Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 01:01:25PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >
> >In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the
> >farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to
> >generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European
> >languages).
> >
> 
> That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker
> who's (attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found
> german considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just
> weird.
> 
> I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more
> similar to english (and english makes no sense even to a native
> speaker!) The word genders didn't help, either.

Yeah, learning a related language has the pitfall of giving a false
sense of familiarity, when the correct approach is to start from a clean
slate, make no assumptions, and treat it like the foreign language that
it is.  My wife, for example, is a native Mandarin speaker, but when she
started learning Cantonese, she eventually realized that she had to stop
all attempts at generalizing from Mandarin, and treat it as a completely
new foreign language.  Otherwise she would end up like so many Mandarin
speakers who *think* they can speak Cantonese just by warping their
pronunciation a little, but actually end up butchering the pronunciation
*and* the grammar (and yes, Cantonese grammar *is* different from
Mandarin, in spite of similarities) and sounding like an idiot to a
native Cantonese speaker.  Even though Cantonese does share a lot of
common words with Mandarin, they do *not* use them in the same contexts
or in the same ways, and naive transliteration often sounds totally
weird, or outright wrong.

(Ob-ontopic) It's kinda like how you can write C/C++-like code in D, but
to a "native" D coder, your code would look pretty weird and very
un-idiomatic. (Or, as Larry Wall once said, you can write assembly code
in any language. :-P) Fortunately, in the programming world, your code
probably would still work, to some extent. But with natural languages
that may not be true. :-P  To truly learn a language well, programming
or natural, you really have to treat it as a language in its own right,
rather than just "C with classes" or "C++ with nice template syntax" or
"Mandarin with warped vowels".


T

-- 
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.