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Good, back to basics.

Posted by Barry on 2016-03-11 03:25:27

Interesting this.  It's obvious that German, like all other languages will have a range of dialectal forms.  What I find difficult to understand (and I think this is true of all languages) is why native speakers find it so much harder to understand non-native speakers when they can cope with really widely differing native variations.  Juergen's illustrations indicate the differences in German and I'm thinking of the wide variations of English pronunciation, as such between Essex and Glasgow and Newcastle.  Although speakers of each find it hard to understand each other, they generally eventually manage to be mutually intelligible. Perhaps with German, although the words sound a bit different, native speakers retain the grammatical structure (as shown by Juergen's example), which English (and French?) native speakers find tricky?  Thus the learning curve is not so great.

Followups:

Good, back to basics. by Nick B. on  2016-03-11 03:38:38

Good, back to basics. by Jürgen Wening on  2016-03-11 03:39:31