Haha that made me laugh! My parents were German, but I was born in Canada. German was my first language. My friends always told me that German was a very angry sounding language
I have a few friends who are German, and it's a language I would have liked to master as I really like the gutteral sound of it. I did, nevertheless find this portrayal of it as hugely amusing, and had another look at it today. It is the dutch language I cannot get my tongue around, and find the pronunciation impossible
My brother tried to learn to speak German to go to Austria in the 70s but found it difficult to master it.
My grandfather and his sisters spoke German. They were second generation Americans. At the time, the midwest had many German speaking communities - the towns, churches, schools, newspapers, all in German. That was pre-WW1. The books and newspapers were in the old German script, and so was the handwriting. By the end of WW2, all of those were gone. I was the first class to study German at my high school. My grandfather tried correcting my German, but his version was two generations and two wars out of date. I'm not even sure if he spoke mainstream German - they were Alsatian. I'm taking Spanish lessons now. I would like to study Japanese too, but I don't think my brain can handle it, and learning the characters would be impossible. When I was a young soldier, I was stationed in Turkey. There were people there who didn't like Americans, and in some cases there were terrorist actions directed at us. So when I explored, I tried getting by using my very limited Turkish, or my not great, but passable German. Many people there also spoke German due to the Gastarbeiter system. I loved speaking those languages. It was quite fun. There were a couple of occasions when neither ruse worked, and those were not fun. I have forgotten almost all of the Turkish, and most of the German, that I knew way back then.
I worked in Turkey at the Roman City of Aphrodisias. We were working under the Americans from New York university and working directly on the site with the local Turks. Language wise it was a very interesting time. The Americans didn't understand a lot of what I said and the Turks were pleased that I knew the local word for Badger (Porsuk) which helped while the time away on site
I cracked up! I speak enough English to understand their humour, good enough German to get by in Germany, and just enough French to get me into trouble. On the plus side I can sing the first verse of La Marseillaise in French. Languages are fun!
Cor Droopy what talent It is really good to hear from you again, we missed your sunny personality and humour.
Hey @Tetters, I've missed you too. I have sent all of you nice thoughts even though I haven't been on. Things just sort of take a lot more time than I think, despite my careful planning, so I think I'll just stop planning and see what happens then! I had to learn a couple of foreign languages in school. Very few people speak Norwegian in the world. I like to talk to people, so languages it was.
