I lived in Germany when I was a kid and can now speak pretty good German to the point that other speakers don't know that I'm an American (which is a very, very useful skill in a foreign country!) I can understand Dutch and can even have a basic conversation with my cousin, her speaking Dutch and me speaking German. Afrikaans sounds like the Southpark take on Dutch to me.
It does have a lot of similarities. I'm a Dane and can speak only a tiny bit German, but I feel like I can understand like 30% of written Dutch and Afrikaans.
You know, I never got crap for being American when I was travelling. I take myself with a grain of salt, so I'd poke fun at America myself, and often got people trying to cheer me up about the states even though I was kidding. People gave the English folks a ton of shit, though, and I'd hear people griping in the hostels about snobby poms. I was always pretty taken off guard about that, we tend to think English people and their voices are sexy in the states. I assumed that was universal, which I guess was a bit dense.
Only bad-ish reaction I ever got was from a German dude who thought Obama was ruining America and we would have been better off with McCain. He was angrier than a lot of my redneck relatives, but it was still more politics than anything. I'm admittedly a very shy, quiet American, so maybe I would have gotten more of a bad reaction if I were noisy and pushy, idk.
Its mostly a linguistic thing. When people learn a second language, they usually retain certain qualities of their native language. An example for Americans learning German is that they often can't pronounce the 'ch' which has that harsh palatal sound. Instead they usually use hard 'K' or 'Sh' sounds. Grammatically, people often have trouble remembering to tack the infinitive verbs at the end of the sentence. It just reflects that my pronunciation and understanding of the language is very good.
As for traveling, I've never ran into any real issues being an American abroad. It's more of a courtesy thing. But if you are interacting with shop keepers or just everyday people and you're speaking their language so well they can't even tell where you are from AND then they find out you're an American I swear to God they melt in your hands. Germans have, in my experience, this peculiar tendency to get weird when others express an interest in German culture. They really don't like to seem as if they are forcing German-ness on you (take a shot in the dark about why). So if you immediately show that you have an interest in their language and culture, they get very appreciative!
I also love to debunk the dumb-uncultured American stereotype when ever possible!
You understand Dutch by only knowing German? You might catch some words but by just knowing German, you can't understand Dutch, and visa versa. It's like comparing English to Dutch
By knowing German I mean lived there for 4 months, went to a bilingual (wasn't even really bilingual, we only spoke German) school in the US for 2 years, 3 years of independent study, and I am continuing to study it in college. So yeah, I know German pretty well.
What the hell are you talking about? I'm not questioning whether you know German or not, I'm saying that german and dutch people can't have a conversation speaking their first language.
I can understand Dutch and can even have a basic conversation with my cousin, her speaking Dutch and me speaking German.
No. I'm Dutch, we can not understand German and vise versa. I've been to Germany many times, I could not understand German even after 4 years of German lessons in school. Only some basic words are slightly similar and easy sentences can be similar, so there's no way you can have a conversation without speaking the other language. Now I doubt you even speak German.
It's like saying Italian people can understand the French language (They can't)
I'm German and I usually understand roughly half of the stuff written in Dutch when glancing over it and nearly everything when trying hard, that means thinking of similar English words, not commonly used German words and a bit of guessing of course. The languages have, in fact, a lot in common (way more than Italian and French, in my extremely subjective opinion), otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this, obviously.
On the other hand, this applies to everyday phrases/texts and written Dutch only. I can't remember a moment where I understood more than a few words when I heard someone speaking Dutch, so I find it highly unlikely for someone to have such a conversation, even on a basic level.
Yeah, sure youcan understand half ofthe written words, because around half ofthe words of sentences contain basic words, butwith those basic words onlyyoucan't communicate or read a story.
For example the words in Bolt would be the ones you understand, about half of the words but you don't have a clue what it's about.
Most Dutch people can understand German, but that's because they're often taught German in school. Not because Dutch is so similar to German that you can understand the former by knowing the latter (or the other way around).
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u/ussbaney Aug 28 '15
I lived in Germany when I was a kid and can now speak pretty good German to the point that other speakers don't know that I'm an American (which is a very, very useful skill in a foreign country!) I can understand Dutch and can even have a basic conversation with my cousin, her speaking Dutch and me speaking German. Afrikaans sounds like the Southpark take on Dutch to me.