Learning a new language is easy!

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• themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I mean, yeah. This is an important part of the German language. They create composite words to describe a thing, and learning to break it down into its constituents is a fundamental part of reading German.

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  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.

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    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Alles gut. Deine Vergesslichkeit hindert mich nicht daran, hier zu pfostieren.

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    • LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      As a German I can assure you that false friends are something you scare away all pupils (regardless of age). I have very intense memory of our English teacher correcting us again and again.

      Regarding the composita in German: we are moving more towards the English approach by splitting these word monstrousities with hyphens. E.g. Donaudampfschifffahrtsamt may be spelled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Amt. Its way easier to read and write. While the hyphenated spelling is not something that is used often officially, it got more popular in the last decades.

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    • Th3D3k0y@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      My biggest issue with Duolingo trying to learn German honestly. Sure I can read a compound word when presented with it, but fucking Duo is like “Cool… now spell it… bitch”

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    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Oh I thought those were false cognates

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    • PlexSheep@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Tja

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  • VitaminF@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It makes more context to translate “Zeug” as “tool” in most compound words, it is its original meaning like in Feuerzeug, Flugzeug, Fahrzeug, Rüstzeug.

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    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      In English, it would be a “thingie.” Like Germans are constantly trying to remember the word “lighter” and they’re like, “you know, the whatsit, the… fire… thingie.”

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  • thedarkfly@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    In which context would you use Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug instead of Feuerwehrfahrzeug?

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    • sirprize@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      When you’re a fireman whose job is to plan which vehicles go where or when you need to precisely specify which type of fire vehicle. Non-firemen usually say Feuerwehrfahrzeug or even Feuerwehrauto.

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    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      No idea, I don’t speak German. I just studied it a bit and barely remember a few basic phrases.

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    • Siegfried@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Imagine you want to set a buildinh on fire but you dont want to risk being the first suspect. So you call 911 instead of the fire department equivalent and use the long word to lose time

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  • Asafum@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I haven’t tried, but I feel like that concept would be easy for me to grasp because I already find myself doing it with English if I happen to know the old words, Latin or otherwise, used to construct the modern ones.

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  • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Hahahaha German makes words like I do in conlangs except it somehow never became unique words with time

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• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  We were Americans driving through Europe and the late '90s.

  It was before Google translate and before Google maps. I had an HP PDA with translation app on it. I had purchased language packs for the countries we were visiting.

  Down the highway we go. This beautiful black and white sign appears in the side of the road. It was 10-12 ft square with a skull and crossbones. Below the skull was a VERY long word.

  We laugh nervously. What the hell was that? Yeah right?

  After driving for a little while another one. Fuck. I don’t know is the serious?

  Another one. Now I’m breaking out the PDA and trying to remember the alphabet soup underneath the Grimm imagery. It doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about. We’ll see another one coming up and we debate sitting in front of it until I get a chance to get it into the translator.

  It was probably the longest compound word ever created to express the term drunk driving.

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• FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  As someone who learnt both German and English as a second language, german was far easier to learn. Atleast the spelling and stuff makes sense.

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  • doingthestuff@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.

    All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.

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    • sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.

      I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.

      I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷

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    • roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      English is the weird one of the Indo European languages in dropping grammatical gender. Or if you look at it from Persians perspective, we don’t go far enough because we still have gendered pronouns.

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  • udon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    IMHO English is easier to learn in the beginning, but gets ridiculous later on. Pronunciation is completely random and makes no sense, vocabulary as well. German pronunciation is probably harder (maybe? The English “th” is a challenge as well!), and articles are stupid. But: once you have a certain level it gets way easier. Pronunciation makes sense, vocabs make sense.

    For example, what’s a “plane” supposed to be? Flugzeug (“flying thing”) makes much more sense, even if it’s the first time you read it.

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  • psud@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    English spelling had a bit of a disaster. Spelling got settled over the same time pronunciation was changing, at the same time printers became a thing and people getting something printed had loads of ability to change what would be standard spelling and they liked to show off how much they knew the history of the language by inserting silent letters reminding them of the Latin or Greek root word

    Also English has many more vowels than the Latin alphabet so it’s practically impossible to accurately reflect the way a word is said in its spelling and some words got frozen in text just before they changed how they were spoken and others just after so there’s no consistency

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    • Johanno@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      English spelling is easy!

      Just learn which word comes from which language.

      Kindergarden. German, you spell the i like in German.

      fable. French, you don’t spell every letter

      Island. French

      pace. Latin, you just spell it like you read it.

      English has the problem that it just took words from many other languages and kept their pronunciation.

      Which leads to a whole mess of words. Older words seem to have a bit more consistency.

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• finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Hanz! Get ze Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug!

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  • marius@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Very useful for when he’s done getting the Flammenwerfer

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    • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Die post ist pissenwasser!

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  • Hupf@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    We make these huge, clunky compound words so that we can introduce new abbreviations. That’s a HLF.

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• tamal3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  My personal favorite is when Pieter cuts off a little girl’s hand:

  Image

  The words are less impressively compound, but the images speak for themselves. This one is good too:

  Image****

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  • JayObey711@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Peter was the guy with the nasty hair and nails. The kid in orange is Konrad or little suck-a-thumb. His thumbs are cut of by the a random man with big sharp scissors because he wouldn’t stop sucking his thumbs. So he kind of had it coming. He was even warned by his mother.

    But seriously the girl on the bottom is maybe the only good story I would actually tell my children. It’s about a girl who kept playing with fire even tho she was repeatedly told how dangerous it was.

    There is also one story about a black kid that is being bullied for the colour his skin. A bystander doesn’t like that and dips the dipshits in ink so their skin is even darker than that of the black child. Wich is kind of slay but still portrays dark skin as worse than lighter skin soo :(

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    • nyctre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      How does that story portray dark skin as worse than light? What am I missing? Just sounds like the dude showed the kids that even if you change the skin color, you’re still the same person.

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• spicytuna62@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Gesundheit.

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  • CheeryLBottom@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Danke

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• werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  How a normal Mexican American misunderstands via conversations with actual Germans…say you got an avocado… Now add salt, its a saltiavocado. Add vinegar, its a saltyvinegaravocado. Now step on it while running and you just “slippedonavinegaravocado” or you had an “avocadoslip”.

  I call bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t come.

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  • Slovene@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Say you got a pen … Now add apple, it’s a applepen. Say you got a pen … Now add pineapple, you got pineapplepen.

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    • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      That’s going to be in my head for a while. Bastard.

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  • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Meanwhile there is many words that are just two words in english instead of a compound word.

    Lets take a typical example for “business” compound-words:

    IT-Sicherheitsdienstleister -> IT security service provider.

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    • dojan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I don’t know about German, but in Swedish it looks really messy if you sunder your compound words. In general I think people know what you mean regardless, but you can end up with peculiar double meanings. There are plenty of signs, notes, and what have you that people have posted online for a laugh.

      Off the top of my head

      • Gå lättpackad i fjällen
        • Travel lightly (as in luggage) in the mountains
      • Gå lätt packad i fjällen
        • Travel slightly intoxicated in the mountains
      • Sjukgymnast
        • Physiotherapist
      • Sjuk gymnast
        • Diseased/Sick gymnast
      • Årets sista svenskodlade tulpaner
        • The last Swedish-grown tulips of the year
      • Årets sista svensk odlade tulpaner
        • The last Swede of the year cultivated tulips

      It’s also worth noting that the tones can be different, so if you “hear” the words as you read them, then “lättpackad” and “lätt packad” sounds different.

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  • bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    English has large compounds like this too, we just usually add spaces and/or hyphens so it doesn’t look quite as extreme when written out.

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    • samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      We tend to limit it to two words most of the time, and most compound words in English are Germanic in origin.

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• chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  just separate the words

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  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    This, but seriously. If you know the words it’s trivial, and when you know a little German it’s much less confusing than it seems.

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    • bitwaba@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      speaking German is easy. Just know German!

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• Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Come on, I know there’s Germans about. What the hell does it say lol? Here’s what Claude says:

  The fire department’s rescue and firefighting group vehicle… It transports firefighters, ladders, tools, hoses… (text cuts off)

  So I am guessing “Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug” is “rescue and firefighting group vehicle?”

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  • CandleTiger@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    American here who studied German for eight years, graduated with a minor in German, and lived there for one year:

    I’m not sure how to properly translate this children’s book.

    The long word breaks into easily-understood pieces:

    “help-ability-extinguish-group-travel-thing”

    But in order to get a proper concept back out of it you need to know what order the pieces go together in and I don’t know that.

    travel-thing is a vehicle.

    help-ability is emergency services

    Beyond that I have to guess — Is group-travel-thing a crew vehicle, making this a crew vehicle for extinguishing?

    Or maybe extinguish-group is a fire crew and this is a vehicle for fire crews?

    Either way I feel like the author is using a lot more word-parts than they should have to for what is (clearly in the picture) better described as a pump truck.

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    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I had to look it up, it’s the technical term for a certain firefighting vehicle.

      In particular, what distinguishes it from a normal crew firefighting vehicle (Löschgruppenfahrzeug) is its equipment for “Technische Hilfeleistung” (technical help-providing) which basically means it carries equipment beyond basic extinguishing agents. If you’re physically stuck in your car after a crash, a Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug has to arrive to cut open the doors.

      Image

      A Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug

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      A (small) Löschgruppenfahrzeug. Note that it only contains firefighting equipment.

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    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      No, that’s actually the official term for a very specific type of vehicle. It’s a hybrid between a Löschgruppenfahrzeug (a multipurpose firefighting vehicle) and a Rüstwagen (which carries equipment for light non-firefighting purposes).

      People who actually deal with them just say “HLF”.

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  • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Its more like “assistance for firefighting group vehicle”.

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    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Probably a "supporting firefighter group vehicle“ to be exact.

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  • wieson@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The other commenters have already explained it diligently, but I wanted to hop on for something related.

    As a German speaker, it actually irritates me a little, that English doesn’t agglutinate. Let’s take the word “gum ball machine”.

    Which is it? It’s a machine. So are “gum” and “ball” descriptors of “machine”? Well no, they’re all nouns. But they’re not all subjects or objects of a sentence. They’re one subject together. But they’re not written together.

    If I had a red gum ball machine, is it a red machine made out of gum that produces balls? Ok, it can also be spelt gumball machine. But that’s still multiple words per concept.

    I like my nouns to be one word if it’s one thing and one subject.

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    • samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      “Gumball” is the only correct spelling; “gum ball” is incorrect. So the gum and ball are at least connected. But you’re right about “red gumball machine.” The gumballs or machine might be what’s red.

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• colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  German infamously has a lot of long compound words but for those who struggle with them I have a question (I’m curious and there’s no judgment here - I totally understand that it’s hard): Canyoureadthissentenceeventhoughtherearenospaces? What about Orangecatsittingonamat? If yes, is it difficult in German due to having a smaller vocabulary in a new language, or something else?

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  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.

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  • Aqarius@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    That’s like saying you can read a sentence written in rot13. Technically yes, you can decipher it, but it’s not as easy. The spaces are used for a reason. Same with punctuation.

    You know that trick where people can mostly recognise words with scrambled letters, as long as the first and last are right? Long, unknown words scramble that, and force you to parse them “manually”, and even then, in your own example, you can easily misread (and then have to go back and correct yourself) cANYou…, canYOUREad…, …ceEVENTho…, …venTHOUGHT-HEREar…, …ghTHE-REARen…,

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    • colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yes that’s a good example too! (I don’t know of any language where that’s a possibility but I agree it’s similar)

      The spaces are used for a reason

      That’s the thing though - my hypothesis is that it’s based on what one is familiar with. There are languages/scripts where spaces don’t indicate word boundaries (e.g. Chinese), or that are rather agglutinative (e.g. Finnish), or somewhere in between (like German), or on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hindi/Devanagari where a space and an overline marks a word. Totally understandable that it feels perhaps rot13-ish due to unfamiliarity but I would be surprised if native users of those languages share that sentiment.

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  • JayObey711@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I think it’s funny that the capitalization of nouns in German is allegedly for readability, but at the same time we can cram the new testament into four words.

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    • Zabjam@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Keep in mind that the memes you see are extreme examples. The vast majority of compound words consists of 2 or 3 words. Like Ofenreiniger (oven cleaner) or Werkzeugkoffer (tool box). Werkzeug being a compound word itself, made from “Werk” & “Zeug” meaning craft or work & gadget. These extremely long words tend to describe very specific, often niche items and are just rarely used in common language. Most people would call the thing in the picture more generalised “Feuerwehrauto”. Sufficient to describe it for most people, but not as precise as the long compound. It is basically a question how much details you want or need to communicate.

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• OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Ah fuck that’s one long mess of several words put together…

  Let’s see…

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  • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    What the fuck does lösch do in that word???

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    • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Hilfe (help or assistance) Leistung (act, performance or service) Lösch (delete, remove, extinguish) Fahrzeug (vehicle)

      Hilfeleistungloschgruppenfahrze, or Extinguishment help service vehicle

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• someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Google translate says “the rescue firefighting group vehicle”

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• DandomRude@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Yes, these compount words might be the reason why we couldn’t get rid of the damn Nazis for good: After the Second World War, we Germans ourselves probably didn’t really understand what the purpose of the “Entnazifizierungsbehörde” (authority to combat National Socialist ideology) was and, accordingly, could not really grasp why it was so important. A serious mistake that still has consequences to this day, unfortunately…

  /s, obviously

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• samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I can read “help,” “groups,” and “drive” in the word, but I don’t know the others.

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  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Hilfe – help
    Leistung – action (closest translation for this context)
    Löschung – extinguishing
    -s- to make it sound less awkward
    Gruppe – group
    -n- to make it sound less awkward (Gruppen, the plural, is unrelated)
    fahr – root of the verb “drive” or “go” in the context of vehicles Zeug – basically “thing”; hence Fahrzeug = vehicle

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    • samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It’s no coincidence that two of the words I recognized are cognates in English. “Fahr” I knew because I was always amused by the phrase “Gute Fahrt!”

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• sramder@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  LOL looks like a German advent calendar, not even a book!

  **Fake news! **

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  • reev@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s one of those books that lets you flap it open to reveal the Feuerwehrleute, Leitern, Werkzeuge and Schläuche within.

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    • sramder@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Ahhhh I was kinda wondering why there was an educational advent calendar 😅

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• ornery_chemist@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  TIL that löschen is also used to mean extinguishing fires. Firefighter support vehicle, I guess?

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  • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Hilfeleistungs-Löschgruppen-Fahrzeug is a very odd composite word for Germans too. It’s not commonly used, this is probably "Amtsdeutsch“, a bureaucratic way of naming things as accurately as possible. Mostly used like that by government institutions and Microsoft help documents in german.

    See also: Umschaltfeststelltaste (Caps Lock) und Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm (Group policy Editor).

    Shudders. This is why I (as a native German speaker) prefer english documentation.

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    • ornery_chemist@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I’ve played around with changing Windows system languages before and was indeed thrown off by the slew of Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm-type calques. Glad to know that Germans also find this offputting ;)

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  • Wofls@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Löschen can also mean to offload cargo from a ship if you were only thinking about to delete as a second meaning

    Literally it’s: Supportserviceextinguishinggroupvehicle, it’s a kind of all-rounder firetruck and the most commen one.

    The “Hilfeleistung” means that it isn’t just for firefighting but also other kinds calls “Technische Hilfe” / technical support

    and the “Löschgruppe” refers to the core capability to fight fires as well as the personell on board, a “Gruppe” is a specific tactical unit in german firefighting of 9 people

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  • weker01@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    When I was in school many notebooks came with a loose sheet to absorb the ink from our fountain pens. These are called “Löschpapier” (extinguishing paper).

    A common joke was, to say you should toss the “Löschpapier” into a fire to extinguish it.

    I tried it once. It burned quite well unfortunately.

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• HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  This is a satirical book right?

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s German, so probably not.

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