I should have listened to the words of the great thinker Tracy Jordan: “Nah-uh. Superman does good, you’re doing well. You need to study your Grammar, son.” :)
That said, those little quirks are another problem with feeling yourself into a language. I was constantly misusing the German „wie“ – “like” – when making comparisons. I would say something like „Pasta ist besser wie Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better like Pizza!”), not „Pasta ist besser als Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better than Pizza!”) because it just sounded correct to my ears.
I would never ever misuse “like” and “than” in English but I quite happily confused their German equivalents for quite some time.
Which made a lot of people squirm and caused them visible pain so I dropped it. That in itself wasn’t all that easy. Since no automatic red flag was raised when I misused “wie” I consciously had to search everything I said for “wie” and consciously detect whether I used it correctly. Which, in the beginning, was quite hard. I would blurt out a sentence with a blatant misuse, pause a second and hastily add “Oh! ‘Als’ not ‘wie’! ‘Als‘ not ‘wie’!” But I was successful in the end.
At a guess you're from S. Germany right? Ich habe gesessen oder Ich bin gesessen?
I would be very, very grateful if you could email me (barry.p.cotter@gmail.com). I just moved to Germany and want to find out about doing vaguely computery or programming Praktika or news.yc equivalents in German.
I should have listened to the words of the great thinker Tracy Jordan: “Nah-uh. Superman does good, you’re doing well. You need to study your Grammar, son.” :)
That said, those little quirks are another problem with feeling yourself into a language. I was constantly misusing the German „wie“ – “like” – when making comparisons. I would say something like „Pasta ist besser wie Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better like Pizza!”), not „Pasta ist besser als Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better than Pizza!”) because it just sounded correct to my ears.
I would never ever misuse “like” and “than” in English but I quite happily confused their German equivalents for quite some time.
Which made a lot of people squirm and caused them visible pain so I dropped it. That in itself wasn’t all that easy. Since no automatic red flag was raised when I misused “wie” I consciously had to search everything I said for “wie” and consciously detect whether I used it correctly. Which, in the beginning, was quite hard. I would blurt out a sentence with a blatant misuse, pause a second and hastily add “Oh! ‘Als’ not ‘wie’! ‘Als‘ not ‘wie’!” But I was successful in the end.