Deciphering English When Spoken with German Grammar and Syntax



At one time, I thought learning a different language would be easy, because all you had to do was learn other words for the words you know. Then I grew up and realized how complicated communication really is. Languages develop in their own way in different places, and the rules for word order vary mightily. YouTuber Overlearner demonstrates this by having a German conversation (with himself) that uses English words but German grammar and syntax. The effect is somewhat of a word salad that we can understand with some effort, but still sounds a bit nonsensical. And beware the gendered nouns; those will baffle you.

We know that the English language is descended from German, but that was a long time ago. Old English had syntax rules that were quite like German, but English changed over time and established the word order that native English speakers now use every day. That doesn't mean either system is right or wrong  -it's just different. Seeing the different ways syntax is used gives me more respect for whoever developed machine translation. As weird as it can be sometimes, it's a miracle that it works at all. In the YouTube description, Overlearner explains how he had to make some choices in untranslatable words, and went with whatever would be most confusing. According to polyglots in the comments, German and English syntax are relatively close to each other and easy to learn compared with other languages. -via Laughing Squid


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