
John le Carré: Why we should learn German (2017) - mpiedrav
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/02/why-we-should-learn-german-john-le-carre
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mpiedrav
«The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship. It is
indeed a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation. It’s
also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your
social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign
language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation.»

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SkyMarshal
_Fyi, you can italicize quoted text by wrapping it in asterisks._

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woodandsteel
I took a year of German in graduate school so I could read German
philosophical texts. On thing that really struck me about the language is that
the main verb in a sentence goes at the end. So a German sentence translated
word-for-word into English would be something like "I to the store in my car
went."

Also I remember learning that German philosophy students prefer to read the
English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason because it broke up the
impossibly long sentences of the original.

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SkyMarshal
German is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order. English and others are SVO. I
always liked SOV languages since first learning one because they feel like
using a Reverse Polish Notation (RPN [1]) calculator like the HP-15c (just
mentioned here recently [2]). The verb, like the operator in the calculator,
comes last, and operates all on the inputs before it.

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation)

[2]:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22222897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22222897)

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Koshkin
I like German because it has own words for many things (including, for
example, radio and television).

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jbotz
French does, too... the Académie Française makes sure of that and slaps you on
the wrist if you use loanwords. Germans are rather more laissez-faire about
it, and recently are absorbing rather a lot of English. For example, the other
day my mother told me that she was going to go "walken", which I guess is a
brisk walk for exercise purposes.

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smacktoward
One such loanword, Angela Merkel amusingly showed the world a couple years
back, being “shitstorm”: [https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/europe/angela-merkel-
shitstor...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/europe/angela-merkel-shitstorm-
scli-intl-grm/index.html)

Though the word has a slightly different meaning _auf Deutsch_ than it does in
English:

 _> According to the venerable Duden dictionary of the German language, the
word is defined as "a storm of outrage in an Internet communication medium
that, in part, goes along with offensive utterances."_

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detaro
How would you define it in English? I'd guess (German is my first language, so
words existing in both are always tricky) a) it's considered a lot more vulgar
in English and b) is more general for a bad situation with s __* flying
around?

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smacktoward
Correct on both points. _Shit_ is a fairly strong expletive in English, so
it’s not a word you’d generally roll out in polite conversation. And a
_shitstorm_ in English doesn’t have a specific context of something that
happens online, it’s just any situation where a bunch of really bad stuff is
happening all at once.

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treden
Learning German, he says, is particularly useful when applying oneself to the
task of understanding the Germans, which he seems to be implying may be quite
soon something of interest to (con and noncon) tinental Europe.

