What the German language sounds like

[LukeFF]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezrJHau7dzU

 

[unreasonable]

A delightful piece of trivia! 

 

Blame Herman the German.

[Feathered_IV]

It's quite fun to speak German, even if you can't. 

 

For example, next time you are in front of the bathroom mirror, adopt a theatrically Hitlerian pose.  Lift your eyes to the heavens and let your head roll about.  Hold out both hands in front of you like you are weighing a pair of invisible melons and say with great feeling:

 

"Eine kleine bonken, und der grosser headjobben!!!"

 

With practice, it can sound amazingly authentic. 

[Uufflakke]

Germans and the English language:

 

[Mastermariner]

Not PK

 

Master

[9./JG27golani79]

"Eine kleine bonken, und der grosser headjobben!!!"

Can you explain - what should be the meaning of this?

Can't make anything out of this.

[=362nd_FS=Hiromachi]

Can you explain - what should be the meaning of this?

Can't make anything out of this.

It seems you are Austrian so that might be it

 

[PFR_Bearkiller72]

That's all I get from your banter, comrades:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIGGYzN_olQ

 

[PFR_Bearkiller72]

Can you explain - what should be the meaning of this?

Can't make anything out of this.

There is no sense in this. It's like a kid pretending to speak a foreign language - just making it sound alike.

And it only works for the native English tongue.     

[9./JG27golani79]

Haha .. alright. Thanks for enlightening me - I just thought there was supposed to be a real meaning behind this sentence or that it should be a real sentence :D

[II./JG77_Manu*]

OP is bullshit anyway.

Have seen it before, but you could do that with virtually every language. As a German i don't find it funny what so ever, because authenticity is zero. 

German isn't even a "hard sounding" language. High German maybe a little, but the dialects (how people actually speak) not so much.

Have to look for Slavic or Finno-Ugric language, there it'll fit better. But even there it depends on the speaker 

Edited December 1, 2016 by II./JG77_Manu*

[Feathered_IV]

Haha .. alright. Thanks for enlightening me - I just thought there was supposed to be a real meaning behind this sentence or that it should be a real sentence :D

Oh dear, I didn't want to have to explain... Someone from one of the Commonwealth countries (or Bletchley park) might read it as, "A little bit of intercourse and a lot of oral sex"

[LukeFF]

OP is bullshit anyway.

Have seen it before, but you could do that with virtually every language. As a German i don't find it funny what so ever, because authenticity is zero.

I wouldn't expect any other sort of response from you. And sorry, but as a non-native German speaker who lived in Germany for a year, German does come across as a harsh-sounding language.

[II./JG77_Manu*]

I wouldn't expect any other sort of response from you. And sorry, but as a non-native German speaker who lived in Germany for a year, German does come across as a harsh-sounding language.

Well this video went around in Facebook a year ago or so, and i know nobody who found it funny. Just stupid. And no one speaks like that in Germany (no one speaks like those French or Italian guys as well). 

Don't know where you were, but there is no generic "German". People in southern Germany (Bayern, Schwaben, Badener) don't sound harsh at all, quite the opposite, pretty soft dialects. 

 

Well, apparently you have never been in Hungary, Finland or Russia..that's what i call "harsh".

But there's always your own perspective. English amongst others is one of the more feminin languages, especially AE (not as much as French though   ). German is more or less in the middle, and then there are the harsher/manlier ones like already mentioned. From your perspective pretty much any language east of France must sound "harsh". For me everything east of Poland/Czech sounds harsh..

Edited December 1, 2016 by II./JG77_Manu*

[Blooddawn1942]

I second that. It's nothing but stupid and not funny at all. None is pronouncing like that. It sounds rather Klingon to my ears.

Edited December 1, 2016 by Blooddawn1942

[Juri_JS]

 

[II./JG77_Manu*]

 

 

   thanks for proving my point. Only one who really doesn't manage to sound harsh is the Egyptian guy

 

you could do that with virtually every language

Edited December 1, 2016 by II./JG77_Manu*

[Hoots]

You see I could be "offended" and fail to see the humour in the English stereotype. But all I saw was a bit of fun. Is now the right time to mention the stereotypical german lack of a sense of humour

[Blooddawn1942]

Humour? What's that? Never heard of it before.

[=362nd_FS=Hiromachi]

Of course, thats what Christoph Waltz explained above. Germans have no sense of humor 

 

Also, being that ugly slav and visiting all neighbor countries I can admit, German is not the same everywhere. There is Bavarian accent, there is difference in Saxony but when I heard old style Prussian accent that made me want to fix bayonet. 

[Blooddawn1942]

This is getting off track...I don't like the last sentence one bit.

[Guest deleted@50488]

Wait until you ear Portuguese!  I can help!!!!

[II./JG77_Manu*]

Wait until you ear Portuguese!  I can help!!!!

 

Know quite some Brazilians...when i first met them, i asked them if they are Bulgarian or Georgian 

I know no other language (i can read), that sounds this different from it's looks. Can read Portuguese just fine, but when i hear it i can't understand a single word 

[Trooper117]

C'mon guys, it was just a bit of light hearted pish taking... nothing else to read into it.

But then again, if you don't understand Basil Fawlty's ''don't mention the war'' when he has German guests in his hotel, then you are already one of the brainwashed 'politically correct' crowd that the world is breeding nowadays.

 

Soon you won't be able to make a joke about a carrot in case you hurt it's feelings.

 

When I was in the army, we visited Germany as well as other countries on 'exchange tours' on a regular basis as we were jumping their parachute equipment, and they were jumping ours.

There was lots of mickey taking between the two sides, all taken in jest, lots of laughs and back slapping all round... (although the Germans constantly liked to bend one of their blokes over, throw a bucket of water over his arse, then everyone lined up and smacked it as hard as they could)

 

Never got my head around that one, but if you think a platoon of British paratroopers were not going to make a joke out of that custom then you are already living in the land of the lost!

 

I spent two years posted to Germany in the 80's... absolutely loved it. I was living in the German community in a little German village called Heidenoldendorf, just outside Detmold.

As a soldier you naturally have a good sense of humour, take the piss out of anything and everything... guess what? The locals loved us and our funny ways and we had a great working relationship with them. I'd have stayed there if I could...

 

By the way, it's not that the Germans have no sense of humour. It's just different to us that's all... and that can surely be said about the Americans, as well as every country I had the pleasure to visit in my long career.

[Yogiflight]

How could one tell, we germans have no sense of humor? Look at our chancellor, how could this be without a lot of humor. But, OK, I have to admit, again we were beaten by the americans, no one else has this amount of humor, to make that guy the mightiest man in the world.

[Blooddawn1942]

Very nice and mature post, Trooper117.

This shall help to put things here back into the right perspective.

Very true Yogiflight. Without a good ammount of humor it would be impossible to bear our Chancellors questionable decisions in regards of opening the floodgates of migration and risking our electricity infrastructure.

But I witness that facing those facts, my humor becomes rather a black one. Getting more and more cynical about all that stuff.

[unreasonable]

The German Child Joke. I wonder if Germans have an equivalent?

 

It goes like this. An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."

 

edit - got it from here, where there is an interesting discussion about how German language sentence structure dictates it's style of humour. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/23/germany.features11

Edited December 1, 2016 by unreasonable

[Blooddawn1942]

Ok. I absolutely understood the joke. No problem from this side. But I found it not a little bit funny. Not that I didn't liked it. I couldn't simply lough about it. Not even smile a little bit.

 

This teaches us, that humor differs from country to country. And I'm somewhat very sure, that germans are neither without humor or that our sense of humor is strange or special. We simply have another sense of humor like every nation has it's own sense of humor.

 

The British humor for example is well known here to be very dry and sometimes wired from our point of view.

[unreasonable]

The British humor for example is well known here to be very dry and sometimes wired from our point of view.

 

I assume you mean weird? 

 

Living for so long in Thailand it is interesting to see what people from a totally different, non- European, culture find funny. Visual humour is pretty much the same, so UK exports like Mr Bean and some Benny Hill stuff is understood and laughed at by the locals when they are in the mood for slapstick.  They also enjoy puns and witty wordplay, but these of course are totally language dependent. 

 

What they do not seem to do are set-piece jokes, but maybe I have just missed them. Traditional British humour uses them a lot, and they all depend on some kind of combination of signaling the punch-line and misdirection, often made possible because English can be so vague and ambiguous.

[Blooddawn1942]

I assume you mean weird? 

 

 

Of Course. My fault. 

It´s not always easy to express the things in another language which is kind of unfamiliar comparing to ones native language.

[Bando]

Well, I am living in Germany (Lower Saxony) for almost three years now and plan to stay here.

I am not a German, but learned the language as one needs that for daily life.

 

Germans have a lot of humor I can tell you. There language is somewhat "hard" to our ears, but so is my native language to theirs. (Dutch)

We always have to laugh at the signs when the schools start again after the summer holidays; "Vorsicht! Schulanfang!", meaning "carefull, schools have started again".

It sounds like a barked order.

 

@Blooddown: I bet your way of speaking, reading and writing English is a LOT better then their German, so in my view you're allowed to make some typos every now and then.

 

I love living here.

[Blooddawn1942]

Phiu... I´m relieved. Thanks for Your kind words mate!

[=362nd_FS=Hiromachi]

 

 

Lower Saxony

Nice. At some point I considered moving to Saxony (so quite a bit to the East), Leipzig-Dresden area since a decent job was there, but pursuing my career I'm back to Warsaw. Been there more than a few times, both Leipzig and Dresden are beautiful places. I should make a visit to Lower Saxony as well some day, was always wondering how Hannover looks. 

 

 

 

I bet your way of speaking, reading and writing English is a LOT better then their German

 

Now that is so true. I've been learning German for 6 years at my school and then had conversations with some Germans but its still little that I know, also probably due to fact that I dont use language much on daily basis. And if language is not used than somehow you forget it slowly. 

[Blooddawn1942]

 

 

Now that is so true. I've been learning German for 6 years at my school and then had conversations with some Germans but its still little that I know, also probably due to fact that I dont use language much on daily basis. And if language is not used than somehow you forget it slowly. 

 

So true! I had english lessons for 6 Years back in my shooldays. No too much, especialy since I never needed another language for job purposes. So the only way to keep my english more or less up to date are holiday trips, Metal-Festivals and maybe Concerts where You sometimes have the opportunity to speak english to foreign visitors, and of course English books and videogames and last but not least boards like this one.

I eversince loved the english language, that may be the reason, I was allways kind of into it, even if I wasn´t very good back then at shool.

Reminds me, that our Marriage Trip brought me and my wife to Scottland in 2001, while most people here in Germany tend to visit Mallorca. At least I´ve never been there and will for sure never go there.

[Hoots]

I am forever in awe of the amount of English spoken overseas, I can just about get by in French and Cantonese. I have tried to make sure my kids concentrate on a language but it's an uphill struggle. Blooddawn, if your spoken English is even half as good as your written then you are bloody good

[Blooddawn1942]

Well, everytime I have to overcome a little shyness, when I´m in a one to one situation after I haven´t spoken english for some time. But I guess that´s not unusual.

After the first three sentences are done, I regain my confidence and then it flows.

The problem is not so much the vocabulary but rather the syntax and the grammar. I guess the syntax alone reveals immediatly my german origin.   

[=362nd_FS=Hiromachi]

I hope nobody gets offended by this old classy

 

[Blooddawn1942]

I love Luis de Funes! I grew up with his movies!

[Bearcat]

Locking.

 

This thread could easily be considered offensive by any German speaking person on these boards based on the delivery of the German speaking actor. If this were done with English.. or translated into a similar kind of dynamic with Americans.. there would be folks who would be quite upset and filling the reports box.