[jimmywanger]

It's hard to start from scratch in a language.

Chinese and German share virtually no roots.

For instance, if an English speaker started a PhD program in German, he can probably figure out some stuff since there are a lot of cognates and the writing system is similar. Sure, you'll sound like a sedated five year old, but you can figure out where stuff is in stores and how to ask for things, and grammatically you'll be in the same zip code.

Coming from Chinese, you really are starting from nothing. You're doing a lot of memorizing, not only of vocabulary but word order.

[bad_alloc]

Especially if you pursue a degree in a technical field, German quickly gets wierd. You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for. Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries. I'm a native German speaker and only recently learned about Tüllen.

Add regional dialects to that which often contain grammatical shifts and even more obscure synonyms for high German words and you'll get a lot of cunfused foreign students.

[maxerickson]

"Krampe" and "Flansch" look a lot like crimp and flange to me.

If I've understood "Krampe" correctly, crimp is a better word than staple.

[pbhjpbhj]

Well there's the tool a "g-cramp" [which often gets miscalled a g-clamp] too.

Also tulle is like tuile, a "French" [to a British person] biscuit that often takes a cigar shape, like a sleeve.

But wasn't the parent/GP point that such aids don't exist for the person coming from Chinese but do aid those coming from other European languages. Seems to make that point.

[Leon]

Good call on crimp / krampe, I was trying to identify the origin by phonetics on that one. Using krampe as a noun for the action of what something does or have happen to it sounds like a German language thing to do.

[maxerickson]

I'm not convinced it's a correct interpretation.

[Leon]

To be fair, "Flansch" sounds a lot like "Flange" which is exactly the same thing in English. I would easily assume it originated in German or they have a common root. The phonetics are spot on in similarity.

[robocat]

And to be fair on composite words, as an English speaker I can still mostly grok the word boundaries.

Doppelkupplungsgetriebe - translates to double clutch transmission which scans fairly literal if you think clutch is similar to "coupling" in English.

Motorsteuerungseinheit - motor control (steuerungs) unit (ECU?). Harder, one word exactly the same gives English speaker a good start over a native Mandarin speaker.

[memracom]

It's just like a short sentence written with no spaces. If you can understand short sentences, these words should be no trouble at all.

Even Mandarin Chinese has the same thing. Multiple syllable phrases for the names of technical things. So even in Chinese you have to learn odd chains of multiple symbols that have a specific meaning.

And don't try to tell me that print-letter-mechanism (literal name from Mandarin) is easier than learning typewriter or Schreibmaschine.

[kobeya]

Cuckoo's egg?

[miles]

Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries.

All 3 are in Linguee[1] which was mentioned on HN the other day[2].

[1] http://www.linguee.com/english-german/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12755771

[protomikron]

I am a native German speaker, and I do not know "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" - is it specific to mechanical engineering or specific to a regional German dialect?

[wayn3]

They are specific tools. A "klempner" would know all these words.

[jimmywanger]

> You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for.

Understood, but I was more addressing the sense of cultural isolation a lot of Chinese PhD students feels. It means a lot when you can have a decent conversation or joke around with coworkers, living in a cone of silence doesn't help.

[GlennS]

Personally I think the compounds words make German a lot of fun.

[varjag]

From the little I know of Mandarin, its speakers will likely feel at home with concatenated German words.

[adamnemecek]

To add to that, my high school physics teacher was Austrian and he said that it's easier for him to read physics papers in English than in German. English is very nice for describing abstract concepts, I think that the relative lack of grammar is really liberating.

[wolfgke]

> English is very nice for describing abstract concepts

I (native German speaker) find German much nicer for describing abstract concepts. Alone for the fact that one can often add a suffix to the stem of a verb to express "the abstract process of doing this", for example

etikettieren (to label) -> Etikettierung (the process act of tagging)

Don't say there is an English noun for it ((the) labelling) - such a concept also exists in German (das Etikettieren). But there is a subtile difference between a noun describing the activity (das Etikettieren) and a noun describing the abstract process of doing the activity (die Etikettierung). This difference is in my opinion nearly impossible to express in English and is one reason why writing abstract things is IMHO easier in German than in English.

German words in my opinion tend to be much more precise (and used in a much more precise way) than their English counterparts. I have read a long time ago that the translation English -> German is particularly hard for automatic computer translation since English is very sloppy in its usage of words while German is very exact.

We also have the fact that you can join nouns in Germany to develop rather abstract concepts that are nearly impossible to write down this way in English, like the infamous Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (a law with such a name actually existed in Germany).

Also because of the precise German punctuation and structure of interleaved sentences (in subordinate clauses the finite verb is at the end) it is very easy to express interleaved sentences in German (up to three ranks is still quite understandable) that would be nearly impossible to understand in English.

[vacri]

> We also have the fact that you can join nouns in Germany to develop rather abstract concepts that are nearly impossible to write down this way in English

I can understand not being able to describe a concept at all, but I don't understand why it's so important to be able to do it in a single word. Wikipedia says Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is a shortening of Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung, but I don't understand the benefit of shortening it to a single word versus shortening it to a shorter phrase or acronym.

I mean, USA PATRIOT Act, ridiculous as it is, is an easier shortening of Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act than a single word that itself is half as long as the phrase it's replacing.

[wolfgke]

> but I don't understand the benefit of shortening it to a single word versus shortening it to a shorter phrase or acronym.

To give a comparison: One can in old versions of Java simulate higher-order functions by writing an abstract interface and a class implementing it. An instance of such an object is passed as the function to a Java implementation, say, of foldl.

This is possible - but it can be done in a much more convenient way like Haskell does.

Now imagine how much more "expressive" the English language would become if such very abstract concepts could be used as a single-noun subject or object in an English sentence. The advantage is similar to the difference between the Java vs. Haskell implementation of foldl.

[osti]

Car fan? I myself am a big fan of Porsche Doppelkuppplung.

[baobrain]

Most Chinese students are at least able to understand and read English and are somewhat fluent.

[rahrahrah]

I'm sure someone who's smart enough to get a PhD will be smart enough to learn German if he really wants to.