Learn the awesome power of the hyphen and you can do this in English. I call this the speak-English-like-German method. For extra credit put the verb at the end of the sentence.
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Almost, but not quite as upsetting as thinking you’ve still got a swallow of tea left, only to gaze in despair into an empty cup
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It is more or less the same feeling! But I know I am not the only one who is like, “Ok, last bite/drink.” and then nothing. Sad trombone.
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Similar in Dutch. Any diminutive noun is automatically genderless. A child is genderless. A boy is masculine. Unfortunately the noun for a girl is the diminutive of a word which has the same root as “maid”, just like in German, and hence is genderless.
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Ah, that makes sense now. Also explains why rabbits (Kaninchen) would be neuter
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Not really about the language so much, but one of my favorite German sayings is, “die Augen essen mit!”
Literally: “the eyes eat with!” It’s used when the food looks really nice. I love it in every way.
@leicester - ugh, that video is so annoying. It’s not about the sound of the words, but how the actors are saying them. I learned german in Berlin, and they speak with a delightful, sing-songy accent for the most part. That video is feeding on the old WWII stereotype. Blech.
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It’s a very specific and deeply emotional tea thing. @anon59592690 knows what I mean. The fact that our language has no specific word for this is, frankly, horrifying. I am disappoint.
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The soul-crushing existential disappointment that the universe chose that moment to reveal the fleeting entropic nature of life in the form of a cup with one less mouthful than expected.
I suspect the Japanese have a word for it that probably translates as “The Empty Sip”.
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1500 milligrams of biscuit slurry and a broken heart
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Yeah, German makes the speaker work harder. English pushes a lot of work to the listener to infer details from the context.
I find it striking how in English it’s easy to produce grammatically correct sentences that leave the listener saying “wait, did you mean this or that?” In German, a lot of those ambiguities are grammatical errors.
I worked with a German engineer who’d lived in New Zealand for over 20 years. He spoke English at home, dreamt in English, etc. But when writing a technical specification, he’d write the first draft in German because six months later he’d know exactly what he meant, and wouldn’t be asking himself “wait, did I mean …?”
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There’s the idea of “high-context” and “low-context” cultures in anthropology. Although not as concrete as German, I would still say that English is still not all that context dependent compared to other languages. Japanese sentences don’t even need to have a subject, and it’s not uncommon to drop verbs where you can complete the thought without one.
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