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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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rawbert ◴[] No.44002326[source]
As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D

Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.

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Fokamul ◴[] No.44003209[source]
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this. Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
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Tainnor ◴[] No.44003554[source]
In every country there will be some expat bubble which can get away with not learning the local language(s). Sometimes that bubble will be bigger and sometimes smaller, but it definitely exists in Germany too (mostly in Berlin).

That said, I simply don't understand the mindset of people who move somewhere for an extended period of time and don't bother to learn the language. It locks you out of a lot of opportunities and makes you dependent on other people (especially for official/administrative/legal purposes). It also simply doesn't work in many places - (younger) Germans may speak decent English, but try going to Spain, Italy, or even Japan and see how far you get if you insist on speaking only English.

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1. Gud ◴[] No.44003650[source]
It depends.

I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language. I doubt I will ever learn Swiss deutsch, it really is a language on its own - with very strong dialects.

But today there are amazing translator apps that can make it so much easier parsing official documents.