• The Picard ManeuverM
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        8 months ago

        Or when you try to read a word aloud and realize it’s basically the same as the English word with 50% more consonents.

        • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 months ago

          That’s the meme. They translate English expressions, names and brands into German 1:1, disregarding any standing idioms and available translations. Hard to read even as a German native. Struggling to figure out what to OP meant is like 90% of the fun.

          • waz@feddit.uk
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            8 months ago

            Haha, I remember trying to tell a German colleague that another colleague was ‘ingverklerten’ because he had red hair, apparently the German word for ginger is not used to represent colour. Almost as popular as our attempt to call someone a ‘glockenende’ when they had been foolish. Sounds like I should look into ich_iel a bit.

  • teft
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    8 months ago

    That means you should start /c/moi_dlvv

    • UNY0N
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      8 months ago

      I speak German and I can confirm, top-tier stuff.

    • lugal
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      8 months ago

      And it’s less funny if you translate it into English because part of the joke is literal translations that make no sense in German

    • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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      8 months ago

      I see the memes and laugh because I imagine a German person seeing it and laughing at it.

  • Noodle07
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    8 months ago

    I’m legit considering getting back to learning German to understand their memes, they look so juicy

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    I studied German in high school but I don’t remember any of it. I like to pretend that ich_iel is just using made up nonsense words, like the Swedish Chef muppet.

  • Flying Squid
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    8 months ago

    I took French in high school and barely scraped by. My wife took German and went on an exchange program for six weeks after high school and had a terrific time.

    Close to 30 years later and I remember a lot of the French but she’s forgotten most of the German.

    So who’s laughing now, huh?

    Oh right, you got to have those six weeks in Germany. Merde.

      • Flying Squid
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        8 months ago

        You won cause you can insult the French in their own language.

        Not as well as the French can insult me for being American. And in perfect English too, most likely.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Define perfect English. Cause you could always lord over them the fact that they have a shitty government entity that used to gorce them to use what amounts to a government enforced dialect.

          Meanwhile if I wrote phonetically it would be mildly ineligible, just like my dialect.

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Learning French in the US is such a let down. Spanish is the unofficial second national language and German has the best memes.

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        It’s better because every post with an English word gets

        SPRICH DEUTSCH DU HURENSOHN

        as a response

        • thesporkeffect
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          8 months ago

          And yet when I try to SPRICH DEUTCH to actual live Germans they give me a pitying look and firmly reply in perfect English

            • TipRing
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              8 months ago

              Only because of their exacting standards. Even when I lived in Germany in the 90s the only time I had trouble understanding someone speaking English was when our realtor was trying to be racist but didn’t know the English words.

                • TipRing
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                  8 months ago

                  See, that is what I mean. Nobody speaks “perfect” English, not even native speakers, because languages are not prescriptive. Their function is to communicate ideas and if you have successfully communicated then you have used language “perfectly”.

        • teft
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          8 months ago

          Well yeah, the germans are well known sticklers to rules.

        • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          Hey I just tried the trick of sounding it out and I got it! Thanks Picard manoeuvre (I still don’t know how to ping).

    • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      Grammar and syntax aside, it’s basically /me_irl for our German-speaking compadres. Most other languages - French included - generally have a community analogous to most of the popular English-language communities.

    • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      Ich, im echtem Leben.

      me_irl

      hugsandkisses

      // Änderung: Ich bin der, der dich runtergewählt hat.

  • SomeGuy69
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    8 months ago

    You miss all of it. Learn German instead. Drop the French.

  • suction
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    8 months ago

    In case you’re learning French to be able to work at a bigger French company - don’t. You will be very unhappy. The basic reason is, French companies, even those who think they’re “modern”, are still run like Louis XIV’s is the CEO. Like an extremely rigid, top-down, feudalistic little empire full of screaming bosses and servile employees.

  • celeste@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    As a German who speaks french: French is probably the easier language since you don’t need to declinate words and only really use 3 forms for time.

    • pseudo@jlai.lu
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      8 months ago

      Yes but at the same time german writing system is almost phonetic while french have many way to write one sound.

        • pseudo@jlai.lu
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          8 months ago

          Maybe in a few hundred year when our civilisation has collapsed a writing reforme will finally happened.

      • WIZARD POPE💫
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        8 months ago

        It is not close to being phonetic. It is however quite consistent which is what you were probably thinking of.

          • iarigby
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            8 months ago

            I am not sure about the definition of the word but look up Georgian, 33 letters, 33 sounds. Each letter has one and only one sound, which never ever changes despite the position in the word or the surrounding letters

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife
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      8 months ago

      I studied German in high school and then as an adult I traveled to India and studied Malayalam, the language of the southern-most state of Kerala. I was surprised at how similar Malayalam was to German (in terms of grammatical structure, not vocabulary) and learned that it’s because of Hermann Gundert, a 19th Century German missionary who learned Malayalam (and a bunch of other Indian languages) and published its first formal grammar, more-or-less imposing German’s grammatical structure onto it.

    • Valmond
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      8 months ago

      As a swede who have studied both, I think French is way worse.

  • Hobbes_Dent
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    8 months ago

    For me it’s Dutch. The Dutch own late night Lemmy for me and I want to know what I’m missing.

    I’ve picked up on Overleden though :(

      • waz@feddit.uk
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        8 months ago

        No umlauts, just keep adding vowels and it’s more or less done isn’t it?