Feld-Wald-und-Wiesen was the best translation I could come up with for "run of the mill" an english idiom that basically means, the same old stuff, pretty typical, generic, unremarkable. I knew I could've used any one of those words but I wanted to use something more evocative. The fact that you've never heard of it means that I probably didn't succeed. :\


In America there's very little impetus to learn a foreign language to any useful degree because literally 90% of the entire continent speaks English as their first language and if they ever have to converse with someone in Europe (ie for business or whatever) they know there's a very high chance that they will probably know English as well. Well, many of us are just happy having it that way, but I always felt like it was kind of lame to be so reliant on just one language. The ability to switch gears in a sense and converse in a way that's absolutely different than the way you were talking before is quite honestly a very enviable skill to have. That being said most of it is just a personal thing. You'd probably find it hard to believe that this forum of all places would be the thing to cause me to learn a new language, but that is frankly a large part of what made me decide to actually spend the last 9 months picking it up and not learning, say, Mandarin, or even nothing at all.

Most other reasons I have for learning German are as follows:

1) The vocabulary is concise and precise. Though I value the amount of variety and expressiveness offered by the sheer vastness of the English vocabulary I also appreciate german's simplicity in that you guys tend to combine a lot of small words to create new ones, rather than pulling them from tons of other languages or outright inventing them from nothing.

2) The spelling isn't a cluster fuck. Seriously. It makes way more sense than English, let alone French.

3) The cadence of the language, ie the way certain words are stressed and such, actually tends to match English fairly closely. With practice it's not too hard to understand what someone is saying in german.

4) The language sounds nice. People like to make fun of German for being harsh and guttural here sometimes but it just reminds me of heavy musical instruments like bassoons and cellos.

5) The people who speak the language tend to be fairly technologically oriented. That is to say that on the internet I tend to notice far more technically literate germans than I do italians, or spaniards, or french, or russians. Not that those people don't exist, but culturally you guys seem more prominent in that way.

6) The language is written more or less the same way it is spoken and it isn't broken into several fiercely competing dialects like, say, Norwegian, where the official dialect is spoken by approximately no one and the written language, Bokmål, is more Danish than it is Norwegian.

7) I already have misconceptions about what wonderful and nice you people are.

8) Eight

9) You have an obsession for sausage and beer.

10) Did I mention sausage and beer?


I'm majoring in Computer Science. Taking German courses was an entirely elective decision on my part and has nothing to do with my ordinary studies. To be honest though I find the classes I'm having to take for my CS degree to be exceptionally dull, and if I were just going to university for fun I'd just load up on German classes because that's the thing I enjoy most at the university.

Actually, I'm seriously considering dropping out of uni completely at the end of this semester on account of the work I've been doing for my game, which is competing strongly for my time and attention nowadays and causing me to rethink whether I want to bother getting certified to work in an industry I have no actual desire to be a part of. I love working for myself and have come to believe if I could concentrate all of my effort on my game it could turn into something very valuable for me. Plus I don't live in Germany so I won't be drafted or anything if I decide not to go to school anymore.

Anyway, thanks very much for the tips. I'll try to bear them in mind for next time.