Comparatively to the rest of the internet, it seems like there are a lot more Germans here. I’ve always assumed it was just because I was on a German instance and was in a sort of echo chamber (join feddit.org btw 🥳), but I just checked Fediverse Observer and it’s the 2nd largest country by users. Additionally, the German instances seem to be the biggest non-English ones.
Why is this?
German subs were really big on Reddit, too.
Germany is the second largest country in Europe by population, they don’t really have their own social media like e.g. Russia or China and they’re much better at English than most other big countries that are not already English native speakers.
To be clear, native Germans are far better at English than most Americans are at this point.
Depends on the age group imo.
I think the people who experienced internet from ca. 2005-2015 will have the best English on average. Because in this time English was simply necessary to get a grip on a lot of media, games, websites… Now a lot of things are translated, sometimes by force (youtube, reddit…) and with bad auto-translation. Also German content creators became much more widespread since 2015, so now people might never need to look past their language horizon.
Of course the dates and statements aren’t absolutes, just general observations.
For context, I was on the internet before the Web was invented.
honestly from a linguistic perspective this is so painfully inaccurate. you’re talking about native speakers here. what you might mean to say is that Germans use English closer to how the Brits use it. that is a defensible statement. but you’re doing something different.
just because native speakers change how they use their own language, they aren’t doing it “worse”. they are adapting their tongue to their needs. one’s mother language is deeply tied to identity, and cultural identities grow and shift through time. to say that their identity is “worse” is certainly a statement you could make, but you see the violence inherent in it, right?
who knows, there’s plenty of criticisms to make of Americans. i probably have more than the average. but i’m not really comfortable with putting down entire groups of people based on how they use their mother tongue. and i’m certainly not going to try to pass off criticism of a culture as a statement of measurement like “you are bad at X”
For another example, there is an exact inverse in America. “Texas German” is much closer to how German was spoken around the time of German unification. Same with Quebec to French.
lol, spoken like somebody who has never actually tried to speak English in Germany. As a shameful monoglot, I have had occasion to test the limits of English understanding in a variety of countries, and Germany has pretty low rates of English speakers in my personal experience. The Netherlands on the other hand…
This is true. But the general rule of thumb is that the farther you are away from a big city, the worse the understanding of English will get.
Try speaking English in a rural Dutch town and you will get hilariously broken English. There’s a famous book about it - Make that the cat wise. Full of literal translations that make 0 sense.
I mean, many Germans might read and write English well, but their pronounciaton …
Ship captain on the radio: “Mayday, mayday. We are sinking!”
German coast guard: “What are you sinkin about?”
Jokes aside, honestly, I have not hear much bad English here in Germany. Then again, I guess I don’t hear many people speak.
I’ve only ever spoken to highly intellectual Germans who spoke perfect English, but I’ve spoken to thousands if not more than a million of the most concavebrain moronic Americans imaginable.
I concur, in my early mmorpg days (EQ) I thought many people playing (US EQ) were non US citizens because their English was very bad. It turned out I was wrong and the skill level was just (oftentimes) far worse than I expected.
Of course not in general, but not rarely either.
It’s been a while since you’ve been in a video conference with Germans speaking English, hasn’t it? /j
EDIT: line break
Gotta use two newlines with Lemmy’s markdown, else it ignores it and then your comment comes out lookin a lil goofy
But with a second newline it’s fine
Thx, in theory know I have to do that, but whenever I type an actual comment I always forget.
I write in markdown literally every day and I still have to edit my comments at least three times whenever I do anything other than a line break. It be like that lol
i edit my comments 3-5 times after posting them because i keep adding info and correcting statements and drafting what i’m thinking lol. the first reply is literally just a “save draft” button for me. like i actually have to pay attention to how recently the parent comment was written to gauge how likely it is they’ll read my reply before it’s done. i have issues
EDIT: im not editing this one
My pronounciation is awful, too, but that doesn’t matter on lemmy!
And I’m still convinced that an English-language video conference with Germans is usually going to be better than with French people.
Fair, the French will just curse at you in French and look angry.
Then they set their desk on fire and go on strike for the rest of the day.
Considering the types of professions who usually have video conferences, that’s probably a net positive for society anyway.
The Seamstresses’ Guild of Ankh Morpork does not look favorably upon your judgement of their recent endeavors into digitalization and working from home.