Why German Sounds So Aggressive

we are German and as such we are always self-conscious about getting angry in [Music] public our language is quite the TR I can do an evil old house sounds harsh and [Applause] aggressive it's a disgusting language nobody should ever speak it it sounds like typewriters eating tinf being kicked down the stairs and somebody is talking to you in German they're saying you think what is happening to you from behind how can we make it stop someone somewhere is is always making fun of our language but why does German sound so aggressive to the rest of the world Fern the German language is part of the Germanic branch of the indo-germanic language family besides German Dutch and English are also Germanic languages but while English sounds gentle to many people German is often described as spat barked ugly dry cold harsh yapping and mil milary German is rarely perceived as beautiful there are several reasons for this one linguistic characteristics German has a lot of gutural and glottal stops they can make the language sound harsh let's start with Gat sounds German has the special a sound which sounds very throy it can be heard in the German words F which means to his or k which means noise these words are often difficult for non-german speakers to pronounce because these sounds don't exist in widespread languages like English next glotto stops Germans pronounce vowels very strongly especially when they appear at the beginning of a word this causes the vocal cords to open suddenly and all the air that has built up to escape at once take the word Apple the German word is you can hear it quite well throughout this example of and in many other languages the words of a sentence are spoken in a flow in German sometimes there's a mini pause before each individual word here you can hear the difference everything is all right Alice in of course I'm overdoing it a bit here but you get the idea these breaks can make German Sound a bit barked some sounds exist in almost all languages such as m and b others are quite unique and only appear in in a few languages in English there's the diagraph th for example in thanks Germans including me often struggle to pronounce that Italian which is often considered to be a beautiful melodious language uses mainly vowels and only a few exotic sounds German on the other hand has many rare complex sounds which might come off as strange we use so-called such as e and U again often hard to pronounce for German speakers and there's the S set it looks like this and is essential for our all-time favorite word shisa the estet is used to indicate the hard s sound plus many German words just have a lot of consonant for example or a classic which means of course German is complicated and as humans we often shy away from complexity but isn't the real challenge to transform complexity into something enjoyable and intriguing that's kind of the ethos of this Channel and also the essence of today's sponsor brilliant brilliant offers interactive 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tier a pet though as a people we seem to have made it our goal to put together as many words as possible this has led to many long and insanely complex Creations Mark Twain already made fun of this word and many others in 1880 in his famous essay the awful German language he writes these things are not words they are alphabetical processions and the inventor of them ought to have been killed and because the words are weird a lot of non-german speakers find them very entertaining they have something weirdly over precise and orderly about them combined with their guro and the stop consonant loaded delivery it can give them a military touch ironically we have a word for this consonant every German speaking actor or model has to do the German word quiz on an American talk show at least once fing B I'll B this last one being an absolute Banger of a word meaning a face that's just inviting a good slap like Jimmy Fallon these shows only strengthen the image of the difficult and weird German language and this leads us to three prejudices what do people think of when they think of Germany and they're saying to you something like we have been better but uh we're very vibrant in the theater and arts and so on all the time you listen to this you're thinking yeah hler hler hler hler during the two World Wars the German naturally became the enemy in many countries German American relations changed drastically in the US the teaching of German was banned German programs were no longer allowed to be played on the radio authorities called for a boycott of German Goods streets and even zut were renamed Hitler is possibly history's most terrifying figure Germany's history once so gruesome it is rightly so echoed processed and analyzed count times in all forms of media so it may never be forgotten according to many linguists their perception of the German language is in part the result of these historical and sociocultural contexts German might have an image problem linguists would point out that you shouldn't judge a language based on its sound what sounds strange to one person as beautiful to another and if you label a language as ugly you might miss out on fascinating ins sites into other worlds of thought and sound so lastly let us introduce you to some beautiful German words you can pretentiously incorporate into your F describes the opposite of homesickness the longing for distant places vmat is a feeling of knowing that the world will always fail to meet your expectations because of the prevalence of pain existing throughout it and lastly tra vits a joke or thought that you think of too late just as you walked out the door already on the stairs like I'm sure there's a nice way to finish the video here but I guess it just won't come to me until we hit publish

Channel: fern

Views: 843,719

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Id: 3YQd8ya3z-E

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024