Benchmarks
Favorite form of interaction with Germans:
Buying used books from them.
Most existential government form response:
How long would you like to reside in the Federal Republic of Germany?
Forever.
Most challenging thing to date about residing in Germany:
"The German language, due to its verb-final nature, relatively free order of constituents and morphological Case system, poses challenges for models of human syntactic processing which have mainly been developed on the basis of head-initial languages with little or no morphological Case. The verb-final order means that the parser has to make predictions about the input before receiving the verb. What are these predictions? What happens when the predictions turn out to be wrong? Furthermore, the German morphological Case system contains ambiguities. How are these ambiguities resolved under the normal time pressure in comprehension? Based on theoretical as well as experimental work, the present monograph develops a detailed account of the processing steps that underly language comprehension. At its core is a model of linking noun phrases to arguments of the verb in the developing phrase structure and checking the result with respect to features such as person, number and Case. This volume contains detailed introductions to human syntactic processing as well as to German syntax which will be helpful especially for readers less familiar with psycholinguistics and with Germanic."
This actually makes sense if you are trying to learn German, verbs come at the end, cases are an incredible pain in the ass...not to mention, they've taken approximately four syllables and made about eight billion words out of them (which you would think would make things easier, but it doesn't somehow). It's also quite unfortunate that the 'the normal time pressure in comprehension' is well under ten seconds, as opposed to say, well over ten years...and the only one who understands has been dead for almost a century.
Best word to describe the above phenomenon:
Psycholinguistic.
Buying used books from them.
Most existential government form response:
How long would you like to reside in the Federal Republic of Germany?
Forever.
Most challenging thing to date about residing in Germany:
"The German language, due to its verb-final nature, relatively free order of constituents and morphological Case system, poses challenges for models of human syntactic processing which have mainly been developed on the basis of head-initial languages with little or no morphological Case. The verb-final order means that the parser has to make predictions about the input before receiving the verb. What are these predictions? What happens when the predictions turn out to be wrong? Furthermore, the German morphological Case system contains ambiguities. How are these ambiguities resolved under the normal time pressure in comprehension? Based on theoretical as well as experimental work, the present monograph develops a detailed account of the processing steps that underly language comprehension. At its core is a model of linking noun phrases to arguments of the verb in the developing phrase structure and checking the result with respect to features such as person, number and Case. This volume contains detailed introductions to human syntactic processing as well as to German syntax which will be helpful especially for readers less familiar with psycholinguistics and with Germanic."
This actually makes sense if you are trying to learn German, verbs come at the end, cases are an incredible pain in the ass...not to mention, they've taken approximately four syllables and made about eight billion words out of them (which you would think would make things easier, but it doesn't somehow). It's also quite unfortunate that the 'the normal time pressure in comprehension' is well under ten seconds, as opposed to say, well over ten years...and the only one who understands has been dead for almost a century.
Best word to describe the above phenomenon:
Psycholinguistic.
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