I GOT A BOOK EARLIER called Perfect Your German so I'm perfecting away. It cost only £19.99 for one 300 page book and 2 CDs from WH Smiths. This might have had something to do with Smiths pricing something marked £29.99 at £10 cheaper but hey. A bargain is a bargain and who am I to complain.I'm on the lookout for bargainacious second hand language courses so if anyone has higher German or French or beginners to intermediate level Chinese, Japanese or Spanish I'd be most interested.
I have to be pragmatic with these languages. German is the most useful language in Europe ~ or to put it another way, if you add the GDP of different nations together, language by language, German comes out number 2 in the world after English. It's way ahead of Spanish which says a lot, considering Spanish has 400 million native speakers and German has "only" 100 million. Japanese has 125 million native speakers; Mandarin Chinese has about 850 million native speakers; a total of 1,400,000,000 people speak Mandarin as a first or second language. Chinese "dialects" by the way, differ as much as Italian and Spanish. They are really languages, but because all Chinese people consider themselves Chinese the word "dialect" is preferred. On the other hand, Norwegian and Danish are really separate dialects. But they're labelled languages purely on political grounds. When a dialect has a written standard it is apt to be labelled a language. But in actuality ~ so it is said ~ you could walk from Amsterdam to Berlin and at no place would you come across any sudden language divide. That's because German blends into Dutch. And that's why I speak so much Dutch. Not because I'm clever but because I did A level German and Dutch is a version of Low German. Low German is very similar to English. Where a German person says "über das Wasser" a speaker of low German dialect says "over de water" ~ just like an English person. Some of Grimm's fairy tales are in low German. The best one has a man and wife living "in a stinking piss pot". I laughed like a diarrhoea-clogged drain over that one!
Now I must go I'm in an internet cafe. Darkness surrounds us with this weather of late. It's very dull and autumnal.
Sorry no furry Friday. I don't know what else to put! Take care y'all.
PS I'm practising my terrible German once more by blogging in German again.... wish me luck my German grammar is atrocious!
Nice post Gled. I didn't know Danish and Norwegian were so alike. And yes, the closer you get to the German border, the more it starts to sound German.
ReplyDeleteHave a great Sunday! :-)
Happy day to you, Gleds. It is good weather here. Still a bit warm with cool nights. I will take it.
ReplyDeleteVincent: next time you buy a camera, compare instructions in Norwegian and Danish and I guarantee you they're almost identical. The language used to be called "Dano-Norwegian" because it was such an amalgam. But those wily Norwegians decided they didn't want to live in Denmark's shadow and invented their own countrified verison of their own language called Landsmal ("country language") as opposed to the more Danish Bokmal ("book language").
ReplyDeleteSyd: it's dark and miserable here, I'm afraid.