Originally Posted by Kartoffelbrei (Post 1426736)

Natürlich sprech' ich deutsch ;P I was born here
The sentence you posted just means "Yes, a body Germany.", hehe :D
That's why i got confused


Actually there are 30 letters, if you count ä, ö and ü, but they are just ae, oe and ue. You should really visit bavaria, if you get to germany. it's so amazing here. we have lakes 'n mountains 'n snow 'n beauty everywhere

Yeah, english is taught here in 3rd grade and all the rest of the time in school

Originally Posted by Neapolitan (Post 1426789)

I thought that there were 26 letters. The esset is a ligature, it's when two letters that are joined together, it's from the two S's found in Fraktur joined together i.e. ſ + s = ß. The umlaut is a diacritic, a glyph add to letter e.g. a + ¨ = ä. I don't know if they are considered new letters, I thought of them as modified versions of per-existing letters imo.

French seems to flow because of the liaisons and the words lean into each other as if a sentence is one long word. German has guttural stops, and depending upon regional differences the ending of certain consonants that are vocalized in English are non-vocalized, so g when it is the last letter is pronounce [k] , d when it is the last letter is pronounce [t] and a few others. German also has the voiceless velar fricative ch [x] :) It took me a while but I learned to roll my R's in the back of my throat like how Kraftwerk say "Harrisburg" in Radioactivity, and have non-rhotic at the end of words which I don't know is still in practice. I learn to scrap the back of my throat when pronouncing the French R e.g. très bien. I don't know if it is because of those things that make German sound harsher to some people than say French. I took German language 3 years in high school, and I like the language very much. And I studied the French language on my own

I had a speech impediment when I was young, and I am bit conscience how I would sound when speaking to a native speaker their language. But then again because of the speech impediment I became interested in languages.

Originally Posted by rostasi (Post 1426859)

The esset can be pretty confusing to those
who don't speak German. I found that out
when my sweetheart was looking at a street
sign in, I think, Frankfurt and was at a total
loss. I kind of laughed, but I already knew it
from German language studies when I was a
youngster. A lot of it really does come back
when you have the chance to interact with
the community. I just love it! It ("the guttural")
probably comes from my German (mother's side)
and Ukrainian (father's side) heritage.

Originally Posted by Plankton (Post 1426878)

Do they still have the Joh (Yo!) stores in Deutchland?

I guess I could just look it up.

Originally Posted by Kartoffelbrei (Post 1426899)

Joh? Never heard of it.
Where does/did that exist?

Originally Posted by rostasi (Post 1426929)

Yes! You're right, I really shouldn't be using the Anglicized spelling of it.
Do you know how many different spellings there are of Oum Kalthoum?
(who was not German BTW) :D

Originally Posted by Kartoffelbrei (Post 1426794)

bloody interesting, thank you.
i've never analyzed the language i'm talkin all the time as you did

Originally Posted by Kartoffelbrei (Post 1426866)

The letter is btw called an "sz" (eszett), which kinda explains what it is :)
it's a mixture between an s and a z. We also call it a "sharp s".
So there are words like "Straße"(street), or "Scheiße"(sh*t), where we use it.
There are also words, that, when I was younger(before 1996), were written with an sz, but now are are written with a double s,
words like "daß" (today it's "dass") or "Kuß" ("Kiss", today it's Kuss)

Originally Posted by Kartoffelbrei (Post 1426150)

*sigh*
Ya. That's what a lot of people say.. :/
Still I really don't understand it. I mean, I'm from bavaria - we speak a much softer german, but still: it can be very very beautiful, if you talk sophisticated german. Hmm.. Maybe one has to understand the language to understand its beauty.
Well.. it's your opinion. thank you for the answer tho :)