German v. Russian

[LBJer]

I voted for German.

[Lechasseur]

German

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

Average Cyrillic fan vs average Latin script enjoyer

[Mr. Smith]

Die deutsche Sprache.

Was fuer ein schwerige Frage. Ich liebe Russisch auch.

[Aurelius]

Der Sprache sich haben Worten auf Donaudamphschifffahrtskapitandamzgezeugenschliffenfrackenspiegel.

no, I don't speak German, don't @ me

[LAKISYLVANIA]

I'm not a huge fan of German either. I'm going with Russian here. It sounds better. And the problems i have with Russian are there in German too, too overtly complex grammatical with the cases and so on.

[President Johnson]

Obviously German (native German speaker).

[Illiniwek]

Deutsch, natürlich.

[LBJer]

I'm not a huge fan of German either. I'm going with Russian here. It sounds better. And the problems i have with Russian are there in German too, too overtly complex grammatical with the cases and so on.

But German has fewer cases than Russian.

[lLamamano777]

I know how to speak German, it's easier to learn than Cyrillic, gotta go with German

[Хahar 🤔]

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

[Aurelius]

I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile.

Huh? I'm intrigued.

[Mr. Smith]

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

And free word order is not necessarily a positive, when it means so many endings [or prefixes] to learn.

And frankly, it makes Yoda-speak lose its effect.

[Хahar 🤔]

I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile.

Huh? I'm intrigued.

All intellectually-minded Bengalis (that is to say, all Bengalis) feel themselves to have a special connection to Russian culture. Some of it is standard Cold War stuff based on projection of Russian soft power (my mom got a television at home for the first time when my grandfather brought one back from a trip to Moscow for work in the late '70s), but it's more than just that. In The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character is called Gogol. In fact, at my high school, there was a Bengali boy the year below me named Gogol. One of my closest friends in graduate school was raised in Calcutta; her family calls her younger brother "Pushuk", which is a diminutive from Pushkin. When I pointed out the special connection between Bengal and Russian culture to my parents once, they disagreed with me until they recalled that I have a cousin named Natasha. A few years ago I met a Bengali friend I had had in elementary school; his family had moved to India when we were 11 and I hadn't seen him in over a decade. I would have bet any amount of money that he was interested in Russia, and of course he was. Here's an article I found online that touches on the phenomenon.

I'd like to say that my own interest in Russia was completely spontaneous, but that's not right. When I was ten years old, I was at my grandparents' house in Dhaka, where I found that I had read every English-language book in the house except for a translation of War and Peace. I was too young to understand much of it  (although even at the time I was aware of how wonderful the scene where Natasha kisses Boris is), but I emerged with a vaguely positive attitude toward Freemasonry and a lifelong fascination with the Russian lands. Years later, in my other grandparents' house in Dhaka, I found a little model of the main building at Moscow State University. I recognized it instantly, of course.

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

And free word order is not necessarily a positive, when it means so many endings [or prefixes] to learn.

And frankly, it makes Yoda-speak lose its effect.

Well, I natively speak a language that has free word order thanks to its functional case systems, so that nouns might be declined does not scare me in the least. The issue with German articles is that there are not enough different endings: "der", for example, can be the masculine singular nominative or the feminine singular dative or genitive or the plural genitive, while "den" is either the masculine singular accusative or the plural dative. This is confusing. Lack of differentiation can be an issue with Russian, too, especially with feminine singular noun declension, but it's not like in German.

[Sol]

All languages are equally beautiful and valid! We love case marking languages and strict word order languages equally in this house!

[Vosem]

As a native Russian speaker, obviously Russian, though I must say I didn't realize this thread would be about languages until clicking into it.

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

What makes them so ridiculous? Plenty of Uralic languages have many, many more cases than the likes of Russian or German.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

German to me only sounds cool when it is said angrily. Russian, by contrast, is a language for all seasons.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile.

Does it have anything to do with Cold War alignment and Bangladesh's successful separatiom from Pakistan?

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

And free word order is not necessarily a positive, when it means so many endings [or prefixes] to learn.

And frankly, it makes Yoda-speak lose its effect.

Well, I natively speak a language that has free word order thanks to its functional case systems, so that nouns might be declined does not scare me in the least. The issue with German articles is that there are not enough different endings: "der", for example, can be the masculine singular nominative or the feminine singular dative or genitive or the plural genitive, while "den" is either the masculine singular accusative or the plural dative. This is confusing. Lack of differentiation can be an issue with Russian, too, especially with feminine singular noun declension, but it's not like in German.

The real problem, IMO, is feminine singular adjectival declension. I wanna say genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional all have the ugly ой/ей endings, whereas male singular adjectival endings (outside of nominative and inanimate accusative) are pretty much always fun.

[Mr. Smith]

As a native Russian speaker, obviously Russian, though I must say I didn't realize this thread would be about languages until clicking into it.

I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.

Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.

The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].

What makes them so ridiculous? Plenty of Uralic languages have many, many more cases than the likes of Russian or German.

It makes it far harder to figure out what a word does at the beginning of learning, compared to X word is here, so it's a verb, Y word is here, it's a noun. Much easier to make a mistake and be understood when you don't have to worry about agreements so much as your native tongue.

And frankly, I'm not touching Uralic languages anyway, though I'll note those languages cancel out the cases by being genderless.  But if I do dabble outside the Indo-Eurozone, it's gonna be either Korean or Thai, both of which I have far more personal connections to.

[Storr]

German to me only sounds cool when it is said angrily. Russian, by contrast, is a language for all seasons.

Exactly:

https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1574811570328276995?s=20&t=w4onqJXIMmM4...

full video:

[Samof94]

I know how to speak German, it's easier to learn than Cyrillic, gotta go with German

German is more like English than Russian or even Spanish is.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

I speak some German vs no Russian. Virtually the same alphabet too.

[Biden his time]

Russian is more useful on a global scale* and has more of a future.

[LBJer]

Russian is more useful

Not if you live in Germany, or if you're interested in Germany but not Russia.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Russian is more useful

Not if you live in Germany, or if you're interested in Germany but not Russia.

Thank you, this is very insightful.