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Very interesting. I thought Germany was trying to distance itself from its rigid, conservative past.
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Yes. I don't think that has to do with being rigid. English did not get a bad name because of the past. It's the overuse of single English words by youngsters. It's not hatred against the language itself when spoken by natives or even Germans who can actually conversate in it. The wording "rebelling against establishment" was a little unluckily chosen by me. Using English words, where there's German words with the same meaning, is associated with teenage language. When done by older people it seems like desperate attempts to look "cool" or worse shows bad understanding of one's own language. There's a point to it. It's sad when words from a different language replace words in another. Like I hear the word "level" used quite often in German, when one would used to say the French word "niveau" (a long established foreign word) or the German words "Höhe" (with the alternative meaning 'height') or "Ebene" (with the alternative meaning 'layer'), depending which would fit better in the context. But new words can be ugly as well, like the nasty use of the word 'download' as a verb - "downloaden", it's just not suited for the grammatical conjugation of German verbs: 'downloaded' becomes "gedownloadet" or even "downgeloadet". Worse than mixing several languages in one sentence is using made up words with syllables from different languages. Solution: translate the verb as a whole to "herunterladen" with the past participle "heruntergeladen".