American reacts to GERMAN PROVERBS (many that American use!)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 พ.ย. 2022
- Thank you for watching me, a humble American, react to Short but Very Deep German Proverbs and Sayings. Great Germany Wisdom
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most sayings have their origins in the middle ages. well, it's no wonder that most american sayings have their roots in europe, isn't it?
To be honest the video you have been reacting to wasn’t good. Some quotes aren’t German, some aren’t used in Germany, some aren’t translated properly and it’s bad that in the video there is no German translation and no explanation what they mean. Greetings from Germany
Early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The one with the name plays with the fact that your good name means your good reputation. So it can be translated " A good reputation means everything". This is definitely true despite the fact that we have a proverb telling the exact opposite somehow. I would translate it like this: "Once your reputation is destroyed you can live without any shame."
Several of these proverbs I never heard in German. They seem to be translated quite loosely. As a German, I too would have liked to have read the German originals first, to know what is meant. And then a literal translation would have been better, especially for the metaphorical proverbs. For example in "Don't make a mountain out of a molehill". I don't know that in German at all. We say: "Don't make an elephant out of a mosquito".
There are many more common German sayings like "Auch ein blindes Huhn findet mal ein Korn" (Even a blind chicken sometimes finds a corn) or "Wer schön sein will, muss leiden" (If you want to look beautiful, you have to suffer for it).
I think only a few of them are common German proverbs like "Self-praise stinks" or "A disaster seldom comes alone". Others like "Great minds think alike" are English proverbs which would be phrased differently in German... this one would be "Zwei Doofe, ein Gedanke" = "Two stupid people, one thought"
we germans used to be famous as a nation of poets and thinkers.
The life is no pony farm. / Who doesnt have luck with love, has luck with games. / At the end of the tunnel is allways a Rainbow. / Who dies early is longer dead. / Lies have short Legs. / Who sits in the glasshouse should not through with rocks. / Who sits in glasshouse should sh*t in the dark. 😅
A lot of those "German" proverbs are ancient Greek or Latin proverbs, that found their way into many languages. It doesn't help to read them in a crude translation either.
1:44
"Aller Anfang ist schwer" = "All beginnings are difficult." Not purely american ...
"Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
I am german and it would be helpfull to see the proverbs in german too. Some of them I couldn´t recognize and I am not sure if they were all german.
"Whatever you do act wisely and consider the end" is a Latin proverb. "Quidquid agis, prudenter agas et respice finem!"
Never heard of most of them and there are much more entertaining ones. Such as "Caution is the mother of the porcelain box"; "Sitting in the glass house, you shouldn't throw stones"; "Among the blind, the one eyed is King"; "When the cat leaves the house, the mice are dancing on the table"; "What Johnny doesn't learn, John will never learn". Look for another video. If you look at the old guy, they probably haven't been in use since 1850.
A lot of german sayings came from the first ever printed book, the lutherian bible. Luther tried to write it in a way that everyone could understand it and for that, he not only translated the latin of the original bible into german (and thereby joinded all kinds of different regional german spelling conventions into one unified german language), but also simplified a lot of the complicated phrases into easier understandable analogies. The lutherian bible eventually spread outside of germany, and got translated into different languages, and therefore you can find his proverbs all over the world, even today.
"a good name" in german refers to ones reputation so it means "a good reputation is the best of all treasures"
“Paper is forbearing”
"a fool is ever laughing" german proverb: "Am vielen Lachen erkennt man den Narren" -> By laughing a lot/constantly, that's how you recognize a fool. It means that fool is someone who laughs at everything and everything is a joke to him/her and doesn't recognize when things get serious.