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Think about the children!At an age when you’re most likely to be drawn towards the appeal of slang, or prone to dropping a few slang words in here and there, you’re more than likely to find your grades plummeting if you happen to be a German schoolchild who is tempted to use slang in a marked paper. Apparently, in light of the current grammatical changes in the recent “reformation” of the German language, it’s the children who bear the brunt of the changed linguistic laws. In a language notorious amongst foreign learners for grammatical rules and the difficulty to learn them – just ask anyone at a German course Miami what they think about noun genders and articles in German, or those in a German course Kansas City if they’re in favour of the verb position or the splitting of verbs… not to mention those virtually impossible to remember and lengthy compound words! German language reform debates have been going on for at least the last hundred years, and notable early reformers include Schiller and Goethe. The ball got rolling on the latest reforms in the early 1990s, and from this point on expert grammarians in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have been scratching their heads trying to figure out a way to simplify the language. The proposed measures? Well, don’t breathe a sign of relief yet, especially not if you’re trying to learn German as a foreign language. Grammar rules were cut from 212 to a “mere” 112, and rules about commas now stand at 9 instead of 52! It will be the children who are most affected by the measures, as teachers have been instructed to nit-pickingly comb through students’ papers, count every misplaced comma and misspelt word, multiply the figure by 100, then divide that number by the total word count of the essay. Ouch! Never fear, all those students at a German course Dallas, throughout the United States, and indeed, around the world: der Hot dog is now der Hotdog, so it’s going to have very little effect on your spoken German!
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