One noticeable advantage of German's frequently kilomenter-long words and its (some say) at times unwieldly grammatical structure is that when you have to write a German essay and you are composing it in your native language first, and you suddenly find that you need more pages, you will - in almost any case - gain page length just from translating it into German alone.
[Ein deutlicher Vorteil der deutschen Wörter, die oft kilometerlang sind, und der deutschen Grammatikstruktur, die manchmal von einigen sperrig beschreibt wird, geht so: wenn man eine deutsche Hausarbeit schreiben musst und die zuerst auf die Muttersprache verfassen möchte, als man auch gleichzeitig findet, dass es einen Mangel an die Seiten gibt, wird man - fast auf jeden Fall - längere Seiten einfach nur durch die Übersetzung in Deutsch bekommen.]
Not really a perfect translation but... see? I told you so. Now think of adding just a few lines to every paragraph over a span of 8-9 pages.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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2 comments:
I remember the same thing happening with spanish papers (though not by quite as much). Which reminds me...I was pretty annoyed that I could hardly understand anything the spanish student that stayed with us was saying (in spanish that is). She had a strong spanish accent, which when you mainly learn south american spanish accents, is really hard to understand...
Did you notice that 2/3 of your blogs end in ! ?
I was confused for a moment about the punctuation comment. First, I thought you were talking about all of my posts ending in "?!". And then I realized you meant my blogs. And then I thought you mean "?!" together. And then by the time I realized what it was, it wasn't very significant any more. On the other hand, I don't think I would have found it significant to begin with. You could almost say both of my blogs, considering the other one is dead.
Did she have "th-th-th" everywhere? I'm not surprised how drastically different they are... especially considering how different accents are even within Spain and within the entire South American continent.
Erik annoyed me a little the other day because he asked why I couldn't speak the local Bavarian dialect here. Like I was some moron who couldn't pick up virtually an entirely different language that isn't spoken in my day-to-day life in one year. Erik, I will drop your ass into deep south Mississippi for a year and make you eat rocks if you can't reproduce the local accent convincingly by the time I come back for you. And their accent is far more mutually intelligible with English than Bavarian vs. Hochdeutsch.
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