If by some miracle you instantly became fluent in 3 foreign languages, what would they be? This includes various forms of sign language and Braille. I’d choose Spanish and French for media consumption and Russian because communism, lol.
(noun) An untranslatable Yiddish word, aftselakhis is defined as a deep desire to execute a certain deed, because somebody else doesn’t want you to or told you, you’re unable to accomplish it. (via wordsnquotes)
This is wrong; aftzelakhis isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective or adverb, and it means “so as to anger/annoy” (i.e., so as to anger or annoy the person who forbade you to do it).
I think the biggest german discussion is when you meet someone from a different area in Germany and they call things differently and you are just like “nooooo that is not what it’s name is!!!”
But the other person just won’t see your point because they think the same you think.
Friendship can break over this folks.
Story time: The other day my friend and I got into a discussion about gender pronouns for various german words, such as butter, nutella or schorle (a schorle is usually drink made of water mixed with juice or something). Anyhow, she is from NRW, I am from Ba-Wü. She wanted to convince me it’s die butter, die nutella und die schorle (all female). Where I come from, it’s der butter (male), das nutella (neutral) und das schorle (also neutral) however. It turned into a somewhat heated discussion in public, so much so that even strangers that were walking past us had to chime in and put in their two cents. It turned into a huge ass discussion with like 3 strangers, so lemme tell ya, Germans are very passionate about dialects.
the worst one is definitely people from NRW saying “Sose” instead of “Soße”. i’m literally ready to kill whenever i hear Sose.
Why you’re all coming for us in NRW like that especially when you say fucked up shit like der Butter and das Schorle?! That’s just so wrong! I never ever heard that in my life? Is it really what you say down there? Lmao 😂😂 That reminds me of the time I found out all of Germany calls Berliner Berliner except Berlins population. They’re called Pfannkuchen there! Why??
“Der Butter” broke my heart and made me cry tbh. Please don’t do this!
Als ob Leute “das Schorle” sagen, wie kann man der Schorle das nur an tun.
It is obviously die Butter (feminine), das Nutella (neuter), und die Schorle (feminine).
Everyone else can go home and think about about they did wrong in life that led them to such great lapses in judgement.
okay FIRST of all, it’s not Berliner everywhere in Germany, because Bavarians are actually civilised and call them Krapfen so kindly fuck off. (and NO those tiny little fried dough thingies are NOT Krapfen, those are Schmalzkuchen, so jot that down. And also, really Berlin? we ALL know Pfannkuchen are pancakes, learn some manners please)
also ofc it’s das Nutella and die Schorle, you animals. I’m torn on butter because I say die, but parts of my family say der, so I’m okay with that as long as you don’t say das
and if we’re on the topic already, will the rest of Germany PLEASE finally accept that it’s die Breze (or Brez’n if you’re feeling fancy) and NOT BrezeL. We invented the damn things so we get to PICK THE FUCKING NAME jfc
also anyone who calls rolls anything but Semmel is a dumbass.
Why would you say “der Butter”, stop abusing our poor language like that, you heathen. It’s die Butter, die Schorle and DIE(!!!) Nutella. Also, Krapfen are little fried dough balls with powdered sugar, Pfannkuchen are bigger and filled with jam, and Eierkuchen are what you bake in a pan at home. And 11:45 is dreiviertel Zwölf.
I’ve never seen/heard Austrians arguing like that among ourselves - I think we, with all our dialects, are all united in the knowledge that The Germans Are Wrong.
Like … what are you even talking about here with your Berliner and Pfannkuchen and Schmalzkuchen and Krapfen and Eierkuchen and… what? There are Krapfen and there are Palatschinken, and those two things are nothing like each other, what is even going on in Germany?
And Schorle is a weird word, it’s a gspritzter [fruit of your choice]saft. (Not just a Gspritzter, that would be wine, not juice).
I’m extremely amused that this entire conversation is happening in English.
It has to happen in English - they can’t agree on the German
I mean, you have a point. I think English has probably agreed to disagree about itself on a pretty perpetual basis.
I couldn’t decide how I wanted to comment on this post but I narrowed it down to two options.
1) Butter, schorle and Nutella – the three genders.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
My cousin’s mother tongue is English, but she also speaks Spanish, French, and Arabic so you could say she’s pretty good with languages. She also has an extensive English vocabulary. She spent two years in Peru and spoke nothing but Spanish while she was there. For the first few hours after we picked her up from the airport, she was fine and used her crazy advanced vocabulary like she hadn’t left. But we were eating dinner and she was telling a story and said “There something on the…” she said something in Spanish. We’re like “Sorry Meg we don’t speak Spanish. She huffs and says “You know, the /thing/.” She points down and waves other hand in a flat plane. After her struggling like this for another 30 seconds my uncle is just like “Do you mean the ‘ground’, Meg?” She slammed her hand down on the table “YES!”
has anyone else noticed there’s a very specific way women interrupt each other in conversation that’s quite distinct from the way men interrupt women in conversation? like, women seem to interject a lot more– not as a silencing tactic, but to show their enthusiasm or agreement, cause they perceive a conversation as kind of collaborative, organic exercise. but i feel like men get really annoyed if you excitedly interject when they’re saying something (most specifically in a debate/discussion context) because they perceive conversation as something combative or competitive and see an interjection as a threat or a challenge. i’ve also noticed men dismiss women’s way of talking as being sort of incomprehensible and nonsensical because of this habit we have of seeming to butt in or finish each others sentences excitably.
This was actually very interestingly used in Mad Max and was a stylistic choice in the way the wives spoke to each other, or at other people as a collective.
They finished each others sentences, interjected constantly, echoed important points in reverence/understanding/agreement and relied on each other to complete the communication of a thought or a concept to someone outside their circle.
So like, instead of one of them explaining something, they would all add fragments to form a complete thought. ____
The Vuvalini: What’s there to find at the Citadel?
Max: Green.
Toast: And water. There’s a ridiculous amount of clear water. And a lot of crops.
The Dag: It’s got everything you need, as long as you’re not afraid of heights.
Keeper of the Seeds: Where does the water come from?
Toast: [regarding Immortan Joe] He pumps it up from deep within the earth. He calls it “Aqua Cola” and claims it all for himself.
The Dag: And because he owns it, he owns all of us.
_____
Capable: We are not things!
Cheedo: No!
The Dag: Cheedo, we are not things! Capable: We are not things.
Cheedo: I don’t want to hear that again!
Capable: They were her words.
Cheedo: And now she’s dead!
The Dag: Wring your hands and tear your hair, but you’re not going back. You’re not going back to him.
___
Interestingly, the Vuvalini do this as well.
Everyone else in the movie (including furiosa!) speaks in short definitive statements or exclamations that cannot be piled upon or interrupted. So this was definitely done on purpose.
its very cool.
I wonder if this is just a thing in english/western culture or if other groups of women speak to each other like this?
also theirs a bunch of people in the notes fighting about “I HATE GETTING INTERRUPTED”
This isn’t so much a classic “interruption”. like when someone talks over you to change the subject or say something unrelated or better than what you’re saying and stealing the attention from you,etc.
Its more like the person doing the interruption is expecting you not to really stop talking, or expects you to finish your thought, and is only interrupting to agree/ interject a footnote that is contributory, but not distracting.
So it would look like.
Woman 1 and 2 telling a story to woman 3:
Woman 1 “We sat down and he brought out this really good green tea- Woman 2: –but it was the powder kind of green tea not the bag kind– Woman1: –yeah and he brought out these really cool whisks and let us do it ourselves– Woman 2: and Woman 1 frothed hers so much she had nothing left! Woman 3: omg did you like it? was it good? Woman 1 and 2 in unison: Yes! Woman 1: We should go again together sometime. Woman 2- yeah I think you’d really like it too!
See how Woman 1 is the alpha speaker (the person telling the story) and Woman 2 is the…. hype man? for lack of a better word. Every sentence that Woman 1 says is the story, and woman 2 is adding smaller clarification related details. And when she adds a dynamic detail “had nothing left!” it is an excited interjection that continues the story, without taking ownership of the topic.
Woman 3 will walk away from this conversation feeling that Woman 1 was the expert on this situation, but that Woman 2 had a particularly exciting time.
there was a study on this precisely that I read about, though I’ll need my pc to retrieve it. It was about how women tendentially see conversation as collaborative while men tendentially treat it as competitive, thus women usually interrupt to agree/interject to encourage, while men more often interrupt to talk over and/or demonstrate superior knowledge on a topic.
