I was curious how different Swiss German is from the standard German language, and my feeling is - totally different.
I tried to listen to a Swiss podcast, and I must say it's really hard to understand something.
Currently I began to teach a Swiss businessman Korean as a private tutor, and I thought it would be helpful to bring some examples from German to compare the difference and similarity of the pronunciation in Korean and German.
I was wrong. The sounds that I know in German are quite different from those in Swiss German. Therefore it is useless to make a comparison in that way to give a better explanation to my student.
(*Swiss German sounds like Dutch. I remember whenever I heard some people talking in Dutch at KoRoot - I don't know Dutch - it sounded like a mixture of English and German but something I can't understand. I wonder how the people from Germany and Switzerland can communicate with each other when there is such a big difference in the same(?) language.)
4 comments:
German language is very rich in all of its varieties. (That's why there are so many people who fall in deep despair of learning this language.) Even german people have their difficulties to understand swiss people (and in contrary it's the same).
Never ever say to swiss people that their language sounds like dutch! It's the same thing when westerners tell you korean sounds like japanese or chinese language to them. Every language is an own world for itself.
What to do? Learn swytzerduetsch! ;-)
Sure, I won't say to Swiss people that Swiss German sounds like Dutch directly. Each language has its own feature.
It's just my feeling that it sounds somewhat like Dutch. That's similiar to when Chinese people(speaking Mandarin) listen to Korean and have the feeling it sounds somewhat like Cantonese.
I think it's better to compare the sound of English and Korean during the class.
Any language that I don't understand, I just say it sounds "Greek" to me.
Perhaps I should stop using that expression. I agree that we must give each language its due merit.
There was no intention to disregard Swiss German in this posting. I just wanted to say that some languages share similiar features while some languages are totally different that anyone (even with no linguistic knowledge) can know that.
^^
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