Omg…

there were better days

Jesus can always reject his father But he cannot escape his mother's blood

Tabitha Scarlet for the Scarlet Hollow community fanart event! Background is from the game (altered). ID in alt text!

What makes German a difficult foreign language to learn?*

Phonology / Pronunciation & Comprehension

✳️ accent-based language (accent isn't fixed, rhythm isn't as melodic and forseeable)

✳️ 16 vowel sounds (lots more than the average 5-6!)

✳️ complex syllables

Morphology

✳️ Case system (Kasus) - allows for variable word order but requires lots of inflection on articles, pronouns, nouns and adjectives

✳️ Kasus-choice changing the meaning (esp. Akkusativ/Dativ with movement verbs)

✳️ rule-governed fusion of article and preposition (z.B. zur, zum, hinterm)

✳️ 9 plural markers for nouns

✳️ 3 grammatical genders (with mainly only probabilistic rules of which is which

Vocabulary

✳️ very frequent use of

🔅 composite worde (z.B. das Rathaus, die Weltkarte, die Mitternachtsformel)

🔅 derived words (z.B. laufen -> verlaufen, günstig -> ungünstig)

🔅 conversion of words (z.B. laufen -> der Lauf, hoch (adj) -> das Hoch (N))

Syntax:

✳️ word order is very variable, but there's still lots of rules (keywords: Verbklammer, Satzglieder, topologisches Feldermodell)

✳️ the verb is often split in two with stuff in between its parts

Miscellaneous

✳️ localizing verbs

🔅 mode of movement often in verb itself, direction often in separate word

🔅 position verbs vs. contact verbs and static vs. causal location (I sit down & I sit on the chair vs. Ich setzte mich hin & ich sitze auf dem Stuhl)

✳️ variety of prepositions (on the table & on the wall vs. auf dem Tisch & an der Wand))

*Disclaimers:

Furthermore of course difficulties that language learning generally has (like vocabulary as a whole, various registers, dialects, etc).

I'm not saying German is more difficult than other languages, just that these are typical difficulties in German (other languages will have many of these as well).

This is also not only from an English-native perspective! (German has 16 vowel sounds + 3 Diphthongs, English 12 vowel sounds + 8 Diphthongs, but Russian, Greek and Spanish for example have only 5 vowel sounds each! so 16 is a lot more in those cases))

Attention Everybody,

Christian Lindner ist in der Offenen Feldschlacht gefallen!

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

been getting into rookanis lately