Okay. What was this? A lesson much different than most, but something I believe will be extremely important in the long run. I really need to understand this bit.

He talks about German’s “value system” here. I didn’t even knew languages had value systems. A value system within the context of a language should roughly mean this:

A language’s value system is a set of rules that guide its behavior, and judgement of right and wrong.

Value 1: German doesn’t encourage interruptions

The language has some rules in place which basically keep off the very important bits of information till the very end so that interrupting becomes wasteful. Before hearing what the person really means, what’s the point of stopping them? It wants us to be careful against assumptions. Here are the examples he gave

Example 1

Sentence: I want to buy it tomorrow

This sentence has 2 verbs:

• wollen (to want)
• kaufen (to buy)

The important bit here is the buy part — what is it that we’re doing tomorrow?

So when we think of this sentence’s order in german, we basically rearrange it like this:

[I want] [it tomorrow] [to buy] -> *ich will es morgen kaufen*

P.S. I was surprised about how google translate was accurate at this! I wonder how they feed these rules to the translation engine that powers the service.

Example 2

I made this up myself, and will check its accuracy using google translate. The lesson did have 2 examples but I forgot the other one 😅

Sentence: I can’t come tomorrow because I have to learn german

This one has 3 verbs:

• comen (to come)
• haben (to have)
• lernen (to learn)

The important bit here is the learn part — what are you doing tomorrow that you’re unable to come?

I think the sentence should be arranged like this:

[I can come] [tomorrow] [not] [because I have] [german] [to learn] -> ich can come morgen nicht den ich habe deutche lernen

Lets go!