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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7164 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 20 19 June 2005 at 4:15pm | IP Logged |
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Does anybody else sometimes have problems dealing with German speakers with extreme accents?
I have talked to a variety of people recently, each from a different part of Germany, and some were really barely intelligible. I could understand only about 60% of what one guy from the Eastern border of the country was saying. This is more than the accents that 'Bodo Bach' uses in his German telephone pranks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 6934 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 2 of 20 19 June 2005 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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I worked for a German Language Laboratory firm (a dream job) and travelled across West Germany. Some of the dialects were unintelligible and the Germans working with me understood no more than I did. We were in a rural area near Stuttgart and stopped to ask a youg boy directions and didn't understand a word of his reply, so my colleague said we'll drive to a town where they might speak understandable German. We were living in Hannover at the time (the company was based there) and they spoke Hoch Deutsch.
I lived with my family in a small village in Bavaria and no one from outside could understand them. I had to interpret when colleagues from Hannover came to call. I think Schwaebisch was probably the most difficult for me to understand. It could have been Chinese for all I understood at times. But, I love the accent. It sounded musical like Irish, in fact, it sounded something like speaking German with an Irish accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| M-Squared Senior Member United States Joined 6927 days ago 117 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 3 of 20 19 June 2005 at 9:01pm | IP Logged |
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Some years ago I visited an friend in Germany near Trier, close to the
French border. After a couple of weeks in Germany I was feeling pretty good about my speaking and understanding. At his house his parents started talking and my friend looked and me and started laughing. He said, in English, "You don't understand a thing they are saying, do you?" I didn't, and couldn't figure it out at all. As I understand it the local dialect is kind of a German/French blend, and it didn't sound (to me) anything like Deutsch. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7164 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 20 20 June 2005 at 1:28am | IP Logged |
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Many of the phones pranks by German comic artist Bodo Bach use these accents as a resource. Bodo Bach would call up some shop and speak with the most impossible accent so that the poor lady understands only half of it. I guess it means Germans too are faced with that problem!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| wombat Tetraglot Groupie Australia Joined 6905 days ago 49 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Thai Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 20 30 June 2005 at 9:11pm | IP Logged |
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I stayed in the Schwaebisch countryside (in a tiny village) many years ago. This was after learning German at school, and being able to make simple talk with Hochdeutsch speakers. I agree with the poster who said that they may as well have been speaking Chinese! It's not just the accent though, the vocabulary is very different to Hochdeutsch, and I suspect the grammar is quite different as well.
I live in probably the most linguistically uniform area of the Earth's surface: Australia. There is barely any regional variation from Sydney to Perth or from Adelaide to Darwin. To go from this to a place where people a hundred kilometres apart were mutually barely intelligible was amazing - but I have always found this sort of thing extremely interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Alex Newbie Germany Joined 6976 days ago 29 posts - 31 votes | Message 6 of 20 01 July 2005 at 9:48am | IP Logged |
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Anybody who grew up in northern Germany will have a hard time understanding southern dialects like Bayrisch or Schwäbisch, even after having lived in the region for quite a while. Many years ago, there used to be a radio comedy teaching Schwäbisch also available on CD titled "Schwäbisch für Fischköpp". Very funny and highly recommended if you want to get a little taste of this dialect, but I don't know if it is still available.
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| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 6893 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 20 02 July 2005 at 8:51am | IP Logged |
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Years ago the famous Polyglott Sprachführer series had a volume about Bayrisch, nowadays the Kauderwelsch series (btw one of my favorites when I want to get a global idea of a language without spending too much money) has such volumes about several German dialects. German is one of the language I have to use in the callcenter I work for and we are allowed to ask the customer to speak Hochdeutsch, but sometimes I think it could be practical to have a global idea of the way these dialects are related to standard German.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rome753 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6035 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 8 of 20 22 October 2007 at 1:13pm | IP Logged |
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Would a native of Berlin and native of Munich be able to carry on a conversation easily? I admit my ignorance by asking the following question, but I am quite curious: Would their level of mutual intelligibility be the comparable to that of a California native and a native of New York City, conversing in English? Or?
What about a native of Graz (Austria)conversing with a Berlin native. Mutually intelligible, and to what degree? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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