this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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I'm not a native speaker, but I'm pretty sure it's
assuming you want to be formal, which feels a little weird to me in the context of an internet forum.
Edit: but to answer your question: fluent English, mehr als ein Bißchen Deutsch, y un poquito Español.
BTW, this should be written as:
We switched from ß to ss in all words with a preceding short vowel in 1996: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996
So, it's "Fuß" and "Maß", because those are pronounced with a long vowel, but then "Fass" and "muss" and "Biss", because those are pronounced with a short vowel.
And in this case, "bisschen" is spelled with a small "b" for reasons that I'm not entirely sure are logical. 😅
It would be spelled with a capital letter, if "Bisschen" was a unit of measurement here (i.e. a small bite), like a "Liter" is.
But because it was used so much and without really referring to a specific measurement, it eventually began being spelled lowercase, similar to "wenig" or "etwas" ("ein wenig Deutsch", "etwas Deutsch"). Apparently, this kind of word is called an "Indefinitpronomen".
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bisschen
vs.
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisschen (much rarer)
Thanks! It's surprisingly difficult to get Germans to correct me on things. Most of them are just happy that I can speak it at all, so they tell me not to worry about the little stuff. 😂
It is indeed normal to use 'du' pretty much everywhere on the internet. Even in French i never see 'vous' (which to me feels more common than Sie in German usually).
I would like to know how a native german speaker would say it. But I would say like you
Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:
"Fremdsprachen" just means "foreign languages", since I know that responding folks speak German.
Then "sprecht ihr" rather than "sprechen Sie", because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using "Sie" is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as "Du" on most of the internet.
But "Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?" still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.
And then the "so", I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Interestingly it is pretty similar to the idiomatic way to say it in French. Except for the "so"
"So" is indeed one of those small things that's just colloquial to casual conversation in in Germany. To me personally it signals that you weren't as exact with your question so you're leaving it kinda open ended to some degree. But when it comes to Grammar no clue what this is.
It feels a bit similar to "do you speak any other languages or ~" because this leaves it less as a direct question and more as an open ended conversation, suggesting you just wanna know more and you're not very particular in your question and in what you expect as an answer.