Arneb wrote:Additionally, Germans have two very charcateristic difficulties pronouncing English
Lance wrote:I love this place. I think collectively we know everything there is to know.
Lance wrote:It's interesting that there is nothing I can get to translate the other way. "out with you" just becomes "mit dir", which I would guess is missing something.
Arneb wrote:What almost none of them ever get completely right are the genders
Arneb wrote:and the "r" sound.
Arneb wrote:"Ch", which can be either the ch in "Loch Lomond" or something you don't even want to know, depending on the preceding vowel, is also very tough.
Arneb wrote:I guess a good shibboleth to separate the wheat from the chaff for German would be "Streichholzschächtelchen" (little matchbox). How do you do, Mactep?
Heid the Ba' wrote:This is not to decry polyglots of any ability as I am effectively monolingual.
Arneb wrote:To give you an idea, try to answer this one: Which of the German words for the following items is/are not in the female gender:
Rocket
Road
Rod
Girl
Erection
Pistol
Grenade
Ammunition
Disease
Bus stop
You guessed it, right?
Heid the Ba' wrote:but still got caught out by some things like "unpossible" when I pointed this out to her she said "But that is unlogical . . ."
Arneb wrote:I notice that good, really good English or American speakers of German usually master umlaut, strong verbs
Мастер wrote:Heid the Ba' wrote:but still got caught out by some things like "unpossible" when I pointed this out to her she said "But that is unlogical . . ."
I hope you mentioned to her that "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing :)
Мастер wrote:Now, without looking it up, do you know whether someone or something is "discrete" or "discreet"?
Heid the Ba' wrote:I think it is virtually impossible to completely master another language unless you start young and live in a country it is spoken in and I'm always wary of people who are described as "fluent" in x number of languages.
We used to have a trainee who was Belgian, spoke Dutch as a native language, French (though she would never admit it) and very good German as her husband was German. Her English was good enough that she passed her law degree, diploma etc. in Scotland but still got caught out by some things like "unpossible" when I pointed this out to her she said "But that is unlogical . . ."
This is not to decry polyglots of any ability as I am effectively monolingual.
Мастер wrote:Arneb wrote:"Ch", which can be either the ch in "Loch Lomond" or something you don't even want to know, depending on the preceding vowel, is also very tough.
Well, I say it. I don't know how correct it is. But isn't there huge regional variation in the "ch" sound? (Swiss?)
Мастер wrote:Arneb wrote:I guess a good shibboleth to separate the wheat from the chaff for German would be "Streichholzschächtelchen" (little matchbox). How do you do, Mactep?
There, I just said it. How was it?
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