You're quite right, Hans, people try to "get by" whenever they can. English
as used in the U.S. is a special case, however. For the convenience of the
ever-lower-educated personalities in the media, the functional vocabulary
the part people routinely use ) has shrunk from about 100 words to
somewhere near 35. That leads to contextual definition of those words,
which, in turn, gives rise to comments such as "... it depends on what your
definition of 'is' is ... " as used by our slippery chief executive. People
still have all the same things to say. They just use fewer words with which
to say them. This leads to a really poor communication process, and it's
VERY pervasive, i.e. it shows up in all phases of life. Of course, it's
wonderful for lawyers, since they get to collect money for arguing out what
we meant when we entered into an agreement.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Franke <Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de>
To: classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Date: Wednesday, March 08, 2000 4:47 AM
Subject: Re: VCF Europa Update
>> It hasn't helped me. I took 5 years of college German and speak less than
>> the average German 2 year old. Honestly, it's humiliating, because I'm
>> still in the habit of telling people that I know some German...only to
>> stumble on the most basic words and sentence structure. I think it would
>> come back pretty quick, but I don't have the time (or energy) to study it
>> on my own, and very little opportunity to use it in a practical setting
>> (despite Hans' brave attempt to try to understand my gibberish).
>
>That's part of the deal - if you pretend to understand
>my English, I'll do the same about your German... :))
>
>No, serious, German isn't that hard to learn, millions
>of kids over here are proof that it's easy enough to
>be done even at toddlers age :))
>
>Well, Now realy serious: All you missing is some practice
>so come over for VCFe and help Sallam in his speech.
>
>Gruss
>H.
>
>--
>VCF Europa am 29./30. April 2000 in Muenchen
>http://www.vintage.org/vcfe
>http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe
Received on Wed Mar 08 2000 - 09:08:49 GMT