how they perceive speakers, much like with German and even Russian (being used so often for movie villains)
I agree. But there are a few more aspects and this make this video quite unbearable for me.
He used an onomatopoeia as an example for a guttoral "fauchen" (to hiss) which literally is one of the most aggressive sounding words in German. I mean ... makes sense ... hissing is aggressive and harsh sounding.
If he would have used everyday words like "achso" or "natürlich" he would have not been able to bring his point across, as they are actually very soft (like most words that have ch in it).
Also he didn't speak properly while he was reading out the phrases. We . don't . make . stops . between . every . word . This . would . just . be . exhausting. Also if this was as distinct in German as he said in the video, he just could hava spoken normal German. People would have been able to hear it.
But what makes me real mad is the display of stupid Americans bastardising German by not even saying one German word. But the lack of German they compensate with shouting.
Also the rest of the world does not think that German is especially harsh and ugly. It's mostly English speaking persons and of them mostly Americans. That is hardly the rest of the world.
i dont speak german but i find voiced consonant very hard and take alot more effort to pronounce at the end of a syllable (except if it a nasal)
I'm from Australia. I wouldn't say aggressive but perhaps authoritative is more what I hear. It's one of my favorite languages to listen to. So rich.
I am English and have to say German can sound wonderful, Fairy tails read in German are what I would call beautiful.
No it doesn't.
Every example where German sounds harsh it's because people are SCREAMING the words at you. Like if you yell BUTTTERFLY at someone, they're not going to consider your speech beautiful.
A certain Austrian Painter yelled in German, that’s why
Uf I will yell angry in English or Russian, people shall think that language is a harsh and military.
Butterfly? What do you mean? It is called a Flutterby. Yes really. How on earth did that ever change to that lousy reverse lettered "Butter - Fly" ?? A fly in butter. WHAT!?!?
To be fair. As a german I do think that the german word for butterfly is an excellent word to be yelled.
@@SpielkindFR the difference between english and german is english words sound like what they mean. german words could mean anything...
I remember my dad initially was disgusted when I told him that I was learning German because he thought it was harsh. But then, when we both visited Germany together, he actually changed his mind and thought the local Germans spoke softly.
Just gonna say this. German doesn't sound aggressive at all. It sounds tender and lovely!
You forgot the main reason: most peoples exposure to German isn't from a native speaker but overexaggerated bad guy screaming in media that often sounds incomprehensible to someone who actually understands the language.
I love the subtle Cello in the background!
Bach Cello Suite No.1, if you want to hear it;)
Bro I challenge anyone to say Tschüss in an angry way it's impossible
Tschüssi
Ja alles klar TSCHÜSS
Too easy!
There is a common way to say "Tschüss" that actually means "fck off, right now!"
Absolutely LOVE the sound of German. Es klingt gut zu mich! Currently learning it...and it is a pain but I'm one to not quit on anything I set out to accomplish! And I really love the video. Prost!
Wir würden sagen:
Für mich klingt das gut!
😊
Es klingt MIR gut ! please ?
@@johngardner4897 nein
Fuer mich, Deutsch klingt wie Musik.
@@valerietaylor9615 we don't structure sentences like this in German.
Für mich klingt Deutsch wie Musik.
No comma
Finally, a good impression to change the famous stereotype. I started learning German 3 years ago and now I am studying software engineering in German. Although my whole school journey was in English, I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to learn and speak this beautiful and very veeery strong language. Not to mention, I have started giving German language courses too!
I just started learning German. My friends say that I'm crazy and should learn a beautiful and useful language instead, but I find German interesting. This video just made me more motivated to learn, thank you! I find he compound words really interesting. I recently learned birthday present is Geburgstagsgeschenk. They're really cool imo
Actually as a German I’m very confused how everyone else gets along without compound words. I was very sad when I learned some Turkish, tried it and everyone was like that’s not a real word 🙂 More Words are Geburtstagskind, Geburtstagsparty, Geburtstagslied
@@gewittertorte English essentially has compound words. They're just written with a space inbetween. An example would be "compound word".
@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit thats literally just two words dude the whole point of a compound word is it's two words combined. Hes not an idiot and two words with a space exist in german too.
@@JesusChristTheHoly didn't think Jesus Christ would be this hostile.
Anyways, the main thing about compound words is that they take two words and combine their meaning. "Compound word" is indeed two words, but they essentially get used as if they were one.
There's really no meaningful difference between "compound word" and "compoundword". It's just that the typical way to write in English is to keep the space between the two halves of what is essentially a compound word.
You could easily do the same in German. "Die Waschmaschine" and "die wasch Maschine" would still be understood the same way (due to context that would be common knowledge if we wrote the way English gets written).
Tl;dr: the difference between a compound word and two words that combine their meaning is the way you write them.
Maybe find a video of Vilsmaier's "Stalingrad" movie in the original German?
As a 🇳🇴, learning (and clumsily using) German back in the early 80’s opened up three main areas of experience over time - Linguistics, culture and time passed (social anthropology & history).
Of course, they are merely aspects of a larger whole, but that’s the journey of life - slowly ingesting knowledge, then insights and maybe a little wisdom.
We need to “speak” across boundaries and borders, for so many reasons… 👍
Should we write the comments again?
yes please, we are afraid this might hurt the video's performance. And it was quite a bit of work ...
@fern-tv Say no more 😈 I'll comment first 10 times 😂💚
@@fern-tv i didn't comment on the original can i still comment here?
Comment for the re-upload.
@@mysterycrumble No you had your chance loser.
German is not aggressive, it's just about how you pronounce the words
Another word we blatantly stole from germans and then applied our own nuance to is "gestalt".
German is such a cool language - and I think the precision of your language keeps everyone very grounded. That's my experience of germans, at least.
Ich bin Engländer und ich liebe die deutsche Sprache. We're all cousins from over 1000 years. And I'm glad that a lot of people feel the same way. Any language when spoken in any form of angry tone is going to sound aggressive. I rage at games from time to time and I scare the shit out of my mates
Lieber Cousin, deine Worte sind Balsam. Football and debates. No more brother wars.🙏
I've been starting to learn German, and like my native English, I find it to be a very poetic language. To be able to take a complex concept and distill it down to a single word is a philosopher's dream, and German does this as well as any language, giving it a metaphysical beauty.
"Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön" from
Mozart's The Magic Flute will prove you wrong.
I'm french and I love how german sounds, obviously how it's delivered has a huge impact on its perception I think
Ha! Im german and i love how french sounds when spoken by a native. Incredibly beautiful language. Not that i could understand anything y'all say after 6 years of learning french lol
@@dragonsarebutterflies3663 fr
@@dragonsarebutterflies3663 French are pretentious snobs and Germans are Nazis. When Hitler came to France they accepted him immediately.
0:46 sounds dutch and not german, bros making fun of the wrong germans 🤦🏻♂️
True but it’s similar enough
Side note: the ß ("eszett") is a sharp, hissing s after a long vocal. For a sharp, hissing s after a short vocal we use "ss".
I love how someone thought "our language is so complicate for non-natives ... let's make it easier by adding an extra letter."
I fiddled with a shortwave radio as a kid. Couldn't tune in much, but once, or was it twice, in the middle of the night I caught a program in German - women talking about opera. I still remember their voices were beautiful, even though I didn't understand a word.
How did you figure out they were talking about opera?
@@parkermitchell2089 He used magic I guess
The word 'opera' is exactly the same in German as it is in English
5:06 It means "Cattle Identification Meat Labeling Supervision Task Transfer Act"
I’ll never use that word 😅😅
Imagine your wifi passwort is Rindfleischettecketierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.
The Hackers: Nope
WTF 😳
😅😅🤣🤣 oder :"Eisenbahnverkehrshauptknotenpunkt."
Klingon anyone?
@@HandyMan657 😅 Qapla'
Etecketierung? Was that a deliberate attempt at squeezing as many mistakes into one word as possible? 😵💫
I always thought of French as the most beautiful, romantic sounding language. And German as a cold, technical language. Having taught myself Mandarin Chinese, I note that one thing they have in common is the way they build new words by combining existing words. Both Chinese and German refer to an airplane as a flying machine, and an airport as a flying machine field. In a way, it is logical and keeps the vocabulary from exploding. BTW, my favorite German word is Schnitzel.
"Both Chinese and German refer to an airplane as a flying machine, and an airport as a flying machine field." - Not quite and not at all.
Airplane: Flugzeug = flying _thing_ --- Airport: Flughafen = flight harbor/ port. Schnitzel comes from _schnitzen_ = to carve. Gives a hint to it's origin _Schnitt_ = a cut.
When I lived in Germany,an attractive German woman speaking German accented English would melt me every time.
im embarrassed to say it, but to me the german language sounds kind of adorable… it’s tentative and soft and polite, and this is part of why I’ve tried learning some of it (just enough to show off)
Thank you! Have you ever heard German folk songs (not the marches...) such as "Ännchen von Tharau" or Schubert's Lieder? They are really soft and smooth, not aggressive at all.
Favourite German word is "Feierabend", it's quite unique to the German Language
Not really. In Danish we have the word "fyraften" which means exactly the same thing. It originated from the Middel Old German or Old Saxon word viravent, not the modern German equivalent feierabend.
My favorite German word is 'Morgenmuffel' or Morning Grouch..
I did German for 8 years in school. It's not an ugly language. People are just still influenced by WW2 propaganda. If all German you hear is from an angry guy with a moustache, no wonder you think all of it sounds angry. Listen to Goethe's poems or something for once. Watch some Mozart's operas. IDK.
German is a very slow language and people don't yell in a normal conversation. You wanna call a language aggressive? Italian is right there lol.
but there are such lovely sounding words, too, like Schmetterling, Schnuckelig and Schlawiner.
German only sounds angry when you yell it 💀
Idk man, when I visted Germany a few months ago, the people there were some of the nicest and gentlest people I've heard.
❣ You should also visit Switzerland and Austria.
You would be astouned how many people, especially Americans (I wouldn't know why) say that.
I really dislike the video. He is German and used a stereotype and proved his point by showing the most aggressive content he could find.
Including using the most aggressive examples like "fauchen" which is an onomatopoeia and has the purpose of representig a sharp, aggressive sound. It's hissing, hissing is aggressive that is the nature of that action and also the word.
If he would have used "achso" oder "natürlich" as an example, which are words we actually use everyday, they would have sounded soft.
Also, when our language would be this aggressive, why the need for emphasising glottal stops. It's absolutely correct, that we have them, but we absolutely do not use them between every word. That . would . be . exhausting.
Cheers mate, I am glad that the overal opnion in this comment section is that it's not aggressive. It is so tiresome to hear that all the time with aggressive Americans yelling who knows what into your face.