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In Germany, learning English is mandatory. When I graduated from school (1992), the barest minimum you could get away with was 4 years. I had 8 years, and English was one of four graduation subjects of mine.

The thing is, most Germans never again encounter anything "English". Movies and TV-shows are re-dubbed, books translated. There's a German e-bay, a German Amazon. You can live quite happily in Germany without knowing English.

The Swedish, for example, don't enjoy this level of "support". Their movies and TV-shows are still in their original language, with subtitles. Many books never get translated to Swedish. (Don't know about the level of web support though.) As a result, the Swedish speak (and write) a very decent English.

That's the situation on the street. But we aren't on a street here, we are in a forum that resides in a .com domain and is English all-around, catering for techie types. With all the German chat forums, do you think anybody not having good English skills would care to stick around?

What you get here is a small subset of what you encounter on the street.

And I agree with Curufir: The trick is to speak a bit louder, and slow. Not as in speaking to a deaf, but as in pronouncing clearly and precisely. And making introductions, as in "Excuse me, can you perhaps help me?", so the other one has a chance to gather his wits.

The man on the street is usually not used to using English even if he knows it well: You're walking a German street, thinking German thoughts going to a German working place, and suddenly somebody shoots rapid-fire slang English at you... even if somebody shoots rapid-fire slang German at me, I tend to say "Entschuldigung?" and have him repeat the sentence because my thoughts were elsewhere.

When I log-in here, I know it's English, and I am prepared. I can also look up words if I'm lost, instead of doing lots of "erm..." and "ahem...".

Talking about English skills.......i'd like 2 get a doubt cleared.
is the following sentence correct:-
I am going to take my bath at 4 in the morning. ::)

Usually, as far as I remember, it is said this way:

"I am going to have a bath at 4 o'clock am."

But a look-up in my favourite dictionnaire revealed that it is also: "I am going to take a bath at 4 o'clock am." So, you are definitely right.

hth

taking a bath sounds funny, thats why i wanted 2 clarify,

But a look-up in my favourite dictionnaire revealed that it is also: "I am going to take a bath at 4 o'clock am." So, you are definitely right.

which dictionary was that?

..

Perica wrote: Out of curiosity: are German and French strictly phonetic languages? If not strictly phonetic, then are the majority of words (95%+) in them phonetic??

Uh...

Unless I am completely mistaken, every mainstream European language is "phonetic". Examples for non-phonetic languages are e.g. Japanese, Chinese, or Egyptian Hyroglyphs.

So I am not really sure what you mean, here.

German and French are vastly different in many ways. French does have many "silent letters", silent sillables etc., whereas German pronounciation is pretty straightforward... however, I have yet to hear an anglo-american pronouncing "K?che" (kitchen) correctly.

Hehe, that's mainly because there's presque no diaeresis in english f. ex. An anglo-american native doesn't *hear* the diaeresis - as a chinese native doesn't recognize the 'r'. He just hears an 'l' because that's the best approximation what his brain *can* translate the recognized signal to.

What he means maybe is this: either to speak a word as it is written: such as german, kroatian or serbian (the both I understand more and speak a little) or to speak a word according to several rules which cause the pronounciation differ from the written word: english, french, swedish (oh, yes, the angstr?m ball is difficult to grasp, as well as the different pronounciation for o and u, not to forget those hairy rules for sk, sj.)

To reply to Pericas question:

German you speak as you write.well, except of diaeresis and the "silent-h"-rule - and the 'ie' which is just pronounced as a very long i. Tell me any Non Native German speaker who has grasped this quickly and show me one who can explain it.

French is another boot: It has difficult pronounciation rules and the spoken word doesn't resemble the written one. You need to know how the word is written AND you need to know how the word is spoken. So, french is - for the outlander - not ready explorable. But it is a beautiyful language, soft to speak and with many nice metaphors.

This "mandatory language" thing is interesting.

In Finland, learning the other official language (which for most people is Swedish, except Swedish speakers for whom it's Finnish) is mandatory. Learning English is technically not. You can learn German or French or whatever instead (although most people end up learning English too). The result?

Everybody theoretically speaks Swedish, at least enough to say "Jag kan inte tala svenska." (I can't speak Swedish, in Swedish). Yet, almost everyone speaks MUCH better English than they speak Swedish; enough so that when I need to speak with native Swedish speakers (which is quite rare anyway, since most of them can speak Finnish too) I usually end up conversing in English, and I'm certainly not the only one.

It is common joke to call English "kolmas kotimainen" (3rd domestic). The idea behind the joke is that while Finnish and Swedish are the official languages, the amount of people able to speak semi-fluent English is several times bigger than the amount of people that speak conversational Swedish. In fact, it's hard to find someone who doesn't speak any English at all.

As for German, there are other two-vowel combinations which similar trouble as "ie". That said, it took me about 5 minutes to understand those rules. There are other problems MUCH harder in German. I might be handicapped though, as Finnish is about as close to fully phonetic system as you can get with "ng" and "nk" causing the minor deviations: for "ng" you get what you get in fishing and for nk you get what you get for ink which is fairly obvious (try to pronounce "ng" with normal "n" instead). Such a phonetic system means that a Finnish speaker can easy map the "written letters" to the "spoken letters": a "volkswagen" simpy becomes "folksvaagen" as the "spoken letters" and an English word such as "combination" becomes "kombineiss?n" (which sounds kinda funny when pronounced literally, as some Finnish people do when speaking English.. watch Formula1 and listen to Kimi R?ikk?nen next time he says something there (assuming he still drives..)).

mystran wrote: There are other problems MUCH harder in German.

Yep. In German, it isn't the phonetics that make it a difficult language, it's the grammar. Where English has "the", German has "der", "die", and "das" depending on the gender of the subject spoken about - which, when it comes to inanimate objects or animals, is everything but obvious. (A table and a dog is male, a lamp and a cat are female, a house and a rhino are neuter...)

And that's only the beginning of it.

@mystran: That's brains. Grasping pronounciation rules in about 5 minutes. Cool. . Afterwards it is only a matter of training to get it straight, isn't it?

I have tried to explain this "silent-h" and the "ie" to my mother, who is non-native-german speaker, for 20 years, and it didn't sink in, believe me. that's because in her mother tongue, you literally write a word as you speak it -apart from several sch- and z- forms in combination with haceks.

BTW the sentence with the silent-h rule and the diaeresis is slightly mutilated: I've omitted the native-german-speaker:
... and a native german speaker who can explain them ...

Well, I can, and I am native german speaker. But the majority just takes it as is and has never given it a thought. Well ... having hard time to understand the spoken word has some impacts ... *mmpf*

Then again, Finish is said to have a grammar trap or two of its own, now has it?

Then again, mystran can boast he's a native speaker of the predecessor of Tolkien Elvish... (Tolkien was much inspired by the Finish language.)

Mae govannen!

But he skipped a few O?s. In my opinion it seems like all finish word must have atleast 3 o?s in it.

BTW: "Jag kan inte tala svenska", sounds a bit, hmm.. old?
"Jag pratar inte svenska" or something else might sound better.

/ Christoffer

Really, the Dutch pronounciation's not the problem. The biggest part when studying it in school, is the Akkusativ, Nominativ, Dativ and Genitiv, but when speaking, nobody cares 'bout it if you make a fault in it. What's harder, is getting the right tense. Put worden instead of geworden and your sentence means something different. If I'm not mistaken, Dutch geworden = German worden and Dutch worden = German geworden, yet not in all cases... or something like that. Confuses the bejeezes out of me, that does.

The biggest problems in Finnish are declination/inflection for which there are no sane rules, since Finnish doesn't use prepositions/postpositions and the declination/inflection postfixes generally cause change to the main body of the word. You mostly have to learn to "hear" them.

That said, while Quenya (that Tolkien's elvish language) share many grammatic principles, all words and declinations are totally different. One of the things that Tolkien followed is expressing the subject in the inflection of the verb: in Finnish for example, saying "Min? olen" (I am) is equivalent to simply saying "Olen" since that form of the verb "olla" already carries the information that the subject is in 1st person. In written language the pronouns are dropped quite often, in spoken language rarely.

The second big problem with Finnish is that while there's one "official" Finnish which is written everywhere, most people use some spoken dialect in their spoken language, except of course in "stadi" (means city, but actually only used to mean Helsinki), which has it's own "slang" with several generations of it's own. In fact, while there are dialects which are notably hard to understand for me (I live in Helsinki) it sometimes happens that when someone deliberately speaks using some of the older forms of "slang" it even HARDER to understand what they might be saying.

So, except for small regions which speak nearly the "written" Finnish, you generally have to know both the "official Finnish" and the local dialect.

Mut nyt m? meen kisoo r??kin ja sit koisaa.
(slang, in written Finnish that would be): Mutta nyt min? menen polttamaan tupakan ja sitten nukkumaan. (and in English: But now I'm going to go smoke a cigarette, and then to bed.)

No, don't go into the subject of dialects... even if you ignore that pronounciation and slang vocabulary differs vastly depending on where you are in Germany, the language my grandmother grew up with is completely not understandable for anybody but someone who grew up in the same area. Not just different, or "strange", but incomprehensible. Those so-called "Platt" languages - the tongue of the commoners - derivated from the "Hochdeutsch" (High German) in the early middle ages (!), and became a language with vastly different grammar and vocabulary.

These "Platt" languages are dwindling away, however. In the early 20th century, speaking "Platt" was severely discouraged, even punished, and so it wasn't passed down the generations. It's a shame, because it is something that reflected on how our ancestors lived, and thought about things.

What remains are lots of words that made it from "Platt" into slang German. It's funny to see how people that live ~300 km away are dumbfounded as to what you might mean...

I come from Westphalia. I'm inclined to say "Es pl?stert", looking at a downpour. A nightgown is, for me, a "P?lter". I live in Hessian; they don't even know the words here and would be entirely lost as to what I am talking about.

And I love every minute of it.