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by perseiden 3244 days ago
I'm german too and feel like being offended by jokes like that just proves the stereotype... I mean come on, german is truly not the "language of love".
2 comments

I think Goethe, Brecht, Schiller and the rest of the German poets would disagree ;)
Couldn't you say the same for any love poet from any language?

Poetry is about rythm, contrasts, word play and many other things in addition to phonetics.

I'm afraid that doesn't change the fact that German is the most memeified language

I don't think so ... as I mentioned before the current perception of the German language has a lot to do with Prussia and Nazi Germany (first and second world war), as well as Hollywood movies. I can't find the reference, but one of the most common German sentences in movies was "Halt!" (Stop) followed by "Papiere bitte!" (Papers Please).

German was before the wars considered the language of poets and thinkers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vy9aqDPYWA

It's all about perception. I don't think there are objective measures to tell if a language is better at conveying certain feelings (or better at certain tasks). If somebody knows research around this topic I would be very interested.

For me, I prefer English for anything academic and work related. German I often fall back to when I'm talking about feelings and emotions. You might argue it's because it's my mother tongue. However, I have the feeling (subjective) that German has more words to express mind and feeling related concepts (maybe due to Freud,Nitsche etc. a lot of the terms are also used in English: Angst, ... ).

Sorry, being offended is something I cannot control. I know it's stupid. In this case (also pointed out by other commenters) it might provide proof of the stereotype that Germans don't understand humour :P

Edit: typos