Kyubinoyoko says:

@cautr

Yes, flame a little bit more after I tried to put an end to this pointless debate. You build your opinion with alsmost nothing more than screenshots of mistakes and you generally are very biased. You didn’t even watch the release and If you were to watch it I’m sure you wouldn’t go away from your negative opinion anyway. Are you really so keen on fighting about something you don’t even care about?

@corocoro

Of course high school students also speak Hochdeutsch, but slang is used very often, too, but hey, you just want to understand me wrong, so just continue ranting about the bad, bad German subs alone.

If you really think you mentioned any valid arguments you’re just as self-assertive as you may think I am. I don’t know why you even tried to intrude this discussion, you clearly just WANT to hate German subs, so it’s totally pointless to try and prove you wrong.

corocoro says:

I wasn’t aware discussions on public internet blogs are private. Sorry if my unwaranted intrusion hurt your feelings.

FalseDawn says:

I really don’t get this argument other language speakers have with English being a “limited” language. English is an amalgamation of two different language routes (Anglo Saxon/Germanic and Romantic) which means that there are so many more words available to us than what you usually see in fansubs, spoken language, etc.

I realise German is king when it comes to making stupidly long nouns, but when it comes to verbs and descriptive words, we’ve got you beat.

corocoro says:

The main problem I have with the German fansub scene is that they pretty much never credit who did the original TL – which matters plenty, as in English fansubs you can infer (most of the time) from the script whether the TL actually knows Japanese or is just playing the guessing game. Since a competent English -> German TL/editor will cover up the telltale signs, that inference is no longer possible (well, at least not about the J -> E TL).

The second big problem I have is that I prefer to watch blurays and German fansub groups prefer not to touch licensed shows. When I checked in the past, those two preferences were at odds quite a bit.

(By the way, I find not touching licensed shows while also not crediting fansub groups to be hypocritical, but that wouldn’t really stop me from watching German fansub releases, as the end-result is more important to me than the morals of the people working on it. It’s just one thing to keep in mind the next time a crusade is started because someone dared touch a licensed show.)

Last, but not least, I started watching English fansubs and I know which of the more prolific editors and TLs to avoid and which are doing a good job. So yeah, laziness plays a role too, but if I can get a very good English fansub for little effort, why should I expend more work just to get an equally good product in a different language?

So yeah, those are my main reasons for prefering English over German fansub releases – now, if you can debunk the above or give me a good reason to switch languages, I’m certain to listen. But please, for the love of God, avoid generalisms and fallacies. Those are worse than any awkward line could ever be.

FalseDawn says:

Sorry to hammer the point home, but:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/is-it-true-that-english-has-the-most-words-of-any-language

I fail to see how German could be more expressive and allow more freedom when English has a wealth of words to choose from. And is that really a surprise? I’d imagine a major reason for English becoming the global language is because of its relatively small amount of commonly-used words, while having much larger scope to cover most eventualities.

Feel free to counter-argue that, though – it is a viewpoint I see a lot among non-English speakers (non-native, I mean), so I’m intrigued to know where this misconception arises from.

Gebbi says:

(the above comment was addressed to FalseDawn btw)

@corocoro:

but if I can get a very good English fansub for little effort, why should I expend more work just to get an equally good product in a different language?

To be honest, I’m doing the exact same thing, so my previous comment can be taken as some kind of self-criticism. Ever since I started writing fansub reviews, I often thought to myself: “Those lines are actually pretty neat, you should watch more German fansubs other than your own.” But oh well, I usually still resort to English subs. Goddamn habits.

corocoro says:

It’s estimated that German has around half a million lexemes and English has around six-hundred thousand. So you got us beat there.
As for average vocabulary – the numbers I found where for lexemes in German and words in English, so I can’t actually tell.
Where German trumps English is grammar. It’s more finely nuanced, which in turn allows to express ideas clearer (or less clear, if so intended). You can more freely shift the focus of the sentence while maintaining a well-sounding structure and so on.

FalseDawn says:

You aren’t limited by common words though, despite how much flak you may get for branching out in the language in fansubs :D

That’s not really a point against English though. Our grammar isn’t as complex because it doesn’t need to be – if there’s a situation that requires greater clarity or the need to be vague (okay, compared with Japanese, English is nowhere near as forgiving when it comes to ambiguity/vagueness), we usually have words that will express that. Though, as I’ve already stressed, English uses a small subset of common words in everyday life.

But isn’t that the same in any language? How often do people mess with grammar to get their point across in German? How many people even know how to use the subjunctive tense correctly in French? I think it’s splitting hairs, to an extent, but I think your emphasis on the language point should be about the users/conveyors of the language rather than the language itself.

tl;dr hate on the English speakers who can’t get their points across, not the English language which is more than equipped to do so :D

FalseDawn says:

@Aru

I’m led to believe it means “Someone wearing gloves who throws a snowball.” Make of that what you will.

And what do you mean by synthetic and isolating? English is not an isolated language at all – we steal words from all over the place. For example, we’ve taken German words such as Schadenfreude and Zeitgeist because we had no proper equivalent. Isn’t that the definition of synthesis?

Gebbi says:

Plural of “Schneeball” would be “Schneebälle”.
And no, that word (“Handschuhschneeballwerfer”) doesn’t exist. It’s the exact equivalent to “glovesnowballthrower”. Would you ever say that?

(I could only name a few compound nouns consisting of more than two nouns right away. I can assure you, that it’s just a rumor like that old “every spoken German sentence sounds like Hitler screaming angry words” rumor.)

Gebbi says:

Finland pls. Your language sounds like vikings screaming angry words.

FalseDawn says:

Well, I tracked down a nice, concise explanation to back up what I was saying:

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/18400713

And if you’re feeling particularly interested in thinking up some more compound nouns, there’s a lot discussed in that particular comment section :)

(Google is all-powerful ^___^)

fnord says:

I speak a number of languages, German and English among them, and I don’t think any language is able to express less than any other language as long as it has had sufficient contact with the world and doesn’t lack modern concepts. Arguing that a language is objectively more capable of expressing nuances is like saying that the people speaking the language are able to express finer nuances and in turn that they perceive finer nuances.

This is an extremely controversial hypothesis.