@JamesBray3 i think it depends on who speaks. Like a song, is it not the Languages that makes the song so good, but the singers , while the Languages are just a side taste.
@@parasit6183 we are talking about some average. I am not saying that German can’t sound beautiful. And beautiful is subjective. Some people like harsh beauty and some like it gentle.
@@Bad_Design The problem is that you were all just wrapped in cotton wool until you became wimps who simply couldn't cope with a language as beautiful and poetically diverse as German. German doesn't sound aggressive, German sounds normal.
@Bad_Design Yes, and i agree with. and it's what I also try to say. There are no worse or best languages in sounding nor in learning. It all depends on yourself who views it.
It easy to have something to point on, even if this is not true. Germany and the language is a perfekt victim after the WW. It needs to get processed this way to put the focus away from their own problems. People who have no education still think this way.
I think people all over the world have not experienced a normal (german) conversation. they saw comedians making fun of the language (totally fine to me!) and maybe they saw a speech by h*tler . For the most part that s about it what they know and associate with germans and their language. Edit: Every humorous video about the language i saw was either a parody and/or just screaming. in a lot of cases i (native german) have no idea what they are actually trying to say
In America lernen die echt nur Müll oder auch gar nichts über andere Länder. Habe mal einen Ammi getroffen, der dachte, dass H**ler noch lebt und regiert. WTF?
Many people only know the German language from war movies, where, of course, a harsh and militaristic form of German is used. In more than 50 countries worldwide, the German language is also used to train guard dogs. This is not only common in English-speaking countries but even in places like Japan and China. The language used in these contexts is short, clear, precise, and sharp, which makes it sound aggressive. Of course, if someone only hears this type of German, they might think that’s how people speak in Germany all the time.😅
We have a law here in Germany that says, that every place where people can order food and sit down on a chair for eating, you have to provide a free restroom for your costumers as a owner. So, if you eat in a mall and the döner kebab or sushi bar has no toilet, you can go to the mall restrooms, even if there is a dude in front of it with his small plate, suggests you to pay, you can say I eat in this mall and you dont have to pay for it.
Damn, your deutsche Außsprache is really advanced. I'd say both your pronounciations of Unabhängigkeitserklärungen are correct, because even Germans depending on where exactly in Germany they're located will pronounce it one way or the other. The other word you got correct the second time, where you pronounced the "ä" correctly.
@Sat-Man-Alpha Das ist schon fast peinlich. Stell dir mal vor, dass es da eine Person gibt, welche sich das Video auf Englisch anschaut, weil die Deutsche Sprache keine Grundausstattung der Natur ist und wird dann ganz wie in der verdammten Schule üblich, zuerst mit Literatur beworfen. Um Literatur zu verstehen, muss erstmal die Sprache verstanden werden. Aber vielleicht verstehe ich deine Nachricht einfach falsch und du wünschst dir gar nicht zwangsläufig, dass diese Autoren im Video vorkommen.
@ Naja, war eher so gemeint, das die Deutsche Sprache auch schön klingen kann, leider haben Hitler, Goebbels, Goering und Konsorten das Bild von der harschen deutschen Sprache nachhaltig pervertiert…
@@Lupy851ich habe Englisch und Russisch durch Musik gelernt. Satzbau, Aussprache und Wörter sind dadurch wesentlich einprägsamer. Ein Gedicht zu rezitieren ist eine höhere Stufe der Sprachkompetenz, aber der Klang und die Harmonie kommen besser zum Ausdruck. Die Deutsche Sprache ist sehr komplex, gefühlvoll und mehrdeutig, man muss sich damit beschäftigen wollen.
Cause of the conplexity of german it is a lot better suited to describe things than with english. And you can use chained words wich make sense, even if you never heard them before. That makes german very practical and efficient.
13:10 pretty close. The German word "Bildschirm" basicall means "image screen" (screen as in flat pannel) Also your pronnounciation has gotten very good, even for those long compound words it's really impressive :)
German woman here... I actually find it extremely sad when our beautiful language is always put down like this and called aggressive everywhere! EVERY language is beautiful and interesting in itself and deserves to be appreciated or at least not devalued. And yes - I feel personally offended when I hear Americans, for example, shouting and screaming and screeching out the German language in a totally choppy way and with the wildest accent imaginable. Of course EVERY language sounds aggressive when misused in this way! What many people don't understand is that German is a very logical language, which is actually very easy to learn. Even our many compound words are logical and follow a simple principle: take 2 or more existing words, string them together and voilà, you have a fully functional word to describe something - but you don't have to "invent" a new word... So anyone can create new words whose meaning can be understood immediately. Absolutely simple... ^^ Btw: these mega long words that are often given as examples in such videos are not really used in everyday language! There is a separate word for this (of course 😆): "Beamtendeutsch" (words that are only used by civil servants in explanations, legal texts and the like). And as you can see, this is a great example of a compound word that EVERYONE intuitively understands: Beamten (civil servant) + Deutsch (German) = civil-servant-german. WE have ONE SINGLE word for this - in English it takes a whole sentence to describe this official gobbledygook... Which is easier to remember? And what is also annoying and sad about this stereotype: it is often not only said that the German LANGUAGE sounds aggressive, oh no - from an allegedly aggressive sounding language it is then also directly inferred to the general behavior of the normal German! Yes of course, we Germans are all aggressive... Grrr, how I hate that! I find it insulting. It would never occur to me personally to denigrate another language as "dirty" or "aggressive" just because it sounds different from my mother tongue! I have learned various languages (English, Italian, French, Croatian, Spanish, Dutch) and tried others, but unfortunately failed (Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek). The main reason for my failure was that it was virtually impossible for me to form the sound sequences etc. - simply because they differ so much from my own language. Is that why I call these languages aggressive or hard or something else? No, I am not! They are simply different, nothing more... The bad thing is that most of these self-proclaimed language experts don't have the slightest idea what German REALLY sounds like! The Americans in particular only imitate the creepy pronunciation and intonation of Hitler (whose actual voice sounded completely different when he wasn't giving speeches... Besides, this way of speaking is a very old stage technique, which is still taught and used in theaters etc. today). Besides, Germans don't shout at each other all day long - such nonsense... I'm really tempted to make a video on the subject myself and show how aggressive OTHER languages sound when you "bark" them out in this way...
4:30 "German is rarely classified as beautiful"... Wait until you watched: Herbert Grönemeyer - Der Weg Live 2003 - Mensch Tour (Gelsenkirchen)[Subtitle] With English subtitles made from the community. Make yourself ready to grab some tissues.
The Speaker is part of the ownership of the german account „simplicissimus“. It is a damn great account with nearly endlevel quality of animations on youtube plus the speaker speaks german.
bro you are so good at pronounciations.. you cracked the german language. youre good at it. you almost a native german at that point. im impressed. this is the first video i watched from you. i subbed. youre a really likeable dude. english is equally hard to learn to me. your language is as hard to learn tho.
11:30 James, you got it right and in the video it is wrong. It is actually Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. A law from 1999 until 2013 which then got repealed. And you did really well reading this.
19:02 Hey why think A.H is German . When He is from Austria . ( I know is Not part of issue , we Talk over German language !) Thx for You time .I Wish You good time!
Learning to pronounce the German R-sound correctly comes with a nice extra: it's the same in French. BTW, my French is quite bad and very far from my English skills. But I've never experienced French people being unfriendly because of the scarcity of knowledge in French. Quite the contrary, they've been friendly and helpful always It's just the people in Paris being a bit impatient. But even they were friendly most of the time. And James, I've said that a couple of times already and I enjoy saying it again: your pronounciation is remarkably good, particularly given that you're not living in Germany permanently or continuously for a longer period of time, like several months or years.
Go to Mittelfranken (middle franconia, Nürnberg for example). The natives there Herbert special way to pronouns the R. It's rolling a lot more. I personally am from Frankonia but not that part of Frankonia. I tried, but i'm unable to speak like that... 😅
Honestly, there is something I noticed in every single Person trying to learn german and maybe that helps you along on your journey. What I notice is that you guys are trying to learn a german word only by it's pronounciation when that is actually secondary in understanding the word itself. But if you try to understand the actual meaning of the word first you maybe would have a much better time? My country wasn't called the "Land of poets and thinkers" for nothing almost 200 years ago. Goethe, Bach and Schiller for example have written texts and poems that still echo into our time today...BECAUSE the german language is very proficient in picking at the very core of true beauty. Thank you so much still for your Videos I really enjoy them 🎉🎉🎉!
Hey James, this request is really different to your usual content but this video brought me the idea to ask you to react to a musician called ccosmo he recently released an album called “Der Himmel war Blau” and it’s a really beautiful album composed of german poems with music it really captures the beauty of the german language and I would love to see you react to it!
8:10 he's right and wrong at the same time, if you try to pronounce every single word it is a stop and go sentance, but in reality speaking to someone, a lot of letters ar silent or even swollowed to smooth out the sentance. "alles is in ordnung" .. leave the t and round up, the sentance will be much smoother. it's like learing english in school compared to speaking is a whole different world
as someone who has followed you for a few years....your pronounciation is awesome now. not quiite perfect but even people who like to pretend not to understand foreigners wont have much chance pretending with you. your pronounciation became really great.
True, literally any language can be aggressive. Good example is in the Wind That Shakes the Barley, in black&tans attack, where is probably the most aggressive english I've ever heard. At least it sounds to me like that.
In my opinion, to pronounce r and ch it helps to imagine you were a cat. To pronounce an r just purr like a cat, for the different kinds of ch just hiss like an angry kitten
I think the alleged aggressiveness comes from Hollywoods WW2 movies where the German people in the movies are always soldiers. Just think about what the world would think about English if they only ever heard an US Army drill sergeant as the example for the English language.
It's funny how people from the US make this very strict distinction between Americans and Canadians. But when it comes to Germans and Austrians they're like: "Naa, that's the same..."
Wenn du Humor verstehst in einer Sprache und kannst diesen vergleichen, hast du es geschafft meiner Meinung nach (das erste mal in einer anderen Sprache zu Träumen ist auch heftig).
In German, everything is explained very precisely, even without pictures, without the risk of confusion. This is because in 1930 every scientific work was written in German first. That's why they say German is the language of poets and thinkers. There are also dialects in German where there are no hard accents like Plattdeutsch.
11:45 So close. It sounded like you said Kennzeischung instead of Kennzeichnung and Überwaschung (over-washing lol) instead of Überwachung (harsh ch sound - supervision).
A square door opener would be called a Rammbock (which is a ram, used for knocking down doors like your police uses) :) Your German was really solid, I am impressed. And to be honest, that endless law hasn't been a real word in a long time, the law was abolished.
Not to throw shade at your progress at all, James, but you still got work to do on the "r". I think trying to explain it can't really work out well if you haven't got it down yet yourself.. You still do a lot of front tongue trill to mask the lack of back tongue trill, which sounds a bit Russo-German as they can rarely make the switch from their native front trill to our back trill if they grew up speaking Russian. Spending some time to nail the back tongue trills German has would propel your pronunciation to a whole new level. Would be fun seeing you practise and give your thoughts on it too. 9:14 Lmao, that's so true though xD We teach by bullying you into learning haha. I never put it together like that but it's so true.
Americans mainly hearing German fron Rammstein and old WWII movies is one thing, but I think another contributing factor is well-meaning content creators totally overdoing it to demonstrate how German sounds are made and differ from the sounds of English.
10:57 Yay, that was so good! Still work to do on the R and the Ä could be a bit wider to separate it from A more clearly. To your question: First one sounded more Ä than A, second one the other way around. Even in the first one you could lean even harder into it, make it even wider if that makes sense. The most obvious inaccuracy would be the English, rolled R though. Gotta get that back tongue trill in there for perfect pronunciation. ;)
I get what you wanna say with the "hr" but I don't know, seems to create more confusion than actually be helpful: The German R is just a little click in your throat 🤷♂ that's about it You can roll it a bit, but that's it. Also I often get comments about my Bavarian dialect, like "that's German? It sounds so soft", "that can't be German", "I didn't know Germany could have so much melody", etc.
Actually, your army training is also a bit effed up. For example, German soldiers train on having a clear head, while American soldiers train to keep their aggressive emotions up and keep them up the entire time. I don't have statistics, but I'd like to know the difference of friendly fire frequency/wounded/killed between American soldiers and German soldiers. I know one time, an American army went into a city and there were 11 casualties; 2 dead and 9 wounded by friendly fire - the enemy (if they weren't just civilians?) were wiped out. Many such stories sometimes come up, like when you celebrate your wedding, in your wedding gown, and in response to gun fire into the sky comes a bomb and blows your party up.
@@sailspo I can't say anything about the conditions in Korea due to lack of knowledge. The situation in Germany depends very much on the location and population density. Rhineland-Palatinate is not known for being an Internet Abyss. 100/40Mbit/s should usually not be a problem. However, 1/1Gbit/s is possible almost everywhere against insertion of coins.
Your pronunciation is quite good already. What I always recommended to my students and foreign friends was that you should try to break big words apart first before you read them and then read them like you would an English phrasal noun. So try saying "Bundesverfassungsgericht" like you would "Supreme Court of the United States" --> "Bund-es Ver-fass-ung-s Ge-richt"
The german word for Monitor is "Bildschirm", wich means Picturescreen. I once saw an english standup, complaining about the german compound words, he chose Rasenmäher, because it mähs the Rasen. But in english its fucking lawnmower, which mows the lawn........
I feel like most people who think German sounds "aggressive" are primary English-speakers, and most likely American, so it's likely they'll have only exposure to the English language and maybe Spanish at best for another. Many other languages I feel like sound more "aggressive", and I personally much love them for it, like Arabic for example or basically any Slavic language, in particular I happen to love Russian though. Now the ironic thing about it is, if you're in a German-speaking place, it's much more likely to have exposure to those two specific types of languages or language groups; Slavic and Arabic (because it's just naturally spoken a lot here). In particular I feel like, the German "ch" sound seems to scare English-speakers a lot, as well as pronouncing the "R" in a strong way, or anyway in a stronger way than they do it in English or French or Japanese for example. And again, both Slavic languages and Arabic have a majestic rolled "R" (which is actually my favorite version of R, even more than the German one), and they have their "ch" as well, though in Russian it would be х (I dearly hope I copied that in correctly, otherwise, please feel free to correct me) and in Arabic I have no way how it's spelled, but they have it.
100% Buddy, you have to actively use the language in order to maintain your capability to speak in it. Aber es lohnt sich definitiv am Ball zu bleiben, da die Belohnung dafür fantastisch ist.
It is possible to enjoy German as a beautiful language. Just read some poems by Goethe, Schiller, Fallersleben, Heine, Fontane, Rilke, Kästner, Ringelnatz, Tucholski, Bachmann and many more.
I think the thing with the German "r" is also discussable. I can do the classic/northern German "r", the rolling "r" as it is spoken for example in all the slavic languages (and many more) and also in south Germany/Bavariam, Austria etc. and also the English "r", which, scientifically/phonetically spoken, isn't even a real "r" to begin with. ;-)
James. the thing with the R and why we Germans don't get what you are talking about is: it's more like when you immagine making a cat's purr sound. but only until it reaches the "peak" once. i hope you know what i mean it is deffinetly hard to discribe because its a sound from the throat.
Bro, u already see the dif. in hängig into hängich ... hängich is just a "slang" to make it more smooth. You have to write down "hängig" to understand, but u will never call it out like "hängig".
Christoph Waltz speaks beautiful German despite playin a supercharged nazi in the Inglorious bastards and then there was Diane Kruger. God bless Tarantino
German is my motherlenguage =D but i often dont know the exact grammar that i use out of intuition because the only advantage is, that i grow up with that lenguage=D
Maybe because it's wrong? 😉 The literal translation of Bildschirm would be picture screen. Schirm means screen. The correct translation of umbrella would be rain screen (Regenschirm). We are just lazy and say Schirm (screen), when referring to an umbrella (Regenschirm).
The word "Schirm" translates as "screen", not only "umbrella". So it is "picture-screen" literally translated. It derives from the verb "schirmen", to protect something with a kind of sheet or something else. The "Lampenschirm" is a lampshade and not an umbrella for the lamp. The lampshade protects against the direct beam of light from the light source and displays the light in a distributed form. The lampshade protects against the direct beam of light from the source. The same happens with the screen. It is illuminated from behind. Whereby in German, a cinema screen is not a ‘Bildschirm’ but a "sheet" because it is not illuminated from behind.
@@moe5346 Quote Goethe Institut: Die computerlinguistischen Methoden machen es möglich, viel genauer als früher zu erfassen, wie groß der Wortschatz wirklich ist. Um das Jahr 2000 herum, in meinen ersten Jahren als Dudenredakteurin, wurde der Umfang des Wortschatzes der deutschen Standardsprache mit 300.000 bis 400.000 Wörtern angegeben. Eine Auswertung des Dudenkorpus, unserer elektronischen Textsammlung, erbrachte vor Kurzem eine Zahl von 17,4 Millionen Grundformen, also unterschiedlichen Wörtern in ihrer unflektierten Form. Ist der Wortschatz in so wenigen Jahren so stark gewachsen? Wie lässt sich ein solch großer Unterschied erklären?
LOL yeah the ww2 education etc in the US is horrible. I still remember my best friend when he came back from a year in the US as a german exchange student, and the stories he told... first thing he was asked was wether Hitler was still alive and if we still have to do the Hitler salute at school. Americans really live in a weird bubble, unless they actively try to check things out for themselves.
Just a little hint. I do have my problems with those snake like words. I am ignoring the rules (who the heck is allowed to judge?) and put space marks in between the components where logic implies them.
Hey James great progress, amazing actually. Quick tip with your German R troubles , let’s use the word rauchen (smoking) imagine gurgling a sip of mouthwash after brushing your teeth and you got your R .
Gargling or snoring is a good hint. My general gutteral r setup seems to be mouth slightly open (fingertip between front teeth), back of tongue up, front flat down. The amount of constriction the back of the tongue exerts will modulate the actual sound atop the sheer gargling noise.
13:03 ngl i spit my drink a bit. because i gotta say..its true. those could be german names for words xD but well they explain perfectly what they do, no? x)
Weißt du was mich sehr traurig macht ist das wir Deutschen immer noch als Nazis gehalten werden. Wir die neueren Generation die nichts dafür können auf einem Erbe des Schreckens aufgebaut. Ich gebe ein Dickes Herz an die Amerikaner an alle da draußen. Möge die Welt in der wir leben Friedlich bleiben denn wir sind eine Famile alle.
Dutch, Swiss-German and Arabic have 100.000.000 more "ch-ch-ch"s than regular high German, for example, and I had to think about it for no longer than a second.
The German word for monitor is Bildschirm Do you want to try a literal translation? Okay, here we go ... correct: Bild is German for picture and the English word for Schirm is screen so a Bildschirm is a picturescreen.
Ich lerne Deutsch seit fünf jahre. Damn near everyone I meet who finds out that I'm learning German feels compelled to make a hitler reference, I blame the media and poor education. If I was learning Italian, nobody would say anything about Mussolini... because they probably don't know who that is. Anyway, my point is that this happened to me today while I had my phone in my pocket, and now this video is popping up. I believe in coincidence.
Honestly I think Russian sounds a tad bit more “aggressive” than German tbh. But again, it all boils down to HOW you speak. What do you guys think?
Russian almost never sounds aggressive but it do sounds dangerous. Many Germans though, speak aggressively.
Russian speaker, living in Germany.
@JamesBray3 i think it depends on who speaks.
Like a song, is it not the Languages that makes the song so good, but the singers , while the Languages are just a side taste.
@@parasit6183 we are talking about some average. I am not saying that German can’t sound beautiful. And beautiful is subjective. Some people like harsh beauty and some like it gentle.
@@Bad_Design
The problem is that you were all just wrapped in cotton wool until you became wimps who simply couldn't cope with a language as beautiful and poetically diverse as German.
German doesn't sound aggressive, German sounds normal.
@Bad_Design Yes, and i agree with.
and it's what I also try to say.
There are no worse or best languages in sounding nor in learning. It all depends on yourself who views it.
Don't forget the Hollywood-German which is often just angry noises which not even a native German speaker could understand.
Thats the jewish revenge of hollywood
Nein nein nein, WIIIRR haben eine gute SpRaChE.
@@LinusStumpsi and its a really harmless and also humorous revenge
Christoph Waltz speaks beautiful German despite playin a supercharged nazi in the Inglorious bastards
@@LinusStumpsi😂
As a german i can confirm that another reason is that forreign media always portrays german as aggressive, loud and militaristic
But I'm not aggressive. 😢😂 What about Arabic language? 😅
It easy to have something to point on, even if this is not true. Germany and the language is a perfekt victim after the WW.
It needs to get processed this way to put the focus away from their own problems. People who have no education still think this way.
@@Bartarok Or Japanese?
@@markschattefor6997 Japanse sounds very harsh..
@@pfichtner01 People who were way to tolerant are to blame for the misery in Germany today.
And I'm gone again, nice censorship UT.
I think people all over the world have not experienced a normal (german) conversation. they saw comedians making fun of the language (totally fine to me!) and maybe they saw a speech by h*tler . For the most part that s about it what they know and associate with germans and their language.
Edit: Every humorous video about the language i saw was either a parody and/or just screaming. in a lot of cases i (native german) have no idea what they are actually trying to say
My American online buddy used to think that we didn’t have WiFi and and cars in Austria. Im not even joking.
In America lernen die echt nur Müll oder auch gar nichts über andere Länder. Habe mal einen Ammi getroffen, der dachte, dass H**ler noch lebt und regiert. WTF?
Did they even know the difference of Austria and Australia?
Your German reading and pronunciation is really good. Respect
yea really good and the first way you pronounced nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit sounded almost natural
I agree, good stuff!
Many people only know the German language from war movies, where, of course, a harsh and militaristic form of German is used. In more than 50 countries worldwide, the German language is also used to train guard dogs. This is not only common in English-speaking countries but even in places like Japan and China. The language used in these contexts is short, clear, precise, and sharp, which makes it sound aggressive.
Of course, if someone only hears this type of German, they might think that’s how people speak in Germany all the time.😅
If someone screems like a moron - it sounds aggressive. In any language...
look at Trump....
@@Steeler-wg5zo trump doesnt really sound aggressive, his handshakes now, different story
15:49 the Fact that that Train of Thought (you know what I mean) didnt come to James' Mind immediately is so heartwarming to see, thank you ✌️💚
I just wanted to leave props for the way you pronounced Rinderkennzeichnungsfleischettiketierungsüberwachungsaufgabengesetz. that was impressive
Hello James, I follow your attempts several years now and I can say, your german visits gave you a boost. You really have a lot of improvement.
James, you're exceptionally talented, do continue the learning!
Happy holidays!
We have a law here in Germany that says, that every place where people can order food and sit down on a chair for eating, you have to provide a free restroom for your costumers as a owner. So, if you eat in a mall and the döner kebab or sushi bar has no toilet, you can go to the mall restrooms, even if there is a dude in front of it with his small plate, suggests you to pay, you can say I eat in this mall and you dont have to pay for it.
Damn, your deutsche Außsprache is really advanced. I'd say both your pronounciations of Unabhängigkeitserklärungen are correct, because even Germans depending on where exactly in Germany they're located will pronounce it one way or the other. The other word you got correct the second time, where you pronounced the "ä" correctly.
Btw ch is spoken in two different ways one is harsh and one is not ( Ach or Ich )
11:38 that word is one of the classics to troll non-native speakers with and not gonna lie dude, you did really well with it.
Heine? Lessing? Goethe? Schiller? Hoffmannsthal? etc. ....
Bach, Händel, Beethoven...
@Sat-Man-Alpha Das ist schon fast peinlich. Stell dir mal vor, dass es da eine Person gibt, welche sich das Video auf Englisch anschaut, weil die Deutsche Sprache keine Grundausstattung der Natur ist und wird dann ganz wie in der verdammten Schule üblich, zuerst mit Literatur beworfen. Um Literatur zu verstehen, muss erstmal die Sprache verstanden werden. Aber vielleicht verstehe ich deine Nachricht einfach falsch und du wünschst dir gar nicht zwangsläufig, dass diese Autoren im Video vorkommen.
@ Naja, war eher so gemeint, das die Deutsche Sprache auch schön klingen kann, leider haben Hitler, Goebbels, Goering und Konsorten das Bild von der harschen deutschen Sprache nachhaltig pervertiert…
@@Lupy851ich habe Englisch und Russisch durch Musik gelernt. Satzbau, Aussprache und Wörter sind dadurch wesentlich einprägsamer.
Ein Gedicht zu rezitieren ist eine höhere Stufe der Sprachkompetenz, aber der Klang und die Harmonie kommen besser zum Ausdruck.
Die Deutsche Sprache ist sehr komplex, gefühlvoll und mehrdeutig, man muss sich damit beschäftigen wollen.
RAG, Prezident, Absolute Beginner, Course, Max Herre....
the best German translation of computer is "Rechenknecht" 🙃
Oder kurz Rechner
Deine Aussprache ist echt super, vor allem wie locker dir die Wörter fallen. 👍
Cause of the conplexity of german it is a lot better suited to describe things than with english. And you can use chained words wich make sense, even if you never heard them before. That makes german very practical and efficient.
6:41 honestly the german R is just dry gurgling without any water. and then you make some slight modifications
13:10 pretty close. The German word "Bildschirm" basicall means "image screen" (screen as in flat pannel)
Also your pronnounciation has gotten very good, even for those long compound words it's really impressive :)
Or the now older German word for a TV "Flimmerkiste" literally meaning "flickering box" xD
German woman here...
I actually find it extremely sad when our beautiful language is always put down like this and called aggressive everywhere! EVERY language is beautiful and interesting in itself and deserves to be appreciated or at least not devalued. And yes - I feel personally offended when I hear Americans, for example, shouting and screaming and screeching out the German language in a totally choppy way and with the wildest accent imaginable. Of course EVERY language sounds aggressive when misused in this way!
What many people don't understand is that German is a very logical language, which is actually very easy to learn. Even our many compound words are logical and follow a simple principle: take 2 or more existing words, string them together and voilà, you have a fully functional word to describe something - but you don't have to "invent" a new word... So anyone can create new words whose meaning can be understood immediately. Absolutely simple... ^^ Btw: these mega long words that are often given as examples in such videos are not really used in everyday language! There is a separate word for this (of course 😆): "Beamtendeutsch" (words that are only used by civil servants in explanations, legal texts and the like). And as you can see, this is a great example of a compound word that EVERYONE intuitively understands: Beamten (civil servant) + Deutsch (German) = civil-servant-german. WE have ONE SINGLE word for this - in English it takes a whole sentence to describe this official gobbledygook... Which is easier to remember?
And what is also annoying and sad about this stereotype: it is often not only said that the German LANGUAGE sounds aggressive, oh no - from an allegedly aggressive sounding language it is then also directly inferred to the general behavior of the normal German! Yes of course, we Germans are all aggressive... Grrr, how I hate that!
I find it insulting. It would never occur to me personally to denigrate another language as "dirty" or "aggressive" just because it sounds different from my mother tongue! I have learned various languages (English, Italian, French, Croatian, Spanish, Dutch) and tried others, but unfortunately failed (Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek). The main reason for my failure was that it was virtually impossible for me to form the sound sequences etc. - simply because they differ so much from my own language. Is that why I call these languages aggressive or hard or something else? No, I am not! They are simply different, nothing more...
The bad thing is that most of these self-proclaimed language experts don't have the slightest idea what German REALLY sounds like! The Americans in particular only imitate the creepy pronunciation and intonation of Hitler (whose actual voice sounded completely different when he wasn't giving speeches... Besides, this way of speaking is a very old stage technique, which is still taught and used in theaters etc. today).
Besides, Germans don't shout at each other all day long - such nonsense...
I'm really tempted to make a video on the subject myself and show how aggressive OTHER languages sound when you "bark" them out in this way...
4:30 "German is rarely classified as beautiful"... Wait until you watched: Herbert Grönemeyer - Der Weg Live 2003 - Mensch Tour (Gelsenkirchen)[Subtitle]
With English subtitles made from the community. Make yourself ready to grab some tissues.
This!
The Speaker is part of the ownership of the german account „simplicissimus“. It is a damn great account with nearly endlevel quality of animations on youtube plus the speaker speaks german.
You do so well, Dear James!!! Chapeau!
Holy moly, your German improved ridiculously well! Haven't seen any of your videos for a while, and I see a drastic improvement. Well played! :)
11:01 you're getting great at this! Very nice! Keep it up, esp your language stuff is awesome!❤
bro you are so good at pronounciations.. you cracked the german language. youre good at it. you almost a native german at that point. im impressed. this is the first video i watched from you. i subbed. youre a really likeable dude. english is equally hard to learn to me. your language is as hard to learn tho.
11:30 James, you got it right and in the video it is wrong. It is actually Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. A law from 1999 until 2013 which then got repealed.
And you did really well reading this.
Some young Americans have asked me, how it's like to live in Nazi Germany.... if they thought they were funny (?) i thought they weren't.
19:02 Hey why think A.H is German . When He is from Austria .
( I know is Not part of issue , we Talk over German language !)
Thx for You time .I Wish You good time!
Frohe Weihnachten, James 🎄🎅
Learning to pronounce the German R-sound correctly comes with a nice extra: it's the same in French.
BTW, my French is quite bad and very far from my English skills. But I've never experienced French people being unfriendly because of the scarcity of knowledge in French. Quite the contrary, they've been friendly and helpful always It's just the people in Paris being a bit impatient. But even they were friendly most of the time.
And James, I've said that a couple of times already and I enjoy saying it again: your pronounciation is remarkably good, particularly given that you're not living in Germany permanently or continuously for a longer period of time, like several months or years.
Go to Mittelfranken (middle franconia, Nürnberg for example). The natives there Herbert special way to pronouns the R. It's rolling a lot more. I personally am from Frankonia but not that part of Frankonia. I tried, but i'm unable to speak like that...
😅
Honestly, there is something I noticed in every single Person trying to learn german and maybe that helps you along on your journey. What I notice is that you guys are trying to learn a german word only by it's pronounciation when that is actually secondary in understanding the word itself. But if you try to understand the actual meaning of the word first you maybe would have a much better time?
My country wasn't called the "Land of poets and thinkers" for nothing almost 200 years ago. Goethe, Bach and Schiller for example have written texts and poems that still echo into our time today...BECAUSE the german language is very proficient in picking at the very core of true beauty.
Thank you so much still for your Videos I really enjoy them 🎉🎉🎉!
Hey James, this request is really different to your usual content but this video brought me the idea to ask you to react to a musician called ccosmo he recently released an album called “Der Himmel war Blau” and it’s a really beautiful album composed of german poems with music it really captures the beauty of the german language and I would love to see you react to it!
8:10 he's right and wrong at the same time, if you try to pronounce every single word it is a stop and go sentance, but in reality speaking to someone, a lot of letters ar silent or even swollowed to smooth out the sentance. "alles is in ordnung" .. leave the t and round up, the sentance will be much smoother. it's like learing english in school compared to speaking is a whole different world
as someone who has followed you for a few years....your pronounciation is awesome now. not quiite perfect but even people who like to pretend not to understand foreigners wont have much chance pretending with you. your pronounciation became really great.
Refering to monitor,the german word is" Bildschirm" which translates literally to picture screen.
True, literally any language can be aggressive. Good example is in the Wind That Shakes the Barley, in black&tans attack, where is probably the most aggressive english I've ever heard. At least it sounds to me like that.
In my opinion, to pronounce r and ch it helps to imagine you were a cat. To pronounce an r just purr like a cat, for the different kinds of ch just hiss like an angry kitten
The sad part of american history classes are probably that the american way is always the right way in terms of wars
Ich finde das du wirklich im Deutschsprechen besser wirst brudi
I think the alleged aggressiveness comes from Hollywoods WW2 movies where the German people in the movies are always soldiers. Just think about what the world would think about English if they only ever heard an US Army drill sergeant as the example for the English language.
No mention of articles? I always thought that is the hardest part when it comes to learning german.
Just as a side note, Hitler was not German but Austrian, only that this is accepted as a fact in the minds of Americans!
He was German, culturally, as basically all Austrians are. But he was Austrian citizen and became the German citizenship later.
It's funny how people from the US make this very strict distinction between Americans and Canadians. But when it comes to Germans and Austrians they're like: "Naa, that's the same..."
"The H before the R is silent" THANK YOU! Its so nice to see someone understand it
Wenn du Humor verstehst in einer Sprache und kannst diesen vergleichen, hast du es geschafft meiner Meinung nach (das erste mal in einer anderen Sprache zu Träumen ist auch heftig).
In German, everything is explained very precisely, even without pictures, without the risk of confusion. This is because in 1930 every scientific work was written in German first. That's why they say German is the language of poets and thinkers. There are also dialects in German where there are no hard accents like Plattdeutsch.
Sarah Chalke is of German descent and also speaks German well.
11:45 So close. It sounded like you said Kennzeischung instead of Kennzeichnung and Überwaschung (over-washing lol) instead of Überwachung (harsh ch sound - supervision).
A square door opener would be called a Rammbock (which is a ram, used for knocking down doors like your police uses) :)
Your German was really solid, I am impressed. And to be honest, that endless law hasn't been a real word in a long time, the law was abolished.
The monitor example was close haha, it wuld be picture screen 😂
yeah dunking on people, while also presenting them with a way out of the misery is a very german way of dealing with/overcomming obstacles.
Not to throw shade at your progress at all, James, but you still got work to do on the "r". I think trying to explain it can't really work out well if you haven't got it down yet yourself..
You still do a lot of front tongue trill to mask the lack of back tongue trill, which sounds a bit Russo-German as they can rarely make the switch from their native front trill to our back trill if they grew up speaking Russian. Spending some time to nail the back tongue trills German has would propel your pronunciation to a whole new level. Would be fun seeing you practise and give your thoughts on it too.
9:14 Lmao, that's so true though xD We teach by bullying you into learning haha. I never put it together like that but it's so true.
Your "Aussprache" is truly good. You're the first American I've heard pronouncing Umlauts correctly lmao
Americans mainly hearing German fron Rammstein and old WWII movies is one thing, but I think another contributing factor is well-meaning content creators totally overdoing it to demonstrate how German sounds are made and differ from the sounds of English.
6:52 Trueeeee you made me realize, no other language has the german r and it is actually REALLY hard to use even as a native, it like almost hurts lol
me as a bavarian who can't pronounce the normal german r cause we roll it 🥲one day I will muster up the motivation to learn it
"As many languages you speak, as often you are humen." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet 1749-1832)
professionel scrabblers killed me😂😂😂yeah we can build crazy words but the most make realy sense😉
13:12 True, even Fernseher which is TV literally translates to Far seer. Like how far we talkin? lol
10:57 Yay, that was so good! Still work to do on the R and the Ä could be a bit wider to separate it from A more clearly. To your question: First one sounded more Ä than A, second one the other way around. Even in the first one you could lean even harder into it, make it even wider if that makes sense. The most obvious inaccuracy would be the English, rolled R though. Gotta get that back tongue trill in there for perfect pronunciation. ;)
Bruh, u r solid af🤩 good job
I get what you wanna say with the "hr" but I don't know,
seems to create more confusion than actually be helpful:
The German R is just a little click in your throat 🤷♂ that's about it
You can roll it a bit, but that's it.
Also I often get comments about my Bavarian dialect, like "that's German? It sounds so soft", "that can't be German", "I didn't know Germany could have so much melody", etc.
The fun thing is, that our words can be long but in the end other languages have the same words but don't write them as one word xD
James, all is so 100% right, what you said. Thanks man! Best regards from germany.
Actually, your army training is also a bit effed up.
For example, German soldiers train on having a clear head, while American soldiers train to keep their aggressive emotions up and keep them up the entire time.
I don't have statistics, but I'd like to know the difference of friendly fire frequency/wounded/killed between American soldiers and German soldiers.
I know one time, an American army went into a city and there were 11 casualties; 2 dead and 9 wounded by friendly fire - the enemy (if they weren't just civilians?) were wiped out.
Many such stories sometimes come up, like when you celebrate your wedding, in your wedding gown, and in response to gun fire into the sky comes a bomb and blows your party up.
James why are you not moving to Rammstein Air Base?
There you will learn German faster than you would like :-)
Happy holidays to everyone!
He once said that Germany has bad internet compared to Korea, where he is currently stationed.
@@sailspo I can't say anything about the conditions in Korea due to lack of knowledge.
The situation in Germany depends very much on the location and population density.
Rhineland-Palatinate is not known for being an Internet Abyss.
100/40Mbit/s should usually not be a problem. However, 1/1Gbit/s is possible almost everywhere against insertion of coins.
In fact, your German pronounciation and reading skill has really become quite good. I'd rate it a 7.5/10 now. Merry Xmas!
When Hitler were speak in englisch, it sounds also harsh i think. When you speak german nice, peacefull and lovley it sounds good i think.
Your pronunciation is quite good already. What I always recommended to my students and foreign friends was that you should try to break big words apart first before you read them and then read them like you would an English phrasal noun. So try saying "Bundesverfassungsgericht" like you would "Supreme Court of the United States" -->
"Bund-es Ver-fass-ung-s Ge-richt"
The german word for Monitor is "Bildschirm", wich means Picturescreen.
I once saw an english standup, complaining about the german compound words, he chose Rasenmäher, because it mähs the Rasen. But in english its fucking lawnmower, which mows the lawn........
I feel like most people who think German sounds "aggressive" are primary English-speakers, and most likely American, so it's likely they'll have only exposure to the English language and maybe Spanish at best for another. Many other languages I feel like sound more "aggressive", and I personally much love them for it, like Arabic for example or basically any Slavic language, in particular I happen to love Russian though.
Now the ironic thing about it is, if you're in a German-speaking place, it's much more likely to have exposure to those two specific types of languages or language groups; Slavic and Arabic (because it's just naturally spoken a lot here).
In particular I feel like, the German "ch" sound seems to scare English-speakers a lot, as well as pronouncing the "R" in a strong way, or anyway in a stronger way than they do it in English or French or Japanese for example. And again, both Slavic languages and Arabic have a majestic rolled "R" (which is actually my favorite version of R, even more than the German one), and they have their "ch" as well, though in Russian it would be х (I dearly hope I copied that in correctly, otherwise, please feel free to correct me) and in Arabic I have no way how it's spelled, but they have it.
If someone ever asks me how to pronounce ä, Ima tell them, “do you know that ‘period ah period‘ uh girl?“ yeah. How she pronounced the ah.
100% Buddy, you have to actively use the language in order to maintain your capability to speak in it. Aber es lohnt sich definitiv am Ball zu bleiben, da die Belohnung dafür fantastisch ist.
An College student from the us still was thinking our Bundeskanzler is adolf hitler und wanted to know how we life with that big wall dividing us😂😂
I'm both Dutch and German and I feel like Dutch may even sound harsher sometimes because it has even more of the "ch/g" sounds
Nicht vergessen, Schweizer-Deutsch.
It is possible to enjoy German as a beautiful language. Just read some poems by Goethe, Schiller, Fallersleben, Heine, Fontane, Rilke, Kästner, Ringelnatz, Tucholski, Bachmann and many more.
I think the thing with the German "r" is also discussable. I can do the classic/northern German "r", the rolling "r" as it is spoken for example in all the slavic languages (and many more) and also in south Germany/Bavariam, Austria etc. and also the English "r", which, scientifically/phonetically spoken, isn't even a real "r" to begin with. ;-)
Merry Christmas to everyone
James. the thing with the R and why we Germans don't get what you are talking about is:
it's more like when you immagine making a cat's purr sound. but only until it reaches the "peak" once. i hope you know what i mean it is deffinetly hard to discribe because its a sound from the throat.
Bro, u already see the dif. in hängig into hängich ... hängich is just a "slang" to make it more smooth. You have to write down "hängig" to understand, but u will never call it out like "hängig".
It depends on the region, in the southern variant "hängig" is spoken, in the northern variant "hängich". Both is fine as long as you write "hängig",
Dear friend ,in the Äpfel and Obst example,you proved his point!😂have a wonderful christmas!!
german is indeed a beautiful language. listen to goethe´s poems. if you don´t speak german it´s half the fun.
Christoph Waltz speaks beautiful German despite playin a supercharged nazi in the Inglorious bastards and then there was Diane Kruger. God bless Tarantino
German is my motherlenguage =D but i often dont know the exact grammar that i use out of intuition because the only advantage is, that i grow up with that lenguage=D
I mean.. a desktop monitor is literally translated to "picture-umbrella" ... that doesn't even make sense
Maybe because it's wrong? 😉
The literal translation of Bildschirm would be picture screen.
Schirm means screen. The correct translation of umbrella would be rain screen (Regenschirm). We are just lazy and say Schirm (screen), when referring to an umbrella (Regenschirm).
The word "Schirm" translates as "screen", not only "umbrella". So it is "picture-screen" literally translated. It derives from the verb "schirmen", to protect something with a kind of sheet or something else. The "Lampenschirm" is a lampshade and not an umbrella for the lamp. The lampshade protects against the direct beam of light from the light source and displays the light in a distributed form. The lampshade protects against the direct beam of light from the source. The same happens with the screen. It is illuminated from behind. Whereby in German, a cinema screen is not a ‘Bildschirm’ but a "sheet" because it is not illuminated from behind.
Just saying, you really get the nuances of the German language 👍
The German language has over 18 million words. From the vocabulary, you can adapt your pronunciation as you like.
not really but ok
@@moe5346 Quote Goethe Institut: Die computerlinguistischen Methoden machen es möglich, viel genauer als früher zu erfassen, wie groß der Wortschatz wirklich ist. Um das Jahr 2000 herum, in meinen ersten Jahren als Dudenredakteurin, wurde der Umfang des Wortschatzes der deutschen Standardsprache mit 300.000 bis 400.000 Wörtern angegeben. Eine Auswertung des Dudenkorpus, unserer elektronischen Textsammlung, erbrachte vor Kurzem eine Zahl von 17,4 Millionen Grundformen, also unterschiedlichen Wörtern in ihrer unflektierten Form. Ist der Wortschatz in so wenigen Jahren so stark gewachsen? Wie lässt sich ein solch großer Unterschied erklären?
Video = Bewegtbildproduktion a word i like. Or for a Phone = Handy or mobiler Fernsprechapparat
LOL yeah the ww2 education etc in the US is horrible. I still remember my best friend when he came back from a year in the US as a german exchange student, and the stories he told... first thing he was asked was wether Hitler was still alive and if we still have to do the Hitler salute at school. Americans really live in a weird bubble, unless they actively try to check things out for themselves.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays everybody ✨❤️💚
Just a little hint. I do have my problems with those snake like words. I am ignoring the rules (who the heck is allowed to judge?) and put space marks in between the components where logic implies them.
Hey James great progress, amazing actually. Quick tip with your German R troubles , let’s use the word rauchen (smoking) imagine gurgling a sip of mouthwash after brushing your teeth and you got your R .
As a German who can't really roll their "r"s, I produce them mostly at the front of my mouth, with minimal to zero rolling 🤭
There are very much different ways to the speak theR in German, depending on the regions where you grow up.
Gargling or snoring is a good hint. My general gutteral r setup seems to be mouth slightly open (fingertip between front teeth), back of tongue up, front flat down. The amount of constriction the back of the tongue exerts will modulate the actual sound atop the sheer gargling noise.
13:03 ngl i spit my drink a bit. because i gotta say..its true. those could be german names for words xD but well they explain perfectly what they do, no? x)
Du sprichst gut deutsch 😊 Grüße aus Deutschland 😁
Weißt du was mich sehr traurig macht ist das wir Deutschen immer noch als Nazis gehalten werden. Wir die neueren Generation die nichts dafür können auf einem Erbe des Schreckens aufgebaut. Ich gebe ein Dickes Herz an die Amerikaner an alle da draußen. Möge die Welt in der wir leben Friedlich bleiben denn wir sind eine Famile alle.
Dutch, Swiss-German and Arabic have 100.000.000 more "ch-ch-ch"s than regular high German, for example, and I had to think about it for no longer than a second.
Yeah. Chuchichäschtli in Schwitzerdütsch comes to mind. Some Swiss friends told me if you can pronounce that correctly in Swiss German you are fluent.
The German word for monitor is Bildschirm
Do you want to try a literal translation?
Okay,
here
we
go
...
correct:
Bild is German for picture and the English word for Schirm is screen
so a Bildschirm is a picturescreen.
My R sound is a growl😅 you got so good. Break the words Down, you got it!
Ich lerne Deutsch seit fünf jahre. Damn near everyone I meet who finds out that I'm learning German feels compelled to make a hitler reference, I blame the media and poor education. If I was learning Italian, nobody would say anything about Mussolini... because they probably don't know who that is. Anyway, my point is that this happened to me today while I had my phone in my pocket, and now this video is popping up. I believe in coincidence.